In which I mark a milestone

Posted on April 22, 2025 by Jennifer Rohn

A garden scene with table and computer

I have been putting off writing about a special twenty-year anniversary. But first, apologies are in order.

Yet again, I find that another season has passed without me writing here. This was never meant to be a quarterly affair, but so it’s proved in recent months. The neglect is not solely down to lack of time – I find that the slowly unfolding horrors of the world (wars, bird flu and climate catastrophe, alongside bigotry, cruelty, and the wholesale dismantling of democracy and science in a certain quarter of the world) have stifled my inspiration. What can one possibly say that could encapsulate – gestures weakly at all of that – ? Future historians will have plenty of material to dissect, so I’ll leave them to it.

My paper journal, which I still tend to most days, is so lost for words that it’s lapsed mostly into descriptions of my garden, whose inspiration, on the other hand, is boundless. I feel a strange urgency to record its infinite charms, even though there are only so many ways that I can rejoice in my tulips, or the way that it feels to tug a particularly long chain of sticky goosegrass from among them. Flip through its pages and you will occasionally find other musings: impressions from my many travels, jotted down in airports, hotels, foreign café tables, interspersed with worries about keeping the lab stocked with fresh grants. Otherwise it’s the orderly succession of snowdrops to crocuses to daffodils to hyacinths to tulips to bluebells. Seedlings in indoor propagators under artificial light slowly graduate to larger pots in the greenhouse, waiting until it is reliably warm enough to plant them out in the beds, where they will battle it out with weeds, slugs, drought and insects. All of this, playing out each year like a well-oiled West End production, with only a few minor variations keeping up the tension: one year it took three successive sowings to get courgettes that did not rot away, a mystery that we never solved; this year, it is the etiolated tomatillos that have terminally failed despite multiple attempts, and the first rows of parsnips did not germinate at all.

graph showing increase in lab lit by year

An encouraging upward trend of fiction about scientists

But I promised you news, appropriately belated as are all things in my blog now. March marked the twentieth anniversary of LabLit.com, my humble science/literature/cultural magazine launched as part thought experiment, part guerilla action, to shed light on the relative scarcity of scientists in novels and, perhaps, in my own small way, to try to rectify it. LabLit.com still has a following, despite recent years of shocking neglect, and I’m proud of having hung in there despite lacking the time and energy to coax it into anything bigger. Alongside the original fiction we publish, its crown jewel is the List, a curated database of realistic fiction featuring scientists plying their trade. When we launched in 2005, the compendium only contained about a hundred novels – now it stands at 495. While part of this is down to continual searches amongst older literature, it’s also driven by a year-on-year increase in new ‘lab lit’ novels, as you can see from the graph above that we complied for the magazine’s anniversary edition. (If you’re interested in reading more about the project and the people behind it, all the links can be found in my 20th anniversary editorial.)

Today is my last day of Easter break before returning to the lab. It’s been a restful and much-needed time away from the stresses and anxieties of work, with cold sunny days spent in the garden and not much accomplished (a good thing in this case). I’m sitting here at my table under the grape arbor in the far back, next to the cascade with its soothing rush of water. The pond into which it empties is a green baize of duckweed dotted with pink cherry blossoms; beyond it our bees seethe industriously around their hive. The air is scented with blossom. Birds sing, and the sun warms my face. All is green, liquid, dreamy.

One last day, just for myself.

Posted in Domestic bliss, Gardening, LabLit | Leave a comment

In which I languish in limbo

Posted on December 22, 2024 by Jennifer Rohn

You could write an entire PhD thesis about how difficult it is for academics to relax on holiday.

Close-up of a Christmas tree

Presiding over festive cheer…and apathy

(And whoever’s writing it would be lying on the sofa by the Christmas tree right now, fretting about how they really ought to be working on that dissertation instead of reading a novel– the first novel they’ve managed to pick up in months. Instead, they remain where they are, gripped by negative feelings, vacillating in that state between work mode and not work mode. Failing utterly, in short, to manage either.)

Yeah, that’s me. Three days into my holiday, and the internal battle is raging on like a land war in Asia. It’s not just academic tasks that taunt me, but the personal projects I’ve been saving up for this break. Making cookies. Planting spring bulbs. Potting up propagated seedlings. Tidying the study. Putting up a few new articles on LabLit.com. Studying for my Foundation license for amateur radio. Wrapping presents. Practicing for my driving test. Making the Christmas wreathes.

And of course, blogging.

Can it really be an entire season since I last wrote here? Sadly, I find this to be true – but it’s not at all surprising. This was the year that I’m thinking of as my academic ‘tipping point’. I’ve been inundated with invitations for keynote lectures, plenary talks and seminars, which collectively have sent me to three continents – a blur of trains, planes and hotels. I’ve written about a dozen grants, a surprising chunk of which have been successful. A sizeable number of people have asked me to collaborate on their projects. I’m in the middle of two hires, and have a whopping twelve manuscripts in various stages of the production line. Meanwhile, I’m contractually obliged to discharge three days a week of full-time teaching, which I still enjoy, but which is relentless, nudging me in the ribs whenever the other stuff starts to pile up. Meanwhile, the commute continues to take its physical toll, exacerbating my chronic metatarsalgia, while the heaviness of my shoulder bag has inflicted a deep ache in my left shoulder and neck region that is starting to feel worryingly permanent. Some days I am so busy that I only manage one or two meals, most of which are not particularly wholesome.

Given all this, you would think I would embrace my 2.5 weeks off with the fervour of a shipwrecked soul washing up onto the beach of a fertile island. Anyone else would be sticking out her arm and demanding a cocktail with an umbrella in it. But sadly, that’s not happening yet. I’m still sleep-deprived, but too guilty to nap. The FOMO is entirely internal: an audience of one. I feel like grabbing a stick and writing HELP ME in massive letters on the sand.

I know, from long experience, that things will settle down. Work emails will trickle down to nothingness as the 25th approaches. I will eventually get enough sleep. I will start ticking things off my list. It will probably help immensely to work on the two manuscripts I urgently need to edit, because that will send the academic guilt scuttling to the far corner of the room, at least for a while, and probably free up space for more fun stuff to flourish. And the party we are throwing tonight will force me into the kitchen to do some baking.

So, yeah. I’m getting off this sofa on the count of three.

One…two…

Posted in Academia, Domestic bliss, The profession of science, Work/life balance | 2 Comments

In which I slowly kill what I love

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Jennifer Rohn
a view of the moors

A recent trip to Exmoor – involving petrol

I sometimes feel like I am living in the last gasp of the “having your cake and eating it too” era. The planet is approaching a climatic tipping point – if not past it already. Widespread war is sparking ever closer, several bushfires punctuating an arid landscape of hatred, seemingly only a matter of time before the dots are joined into all-out conflagration. There is so much loathing, indecency and disinformation online that it’s hard to imagine a time when we were mostly a civilised society, let alone one governed largely by truth and common sense.

And yet. Some of us lucky few, in calmer pockets, still have our interesting jobs, our comfortable houses, our collection of “nice things”, access to forests full of serene greenery, gardens full of songbirds and butterflies, shiny cars and far-flung holidays – pleasant pastimes that nevertheless drive the aforementioned carbon-dioxide-fuelled apocalypse. But we do it anyway. The world is horrible. But it’s also beautiful.

These thoughts come and go as I live my life, a cycle of worry and complacency. There was an article in the Times yesterday about the Profumo Affair – can you imagine any politician these days resigning in scandal because he’d had an extramarital affair or consorted with Russian assets? It seems laughable now. No, he’d just shrug and go on, safe in the knowledge that the furore would die out in a few more news cycles. Maybe that’s no different from me: I am horrified or enraged by some injustice on the other side of the world, but then go outside and hoe my rows of lettuces and enjoy the feeling of autumn sunshine on my face.

Of course, we all try to do our bit. Our family has a 20-strong array of solar panels on our roof, an electric car, a rigorous recycling regimen. We do the little things: we don’t own a clothes dryer, but string up our laundry on the line. We have our milk delivered in reusable glass bottles, grow our own fruit and vegetables, keep laying hens and busy honeybees, make our own alcoholic beverages from garden produce, use metal water bottles and portable coffee mugs and sturdy shopping bags. The school run is on foot; the London commute is by train. But this is nothing when we fly to that conference or beach, or order more stuff that we don’t truly need.

Perhaps because I consume a lot of science fiction, whose forte is laying bare the stark differences between the present and some speculative, inevitably worse-off future, I am hyperaware of how good I have it right now. We are extracting every last pleasure that our way of life allows, heedless of the damage, and yet we still – mostly – can find beauty in which to immerse ourselves. My family and I regularly camp in the woods, swim in rivers and the sea, fish remote trout streams, stay in rural areas and eat in country pubs that haven’t changed much in hundreds of years. The air is usually fresh, the stars bright. Wild animal life is everywhere – lazy circling kites, damsel flies, beetles, long-tailed tits, painted ladies. I imagine my ancestors reading my journals (if such fragile paper survives conflagration) and marvelling at the miraculous bounty we enjoyed – both of the earth, but also the activities we pursued that slowly killed it.

It’s like living perpetually in cognitive dissonance. My human brain is not equipped to embrace the contradiction 24/7 – instead I enjoy the good parts, and try to forget the bad. Most days, I just get by, my life so full that I rarely have time to regret. I’m aware that, in the grand scheme of things, my time here is nearly up, and all of these problems will be passed down to my son alongside our estate and possessions. But it seems too late to change, and any drastic changes I make will not even register against the backdrop of 8 billion others on this planet. In the meantime, it seems only right that I do the best I can: cherish my family, enjoy my garden, try to be kind, chip away at the science whose ultimate goal is to help people.

On the individual human scale, I have to feel that this is enough. But history may not judge me so leniently.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on In which I slowly kill what I love

In which I dream of escape

Posted on July 14, 2024 by Jennifer Rohn
Garden scene with flowers

Alternative reality?

Sometimes everything just seems too much. As the non-existent summer rolls on – 14C mornings of rain or overcast, wool sweaters taken back out from storage – I find my stress level to be the only thing heating up. As I prepare the course I lead for its next academic year, there are also manuscripts to edit, review articles to write, grants and papers to peer-review, interim reports to file for current grants, collaborations to tend, talks to compose, PhD upgrade reports and final dissertations to examine.

And above all the relentless admin: pushing research agreements and material transfer requests through a reluctant quagmire of legal bureaucracy, wrangling finances, applying for ethical approval, seeking reimbursement for business expenses – the thousand natural shocks that academic flesh is heir to, culminating inevitably in spiritual death by tedium. Physically, I am finding the commute increasingly difficult: my joints ache from the amount of miles I need to walk, and when I get home, I want nothing more than to lie down, without the energy for all the creative things I used to do.

I turned down a family outing to the woods to stay at home this morning, seeking some inner peace in the rare sunshine. Here on the back patio, solar fountains trickle, flowers bob in their containers – cosmos, zinnias, mallows, marigolds. Wind shushes in the tall trees, and the metallic tapping of beaks on feeders lets me know without having to look up that the sparrows and tits have forgotten I’m here, not a few yards away and only partially screened by the apricot tree sagging under its weight of rose-gold fruit.

Although the growing season has been severely retarded this year, all around me the crops are steadily progressing: tomatoes and tomatillos, strawberries and blueberries, chokeberries and blackberries, courgettes and pumpkins, runner beans and beets, carrots and lettuces, sweetcorn and kale, spinach and chard, potatoes and garlic. The greenhouses are home to cucumbers, chilli and celery, pots of fragrant herbs. The cherries, gooseberries and raspberries are past, but apples, pears, figs, plums, hops and cobnuts swell in the wings; grapes clusters hang heavy amid groping tendrils that seem to grow meters overnight. It is the time of year when you can breeze round the garden foraging for your breakfast or dinner, returning with handfuls of produce whose “food distance” is measured in feet and inches, not miles. Our girls are working hard, too: bees filling their clever waxy combs with nectar, hens laying their daily eggs.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to end all this stress. Just to walk away from the job and do something else, something where the amount of effort you put in is reflected equally by what you get out, where the crushing uncertainty of whether you will get enough grants to carry on to the next phase is no longer relevant. Or even more extreme: taking early retirement, and being in the garden whenever I like.

I was chatting with some colleagues earlier in the week at a scientific conference, so I know that the idle fantasy of just stopping is almost universal, on and off, amongst academics of a certain age. What keeps me going is how long I have worked to be where I am, and how important the scientific cause is. I may be only a tiny cog turning on the fringes, and it may be a constant struggle for existence, but this wretched infection afflicting 400 million people a year is not going to just go away on its own. Grants-wise, I’m sorted for the next few years at least, with a good probability of new ones slotting in to take their places. I want to do what I can, for as long as I can, even if some weeks it feels like I’m going to break.

Posted in Careers, Gardening, Research, science funding, Staring into the abyss, The profession of science, Work/life balance | Comments Off on In which I dream of escape

In which I make the best of things

Posted on May 6, 2024 by Jennifer Rohn

BluebellsGreetings from the tail end of a typical British bank holiday, where the big highlight was gardening in the rain.

In all seriousness, it was rather lovely to be out tidying up the flower beds in the fresh air, among the blooming lilac and the first roses, hacking order from chaos through water-splattered specs. (When I was a kid I always longed for windscreen wipers for glasses, and even though the year 2024 sounds like science fiction, I’m still waiting.)

It made a nice break from grant writing, at least. I’m on the home stretch, finishing up the last of four I’ve been wrangling this spring, probably the one I’m most excited about. It’s due next week, and I’m confident everything is under control. The competition will be tough, but I’ve got a great foundation, building on our published work in a way that seems logical but also timely and exciting.

It bothers me that I seem to spend most of my research time writing grants – singing for my supper instead of eating, let alone enjoying the meal. I’m painfully aware that there are a few manuscripts that would go more quickly if I only had more time to spend helping their lead authors out. But the way I’m funded at the university, I have to prioritise writing the bids that will bring in small fractions of salary, cobbling together my two days a week buyout from teaching. It’s not easy to mastermind a continuous 40% salary, but just when I think I’m going to default, something always comes through for me. I could honestly do without the stress, but having lived with it for nearly a decade, I’ve learned how to keep the anxiety largely at bay.

I always feel guilty working evenings, weekends and holidays, though, which I’ve been doing a lot recently. At least my family are understanding, for which I’m grateful. When I have to work through my down time, I sometimes try to make it seem more bearable by surrounding myself with a special environment, to make the labour feel more like a holiday. Normally this time of year I’d park my laptop on the bistro table under the grape arbour by the little cascade and pond that R. built me. But this spring has been more or less a cold wash-out, so I’ve spent a lot more time in our summerhouse cabin with a fire in the wood stove to keep away the chill.

a cabin with wood stove

The cabin is my sanctuary. It’s quiet, bright, smells of seasoned pine, is carefully decorated and offers a lovely view over the lush back garden terraces. When the sun shines, a fountain splashes in a stone trough on the porch; when it rains, the drops tap comfortingly on the roof. Birdsong filters through: robin, wren, blackbird, dunnock, tit. The wood stove is a marvel of efficiency, burning slowly through kiln-dried logs which I spice up with fragrant dried bark from our eucalyptus tree, making the interior toasty-warm. A small glass of wine does not impair my intellect.

In this space, I can pretend that the overtime is pleasure, is voluntary, is what I would have chosen to spend my holiday on if I’d truly had a choice.

Posted in Academia, Careers, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Research, Staring into the abyss, The profession of science, Work/life balance | Comments Off on In which I make the best of things

In which I dream

Posted on March 17, 2024 by Jennifer Rohn
Lab worker looking at a Petri dish

One from the archives: I check out some urinary tract infection bacteria, circa 2016

Last night I dreamt I was pipetting.

It was a beautiful Gilson p200, the classic model of my formative years. The precision instrument felt reassuringly heavy and solid in my right hand. Despite its age, the movements were smooth and easy after years of faithful service. Double-slam the yellow tip, plunge, immerse, pull up, transfer, expel while mixing up and down, shoot the spent tip into the benchtop bin with a satisfying rattle, repeat ad infinitum – movements as familiar and thoughtless as clutchwork while shifting gears.

I was in the midst of one of those experiments where you’d have to perform the same rote transfer hundreds of times, the hours somehow compressed into timelessness, into a state where tedium encroaches upon nirvana. The manipulations require little thought, so your head fills up with all sorts of other things: the next step in the protocol after these racks of tubes are finally completed; when you will get a chance to collect ice and thaw the enzyme, eat, grab a quick coffee, nip to the loo, write up your notes; what time you might manage to leave the lab, and whether any other late workers along the corridor might be up for a spontaneous evening social. It could have been one afternoon in any of the thousands that occurred in the roughly 25 years when I was heavily active at the bench, not just funding, planning, analysing and writing up research like now, but actually performing it manually.

When I woke, I wasn’t sad to find those days far behind me. My plate is full of ample nourishment. In the grand principal investigator cycle, I currently have two grants under consideration, three in preparation, two newly funded with personnel to hire, and two papers at draft stage. My substantial team is busy producing interesting data. I’ve got about ten invited talks or keynotes to discharge so far this year, and while teaching itself is winding down for this term, there is still plenty that needs attention in that sphere.

Do I miss my Gilsons? Of course I do. There is something raw and vital about benchwork – not just the work itself, but the phase of life it punctuates. My lost youth is rattling in that cardboard tip waste box, along with the camaraderie of my fellow travellers. It’s lonely at the top, and scientific friendships – though still present and important – are never the same as during your PhD and postdoc, when everything seems possible and the future is a bright unknown. The reality is probably less exciting, but far more satisfying than those long-ago aspirations.

I wouldn’t be young again for anything – but a girl can dream.

Posted in Academia, Careers, Nostalgia, Research, Scientific thinking, The ageing process, The profession of science | Comments Off on In which I dream

In which we fast-forward

Posted on February 18, 2024 by Jennifer Rohn
A grassy lawn with spring flowers

Once more, with feeling

The phrase bleak midwinter was first coined by the English poet Christina Rossetti in 1872 and went viral when composer Gustav Holst incorporated her text into a carol a few decades later. Although the words are clearly meant to evoke the “hard as iron” feel of Christmas, I have always associated bleak midwinterism with January and February, the period after the festivities have ended but before the first spring bulbs begin to bloom. In this dormant, liminal period, the world is gripped in darkness and all hope seems very far away.

I used to struggle quite a bit during the bleak midwinter, but it’s been increasingly less problematic; this year, the period has lost its bite altogether. In fact, it doesn’t seem to have happened at all. Maybe it’s because of the mild winters we’ve been having, which keep the roses blooming into late December, coaxing up freakishly early snowdrops at the same time. The cow parsley sent up green fronds in January, alongside the rusty-red quince blossoms and lemon-yellow false oxlips; February has brought the crocuses and daffodils, hyacinths and hellebores, all compressed into one wave and heedless of the proper unfolding order of things. We may yet get a cold snap or even a dusting of snow, but to all intents and purposes, some celestial force has zapped us straight from New Year’s Day to spring.

I am not complaining. But at the same time I am hardly sure what to do with this sense of peace and contentment which normally needs to be awaited, longed for, somehow earned.

Posted in Domestic bliss, Gardening | Comments Off on In which we fast-forward

In which we celebrate

Posted on December 24, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn
ornaments

Overlapping festive traditions: new (left) and old (right) baubles

Christmas, I argue, is a space-time continuum where the past and present layer up like sediments on the Jurassic coast. At the appointed time, old traditions are unearthed out of storage to mingle with those spontaneously invented as you go along. The result is slightly different every year, yet grounded with a hefty sense of nostalgic familiarity, the past shoring up the present as if they have always been together.

This time was especially intense because we received my late parents’ possessions over the summer in an overseas container shipment, most of which have yet to be explored. (It is so emotionally difficult to process, I can only do a box at a time.) But when we were putting up our tree last week, I was ready to tackle the one marked “Christmas” that Richard found among the stack in the loft. Feeling that tingly sensation like the moment before the big reveal of a scientific experiment, I slit through the tape and began to delve through the dusty contents within, stirring up the scent of a Victorian farmhouse halfway across the planet.

I found what I was looking for: several cardboard boxes containing the ancient glass family ornaments in faded tissue paper, each nested into a cardboard cell. Some were instantly recognizable, and others, utterly unknown. In the familiar category were all the baubles that I’d forgotten until the moment I saw them, the seeing somehow reconnecting the memory as decisively as a light switch. Some were broken, others intact but with colors faded almost to greyscale, while a few looked nearly brand-new, like the brace of red and green peacocks with their real tail feathers that I used to adore, and which must be close to a century old. The unfamiliar ones included a pretty, gilt-trimmed scarlet sphere in its own special box, with a gaping hole on one side and a little note in the hand of my mother (also a relentless chronicler) stating simply: “Poland, 2002”. (Darling Richard managed to fill the perilously fragile shell with expandable foam, and it now hangs with all the others on the tree, foam-side back.) Did my parents manage to travel to Poland on the same trip when they visited me in Amsterdam? I have no memory of this, but it may be so. So many mysteries, which now will remain forever unanswered.

I wasn’t expecting to find the metal Christmas tree candle-holders, complete with half-burned silver candles still in situ. Dad used to take hours attaching the holders in unproblematic areas of the live tree, then changing his mind and moving them repeatedly, before making us all sit down and not move for half an hour after he lit them, lest we accidentally burn down the house. Just seeing them gave me a shiver of fear, but also an injection of the old Christmas wonder, from back when I was as small as my son, and everything seemed not just metaphorically magical, but actually magical.

My maternal family’s cookie recipe, converted from American to British

Back in the present, the longest night of the year has come and gone and the moon is swelling towards full. We have been baking non-stop – the usual Julpepparkakor cookies, and my recent adaption of Martha Stewart’s sugar cookies, both cut into shapes using the metal cutters that I happily discovered in the overseas Box of Christmas. I like the idea that when Joshua is pressing them into the dough to make stars and hearts and trees, he is handling the same tools that his grandmother used to use, and his mother, when I was his age. Richard has been knocking out stollen, mince pies and sausage rolls with his usual aplomb, all handmade from scratch including the candied peel, mincemeat and marzipan. He’s got a Christmas cake and pudding in the wings, and a magnificent feast for tomorrow night. I am not sure what sort of cosmic lottery I won, but I’m just going to try to enjoy it without pinching myself every two seconds, or convincing myself that I don’t deserve it.

musical notation

How did this abomination slip past the editors?

Joshua and I have been practicing festive duets daily for the past month, which we finally got to showcase last night at our annual cocktail party, with everyone gathered around the piano singing. It’s hard to find decent arrangements of the old favourites, and I usually have to annotate them to set them to rights. But it is wonderful that Joshua is turning into a proficient player, and that I have someone to play with. It’s been nearly half a century since I use to enjoy duets with my father’s best friend Chester, a concert pianist who would indulge my childish enthusiasm, and whose Secondo would include thrilling improvisational flourishes and trills that turned our songs into gold. But now I’m the Secondo, spicing up the bass parts, and Joshua is playing a serviceable melody snuggled next to me.

It’s Christmas Eve, and everything is ready. The lights are up, the mistletoe is hung, I’ve made a wreathe of fir offcuts, holly, ivy flowers and pyrocanthus berries. The larders are full, the older offspring are home and sleeping for 15 hours. The presents are wrapped, and the weather is typical mild English green-and-grey gloom. I am humbled by my excessive good fortune, and strive only not to take it for granted.

Posted in Domestic bliss, Joshua, Music, Nostalgia | 2 Comments

In which I age backwards

Posted on November 21, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

Autumn leaves

I don’t know if it’s just me, but for the last few years, I’ve forgotten how old I am. Because I spend so much of the year pessimistically rounding up, I’m rendered unsure by the present state of affairs. When the inevitable question comes, from a doctor or someone else official, a few embarrassing seconds tick by while I’m forced to do the math. This morning, I woke up to realize that, despite it being my birthday, I’ve actually lost a year of age. Not a bad present, that.

Blue pumpkins

Headed for a pie

The latter half of November is always my favorite time of year. My birthday and Thanksgiving fall in the same week, giving a glimmer of excitement and occasion to my life against a backdrop of autumn color, dark mornings and nights, the snap of cold against my skin. From the garden, we harvest pumpkins and squash, withered apples, sweet potato, kale, quince, crabapple, the last of the bolting autumn lettuces. A crop of Christmas potatoes and parsnips awaits in the damp earth, and we cloche the over-wintering patch of cauliflower, broccoli, kalette, broadbeans and peas (but leave the garlic to fend for itself). I snip the final few roses to unfurl indoors, find unoccupied space in the ground for yet more tulips and daffodils (violating some arcane law of physics in the process), and force narcissus bulbs in the garage.

In dripping local woods smelling of moss and loam, we gather fallen sweet chestnuts, carefully extracted with a boot toe from their lethal acid-green cases, and roast them over the fire. The solar panels no longer produce surplus energy, the hens lay fewer eggs, and our bees slumber in their hive, much missed. Richard’s amazing homemade eggnog develops in the fridge, soon ready to be served with freshly grated nutmeg.

chestnut on a branch

Headed for an open fire

Out and about, London has long since succumbed to premature festivitis and is decked in Christmas lights, with boughs and wreathes up in St Pancras International station. The commuting capital teems with life, as if the pandemic were a long-ago nightmare, and at night, as we go to the theatre or dine out, the joy of life is almost overwhelming. My lost youth is out there in the revelling crowds, just around a corner, shivering in the queue of some club in heels and inappropriate clothing. Truth be told, I’m far happier at home, on the sofa under a blanket with candles as the rain and wind pound against the bay window glass. The joys of middle age are definitely underrated.

Posted in Domestic bliss, Gardening, Nostalgia, The ageing process | Comments Off on In which I age backwards

In which the wheel turns

Posted on October 8, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

Time is a wheel, speeding me along in ever quicker circuits. As individual moments rush towards me, flare into immediacy and then blur past, most are soon forgotten save for those captured as digital images, or in some dashed lines of ink in my journal. While the tune is largely the same each year, certain themes progress irrevocably: the height of my son, once a helpless baby and now a ten-year-old whirlwind of humour, intelligence and stubborn self-sufficiency. The consistency of my skin, gathering millions of tiny wrinkles and spots, making me stare sadly at my ankles and think, girlfriend, you are old. Aging, my own and my family’s, is a fiducial marker by which I can gauge the eventual end of this crazy road trip. Still a good ways out of sight, I hope, but no longer an infinity away, as it seemed when I was my son’s age.

Bowl of garden produce

The beginning of the end

There are multiple annual cycle start points in my life. Of course there is the first of January, when the calendar year resets and I think about personal changes I might want to make in my life, both physical and mental. The garden cycle starts in February, when I begin propagating the earliest seeds, a months-long and arduous process that will fill our plots and greenhouses – and weekends – for the year. And then there is the end of September, when the academic year kicks off and the new students arrive, emitting youthful enthusiasm and anxiety in equal measure, when I dust off my lectures and gear up for months of pretty heavy stress until the Christmas wind-down.

The lab has its own internal cycles that are far more chaotic than the annual circuits framing my individual life. Team members come and go on a random timescale, meaning that the group dynamics are always fluctuating in terms of personality, experience and some unquantifiable aspect I might unscientifically call “vibe”. Our recent move to the new building has added an additional dimension: the camaraderie of working together to find out where things are, how things work, how we fit into the ecosystem – and whether we can really trust the “decontaminated” lab fridge in the kitchen to store our lunches.

There’s no point in getting too comfortable with a current vibe, as soon another new postdoc will be joining our team (hooray!), alongside the small phalanx of annual undergrad and master’s project students who will brighten up the atmosphere even further in their brief tenures with, one hopes, a minimum of broken glassware and yeast-infested cultures. But the vibe is great now, making coming into work something I anticipate. There is also the welcome excitement of accepted papers, invited lectures, press interviews, public engagement activities and new collaborations to keep things lively. It’s a weird job by any measure, and often challenging, but one that still keeps me interested, more than thirty years since that timid PhD student first ventured into a real lab to start her own scientific journey.

Posted in Academia, Careers, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Joshua, Research, The ageing process | Comments Off on In which the wheel turns