Neville Nail’s story begins over 4.5 billion years ago, right back at the time when our planet was still forming from star dust into the rounded ball we all know it as today.
During those turbulent times, when the Earth was still being moulded and shaped into circular being, all the accumulating minerals and elements which are still with us today were enduring radical and profound change. Unbelievable amounts of heat and pressure were constantly at work, busily transforming the spinning dust and gas into solid matter. If a view could have been captured from space at the time, our Earth may probably have looked like a giant gloopy lamp. Molten, glowing masses of boiling magma would have been flowing in relentless spirals down to the heated core. On reaching the planet’s centre, convection forces would then have caused the magma to churn and swirl right back up to the surface.
After enduring untold millennia of such a pressure cooker situation, the planet gradually began to cool and stabilise. The molten minerals eventually solidifying into the hard crust of mantle we enjoy today. This newly cooled and hardened land masses still didn’t have it easy though. They were then subjected to other kinds of shaping forces, such as plate tectonics. These dynamic powers shifted and lifted the newly created land with slow and regular movement’s right across the Earth’s surface, in the process forming and creating continents, mountains and deep sea chasms.
Out of all this chaos was created a giant lump of iron ore, which for the sake of this story we will call, Hector Haematite.
By the time our modern day 21st century came around, Hector had been lying dormant for several billions years, buried deep beneath the parched red ochre surface of Western Australia’s Pilbara region. Coincidentally, by this same point in the planet’s history, humans had become well established as the dominant species on the global scene. They have become the new shaping force after having taken a strangle hold in dictating how the planet’s mineral treasures are used and moved in order to make the stuff we need for our modern economy. Our planet’s crusted surface has already become extensively pot holed as result of industry having spent centuries extracting minerals from their ancient hiding spots.
So it was that we find Hector Haematite about to be lifted from his long-time resting place by an immense digging machine which was eating away at the exposed face of a deep open cut mine. The mine is located on the outskirts of a town called Mount Newman (a slight misnomer, as the former mountain is now a deep hole in the ground.)
A great lump of Hector was swiftly and efficiently extracted by the powerful grind of the machine’s hungry metal teeth. The displaced ore was moved without delay onto a conveyor belt and carried a short distance before being dropped into the back of a large haul pack truck which was waiting patiently next to the digger. When the truck is full, the driver begins a slow and meandering crawl back up to the surface of the mine. On arriving at the top, the lady behind the wheel delivers her load to yet another crushing machine. In the process of going through this new machine, Hector is further broken down and the resultant rock, stones and dirt are loaded into one of the waiting carriages which forms a train of over a kilometre long. The train, which travels constantly all year round, transports the newly mined iron ore, including the remnants of Hector, 426 kilometres to the town of Port Hedland.
After arriving at the port, Hector and the other newly mined iron ore is dumped into huge and dusty piles alongside the rail marshalling yard. The ore waits there for another week until it is mechanically shifted and further broken down by another immense crushing machine. The product of that final crush is then transferred on a wide and fast moving conveyor belt which transfers it all into the hold of a giant container ship. Thousands of tons of crushed iron ore form the only cargo the ship carries as it, and many others just like it, ply back and forth between Port Hedland and their destination port of Guangdong in China.
Hector and his Pilbara iron ore associates are duly offloaded into new piles on the foreign soil. They join millions of tons of similar ore which had been transported to China from all over the globe.
Less than 3 months after being extracted from his deep and ancient home, the remains of Hector are carried by train to a huge government controlled smelting factory. After being off loaded into giant cauldrons and having other chemicals and minerals added, Hector was soon no more. He is in the process of having his atomic connections altered by an intensely hot blast furnace, melting him into a flowing mass of a new substance known as pig iron. Clever alchemy and other processes developed and refined over the thousands of years since the Iron Age first entered into our history, soon had the glowing mass of pig iron flowing through a series of stages designed to give the metal strength and extruding it into narrow and stretched stands. The thin rounded metal which emerges is then fed through other machines. One cuts the still glowing metal into exact lengths. Another flattens one end into a head and pinches the other end into a sharp point. Hector is thus elaborately transformed into the real hero of this story, Neville Nail.
Neville was just one of the several million other 50 millimetre, flat headed nails which have been churned out in order to meet the foundry’s production quota for that week. After cooling in a large pool of water and then allowed to dry, Neville joins an ever growing pile of completed nails, all ready to be exported out into the world where they will meet their new destiny.
In Neville’s case, this first involved being transported to the headquarters of the local Chinese company who had initiated the contract for such a large mass of nails. He was subsequently placed in a box with 10 kilograms of other nails. That box in turn ended up being loaded into a shipping container which was later heaved onto the deck of yet another vast ship. The vessel carrying Nigel made its way south from Guangdong, around the rump of Vietnam and then down to Singapore. The ship maintained a southerly direction until finally its course turned north-west and headed up the Straits of Malacca. After crossing the Indian Ocean the ship then heads north, passing through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean Sea. The boat eventually docks in the extensive port area of Barcelona in Spain.
The heavy boxes of nails, still in their container are next transported to the hardware wholesaler who had recently placed an order for the nails and a variety of other materials required for use by the Spanish building industry. The hardware wholesaler is also the owner of a large number of retail outlets scattered throughout Spain. Using their own distribution network of contracted trucks, Nigel was eventually despatched to a large hardware retailer on the outskirts of the city of Malaga, on Spain’s Costa del Sol. The box of nails containing Neville had already been pre-sold to a building contractor named Manuel, who was in the process of building some high quality apartments that would eventually become part of Malaga’s ever burgeoning tourist industry.
Manuel was a skilled and experienced carpenter, but on the day he removed Neville from his box to be hammered into a wall frame, his concentration must have been elsewhere, because his hammer failed to hit Neville squarely. As a result Neville became severely bent. Manuel spent a few seconds trying to straighten Neville, but the damage had been done and poor Neville was beyond easy repair.
Being a man who hated to waste anything, Manuel threw the now bent Neville Nail into a cardboard box where he put all of his discarded ferrous waste. Neville was reluctantly resigned to the fact he’d never get to join two pieces of material together as his manufacturers hoped he would.
Manuel the carpenter’s grandfather, on the other hand, was extremely happy to take Nigel and anything he could get from Manuel in the way of iron products. He’d had a long standing habit of sprinkling the rusting hardware at the base of some citrus trees he had in a small grove at the back of his home. Manuel’s grandfather didn’t know the science behind it, perhaps it was just an old wife’s tale he’d heard about in his youth, but he’d certainly seen with his own eyes on many occasions just how much the iron seemed to benefit the trees and encourage the juiciness of their fruit. In any case, Nigel was now left to slowly disintegrate and fade away, in the process he was releasing atoms and elements which had originally formed when Hector Haematite had come into existence all those billions of years ago.
It had taken Neville Nail less than 6 months before his constituent parts had been lifted from the Pilbara plains until he has buried near the base of a healthy lime tree in Malaga, Spain. Although it may appear that Neville’s life was ultimately somewhat short and futile, there is a happy ending to his story.
It happened that Manuel’s sister, Alejandrina, owned a bar in the busy down town tourist area of Malaga. Each year, at the start of the busy summer season, the cocktail mixers from all Malaga bars competed in a competition to see who could make the best Mojito, the refreshing mix of rum, lime, sugar syrup and soda which was drunk and enjoyed extensively by both visiting tourists and locals. The judges of that year’s competition were unanimous in their decision. Alejandrina’s Mojito offering was definitely the stand out in the contest. The main judge had said that it was all thanks to the exquisite flavour of the limes which had been used in the mix. Limes which had come from the bar owners grandfathers citrus grove and who’s health and flavour had been contributed to by none other than our humble hero… Neville the Nail.
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