James William Platt
| About My Writing | Authors' Register: | About My Background James (Jim) Platt is a Cornishman, born in Port Isaac. He is a graduate (1960) of the Royal School of Mines at London’s Imperial College, and worked as a professional mining geologist in the international hard rock mineral exploration and mining industry for the 41 years leading up to his retirement in 2001, since when his principal interest has been in writing. Jim is married to Maria. They have 3 children and currently live in the small town of Voorschoten in the Netherlands. “Your Reserves or Mine?”, drawn directly from the experiences of his later working life, is his second book. |
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Your Reserves or Mine? | | | Genre: Humour/Travel
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 | | The book is a personal account, spiced with wry humour and served up with a touch of irony on the side, of adventures and misadventures in the life of a geologist employed by a celebrated mining company, the imperial ambitions of which self-styled colossus were inspired by two far-famed masters, the first an avuncular multinational oil giant and the other a majestically entrepreneurial South African Mining House. The book describes the thrills and spills of journeys undertaken to remote places; vagaries of deportment in both field operations and the mystic art of business travel; executive career-building imperatives, (come what may); pleasures and pitfalls of working in a culturally diverse environment; the never-ending dilemma over whose side Head Office is really on; and corporate practices both benign and bizarre – while offering insights and opinions (quite as topical as they are pertinent) on all of the foregoing.
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| East of Varley Head | | | Genre: Humour/Memoir
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| | The place was the little fishing village of Port Isaac in North Cornwall. The time was just after the Second World War, although since the place was world enough for all who lived in it, time was an incidental. What mattered to them was their pink pool, the flushing lake, a clasp knife able to set a figgy duff trembling, a well-raided bunch of grapes on the church pulpit, blocks of water ice cream, the school playground hanging over the harbour cliff, rock-cracking waiters, fish aplenty, wreck, and that was only for a start! If the local boys, whose steady escapades in seasonal pursuits are sown like errant seeds through the pages of this book were no better than they ought to have been, they were probably no worse either. Port Isaac residents looked out for one another and did themselves down as best they could. The book is a tribute to the village and their daily lives, warm in the support of the constant sea, fields, woods, and valleys, written with wry humour and warm affection. All gone? Well, maybe, but forgotten? Never!
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