James Bendle typical day

21-January-2010

Typical day on the JOIDES transcript

Once the coring material starts coming in, we will be working flat out for 12 hours every day

When you finish work, if you do a 12 hour shift you've not much time left to do anything else. You have a couple more hours before you go to bed. You'll go to the gym for a bit to try to stay fit. You get some food, update the blogs, do some emails, communicate with family and people back home – and that's it. To bed for however many hours, then back up again.

There will be some socialising. I'll be doing a few things to try to stay sane – to distract me from just work everyday. I'll be taking my acoustic guitar and I'll be trying to keep up half an hour's practice every, if I can find a quiet corner of the ship. Apart from that and trying to do a little running in the gym there won't be much else

I play Indie-rock, country rock, quite old-fashioned stuff like Neil Young. I'll be taking the acoustic with me, but I play electric as well. I play in a band with one of the other lecturers and some other people at the University. We're called the Screaming Forams

The birth of a band name is always murky. Forams is the nickname for Foraminifera, which is the fossils we study.

They're pretty quiet though, aren't they?

Yeah, they're dead mostly.