Manchester-born Joe Diamond

Manchester-born Joe Diamond, SPD's jovial site manager, engages in conversation over mouthfuls of a basic Russian dinner of borshch, meat and potatoes."I started working on the North Sea rigs to fund a parachuting school I was running in England," said Diamond, his story proving every bit as intriguing as his name."Since then I've been all over the globe.Back then it was one of the best ways to see the world.Now it's getting more difficult to attract young people to these jobs.People want to have families; and now that you can travel anywhere, there's no need to come to the middle of nowhere for three years," he says.Still, he likes the work, and calls Salym "one of the most exciting oilfields in the world," since there are not many opportunities to work in new fields now.

After four years working offshore on Shell's Sakhalin Island project in Russia's Far East, Diamond admitted that he spoke not a word of Russian.But the Russian-language environment of a joint venture like SPD has prompted him to enroll in a Russian course at Tyumen University, and he is slowly coming to grips with the language."At the moment, although I have a house in Manchester and a villa on the Costa Del Sol, nowhere feels more like home than here," says Diamond, an extraordinary statement given that he is sitting in a prefabricated hut surrounded by mosquito-infested swamp for hundreds of miles in every direction.He recounts his weekly trips to Salym village, saying that interaction with the villagers is "one of the best parts of the job."