Diary - May 11th

"I've seen fire and I've seen rain..."-This song keeps rattling round my brain.Why this song in particular? What's the significance of mentally tuning into an old James Taylor song whilst working 190 kilometres north east of Shetland in the cold North Sea? Some strange flicker of nostalgia perhaps...but for what? I've worked here before.

Then as now I was shooting videotape. Recording scenes as part of daily life here, encoding video news, relaying media gossip. Then, for the most part, I was working for the oil industry, recording the minutia of rig life and spreading the new technological knowledge of offshore oil exploration... expansion... exploitation.

All the E's!

Now I'm working with people who play a different card, who use other E's... Ecology, Environment.

Greenpeace, the environmental organisation, invited me to shoot news footage of their occupation of Brent Spar, a large disused oil storage platform which forms part of the Shell Brent oil field development. Their people have now displaced the ghosts of those who worked here for 20 odd years, those pioneers of North Sea oil recovery. They, who battled those bitter, hoary elements with honest toil and high technology. The new incumbents are no less eager. They too struggle to succeed, accepting the rigours of a harsh seascape, working with vigour and seasoned experience. They too are professional, committed, eager to succeed. They share a common 'E' with the last Spar stalwarts... Endeavour.

The new occupants of this rig are not of course direct descendants of the old order. They carry out similar tasks it is true. Survival and existence on this man made island demands it be so. These Greenpeace activists use modern technology, some of it very advanced. They conduct complicated logistical tasks. They have a command structure similar to their predecessors, but common professionalism is all they share.

The 'New' crew are just that. Their philosophical approach to this scene of modern economic advance is profoundly different to that of the last shift.

When I worked on this oil field last, in the seventies, the song I have earlier mentioned was very popular with the crew of the production platform on which I was based. I guess the 'Fire and Rain' bore relation to their time more than now. In the greater plan of things they are one and the same.

The old order have never quite grasped this.
The new order reads that final line...

"But I always thought that I'd see you, Baby, one more time again".

and sees a broader picture.

Well perhaps on querying the new Brent Spar crew on the exact lyric of the chorus of the James Taylor song most didn't even know who he was, far less the song itself. These ancient inhabitants of southwest Palestine probably figure me for an old hippy.