Do you know what I hated about my job?

The cold.

The biting, incessant cold which cut through, no matter how many layers I wore, making

it feel like the marrow my bones was aching.

There was the fact I spent hours on end crouched over, scrappling about in the dark.

The food was another gripe.

The mush which we heated over portable stoves, it all tasted the same no matter what is said

on the tin.

I hated sleeping on a thin mattress in a tent as well.

Though sleeping is the last thing I could manage with the pins and needles in my skin, left

by the cold, and my guts churning from whatever process stew I had forced down.

Apart from that, my job was great.

I was an archaeologist.

My gain, my degree, was working towards post-grad qualifications, and was on my first dig as a professional,

rather than an enthusiastic student.

I had flown to the site a few days before.

This was a long skeleton raffling journey that had eventually arrived late afternoon.

As we had hurried to put our tints up, the desert landscape which stretched out around

us as far as I could see, made me feel like we were on an alien planet, rather than in

the far north of our country.

The Alaskan border bled into the vast expanse of the Arctic, less than a hundred miles

away.

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