It’s hot again, oh my goodness. Back up over 30c today in the quarry I was detecting in. A cauldron, cauldron I tell you!

Brian, my mate from the bar, offered to show me a hidden quarry where there had to be gold.

The pub is closed on a Monday but Stewart cooked me breakfast. Classic and stunning bacon and eggs on toast. Thick, salty bacon, fried to crispness, and perfectly fried eggs. Sometimes with tomatoes and mushrooms.

Then I picked Brian up in the car and he guided me up into the Redbank Conservation area. Past where I’ve been before, and he told me when to stop. We walked up the side of the mountain to our right and he led me up a winding path to a hidden quarry. I drove him back to his house and then drove back up.

I grabbed my gear and walked to the highest part of the quarry.

I started detecting, and after digging up lots of lead shotgun pellets I stopped and drank half a litre of water from my Camelbak. Within minutes of restarting detecting I was thirsty again. This was my 18th day of detecting on the trot and I was feeling it. The quarry formed a natural amphitheatre to capture heat and exclude the breeze. I tried to keep ahead on hydration and I wasn’t sweating, just transpiring into the atmosphere. I was disappearing through my own pores.

The sky here is amazing. It starts at the colour of a Caribbean bay and rises through a range of blues to Indigo.

I think blue and green should be together seen in this context.

Brian says he’s lived in the Bush most of his life and loves it. Some days he climbs a mountain and just sits on the top all day. He’s in his fifties, he’s on his own, although his sister shares his house, and he has a Staffy dog. Life is straightforward for him and I just love the guy. Serge too, who lives in the pub. He’s in his fifties. When he was a baby he fell in the fire. His eyesight is poor because his eyes burned. His left hand and foot are short without nails because they caught fire. He’s vulnerable and suppresses bad things that have happened since, through medication, both prescribed and proscribed. He is the gentlest and nicest of men.

Stewart, the pub owner, is in his sixties and is surrounded by chaos. He wants to sell the pub but nobody wants to buy it. Twenty young Swedish women on a bus journey around Australia turned up the other night and blasted out ABBA on the jukebox. Drove me out of the place. A hen party turned up the previous week and ran amok! Stewart likes to sit in his armchair in the pub, which is dark and never looks open, and watch US detective and courtroom programmes. Customers are an unnecessary diversion from the tv. When things kick off he sinks lower in his chair until he reaches the point where he says ‘You can all f*** off, I’m closing’. He’s a diamond and he’s looked after me, telling me which patrons are iffy and have done time and which of the others I can trust.

The middle of nowhere and we have Eastenders on steroids.

Meanwhile back into this furnace I ask you now to venture, you whom I cannot betray. Thanks Leonard. It doesn’t help that I not only have to wear boots, I also don heavy duty Swiss army trousers, but I have to tuck them in my socks to stop Bull Ants and scorpions getting up my legs. Sweaty or what? But at the moment it is dry heat so, as I said earlier, I am just transpirational.

It was poor going so I dropped down the sides of the quarry to detect the slopes lower down. Each metre lower added another 1c to the temperature, or so it felt. No joy at this level. So I dropped down to the quarry floor and detected there.

Sometimes the sound of a target is so faint that you think it can’t possibly be anything other than hot rocks, stones containing a high concentration of iron minerals, or the detector sighing at the absence of gold. Then you scrape the surface off with your boot, and the sound becomes a little more distinct. Then out with the pick and scrape off half an inch of the compacted clay or earth/rock mixture, usually baked into a concrete consistency. The detector sound will now clearly reveal a target. Turn the pick round, its head is triangular in shape, and use the pointed apex to dig deeper, then scrape out the dislodged material. When the target has still not been removed from the hole it cannot possibly be anything but gold. Shotgun pellets or bullets, even from 180 years ago, would not have penetrated this deeply. Then after you have thrashed the earth with your pick for half an hour, removed tens of kilos of material in a large pile, and you finally put your detector down the hole, and it is silent, the target is outed!

By this time you have drunk a couple of litres of water to keep you from fainting. Now it takes a further ten minutes to determine where the target is on the pile of earth, and to run it across the detector in your scoop. Until there are only a few pieces left in your scoop and the detector is now making a very loud noise. Finally there are a couple of pieces of earth left in the scoop, and it is still making the detector wildly excited, so you take one out. And when you pass the scoop over the detector with the remaining piece of earth it goes ballistic. Then you break the clod in half. And a lead shotgun pellet falls out.

Then by law you are required to infill the hole with any material that you have taken out. Replace any plants accidentally uprooted, because uprooting them is a criminal offence, and then return the original dead leaf cover. I kid you not. And I’ve been doing this for seven hours a day, non-stop for 18 days. And for the last 5 days I’ve not found gold.

I worked my way to the edge of the quarry floor, where the forest met the open space. There was a huge pile of earth and rocks, where an old gold mine had been infilled with its mullock heap.

Sorry to keep crapping on about the heat. I never thought I’d last this long. The flies are buggers too. Landing on your eyes to steal some liquid. Keep an eye open for Bull Ants and don’t even bother about snakes, they seem to be sleeping at this time of year.

By now it was late afternoon. My water was low. The heat hadn’t abated and I picked up a faint signal. Going through the half hour ritual of digging a deep hole and finding a shotgun pellet, I found a shotgun pellet. As I stood up, completely exhausted, something strange happened.

I walked back to the car and drove to Stewart’s pub. The bar was closed. I had a tin of chilli con carne in my room, and a small tin of Heinz baked beans. I emptied them into a plastic takeaway container, put it in the microwave in the galley at the pub for four minutes and smothered it with Tabasco, what I’d bought yesterday. Within 15 minutes I could take on the bloody world. Come on!!! Have a go!!! I’m big Dave Smith from Sheffield!!!!!!

Night night.