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I asked, ChatGPT answered

Posted on 6 June 2025 by Henry Gee

I asked Chat GPT: Please recast the argument between Donald Trump and Elon Musk as a scene from a play by William Shakespeare.

It came up … er … ‘Trumps’

A Scene from The Tempest of Tech and Throne
Act III, Scene II
A courtyard in the realm of public opinion. Enter DONALDUS, the exiled King, and ELONIUS, a merchant alchemist and master of flying chariots.

DONALDUS
What rogue is this that mounts the stars in steel,
Yet scorns the hand that lifted him aloft?
I made thee, knave! When Fortune’s tide ran low,
‘Twas I who lent the gale to fill thy sails.

ELONIUS
Thou err’st, great Trump, for I did chart my stars
Long ere thy golden tower cast its shade.
Thy boast is but the echo of thy pride,
Not coin from which I forged my wondrous works.

DONALDUS
Aye, silver-tonguèd serpent! In days gone past,
Didst thou not whisper praises in my hall?
“Most noble Donaldus,” thou didst proclaim,
“The sun itself doth envy thy bright reign.”

ELONIUS
In truth, I flattered where I feared thy wrath,
As courtiers do when kings grow tempest-toss’d.
Yet now the realm hath eyes to see thy guise—
A jester crowned, whose crown sits much askew.

DONALDUS
Thou art but a knave in merchant’s garb,
A peddler of toys and tongues of flame.
Thy wagons fly, yet still thou canst not flee
The ire of kings nor truth of loyalty.

ELONIUS
Better to craft new worlds than serve a fool.
Thy realm is tweets, thine armies bots and boasts.
Wouldst wage a war of words? Then have at thee—
But know, my ships reach stars thine eyes can’t see.

DONALDUS
Ingratitude! A sin most foul and deep!
Go then, false Elonius—fly far and fast!
Yet mark me well: no throne awaits in space,
Nor shall the people crown a lord of code.

ELONIUS (aside)
The stars are silent, yet more just than kings.
This play of power ends—I’ll write new scenes.

Exeunt, their feud echoing through the digital wind.

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What I Read In May

Posted on 5 June 2025 by Henry Gee

Once again I apologise for being late. I make no excuse for this, partly because there are too many reasons to mention. Oh all right, here’s one —  my desire to participate in the online world is waning. The same empty vessels  with the same prejudices still resonate  as loudly as they ever did. I am very tempted to leave them to it and do something more useful instead. Partly for this reason I haven’t added the usual pictures and links, and I am wondering whether I shall continue much more in this vein. Time will tell.

Paul Cooper: Fall of Civilisations I was prompted to read this as there was a glimmer of a joint book event with the author given that my latest book is similarly fin d’espèce. The event never happened, but I got the book all the same. It’s a very readable account of the decline and fall of different civilisations through the ages, and seems to be a spin-off of a podcast called Fall of Civilisations. The book definitely has that episodic feel. Each one of the fourteen chapters is a case history of the rise, decline and fall of a civilisation, from Sumer to Easter Island. It was refreshing to find details of civilisations far from the usual beaten track, such as the Khmer; the southern Indian civilisation of Vijayanagar; and the Songhai of the African Sahel. It is engagingly written, but – perhaps because of its derivation from a podcast – doesn’t quite have the coherence of, say, Collapse by Jared Diamond. So, what causes civilisations to fall? Well, it’s a number of things. Climate change (whether natural or human-caused); the exhaustion of land required to support a large population; but, mostly, the endless capacity for human societies to bash themselves in the face with their own stupidity, cupidity and vainglory.

Mark Rowlands: The Happiness of Dogs In which a professional philosopher and avocational Dog Person takes issue with the Socratic ideal that only the examined life is worth living. In the course of his exploration (and I use the word course advisedly, because one acquires in reading this book a great deal of knowledge about the current thinking on matters such as morality, motivation, sentience and so on) Rowlands shows that dogs, lacking the human ability to reflect upon themselves and their place in the world, have a more fulfilled life. It is the unexamined life, contra Socrates, that is worth living. Humans sometimes achieve a nirvanic state in which they can fleetingly ‘lose themselves’ , if, for example, they are playing sport; indulging in some hobby or activity that they love; or during sex. To quote from the Guide to Jewish Buddhist Wisdom – there is no self. But if there is no self, whose arthritis is this?  Dogs, though, find themselves in this state as a matter of course, and can do things routinely that many humans struggle to achieve even for a moment, such as full, honest love and commitment. So pupperino, so prelapsarian, and who, really, is the better off?

Jonny Sweet: The Kellerby Code is what might have happened had P. G. Wodehouse tried to write Brideshead Revisited but ended up with Vile Bodies. It concerns Edward, our mashup of Jeeves, Charles Ryder and Tony Last, who would do anything for his ungrateful friends Robert and Stanza. Collect their dry-cleaning. Get them tables at a restaurant. Be There for them at any time of day or night. And all because he has a burning and unrequited love for Stanza, whose ancestral pile of Kellerby stands in for Brideshead. Without wishing to spoil anything from this brittle, pin-sharp satirical froth, Edward – unlike Tony – laughs Last.

Tom Michell: Penguin Lessons The true story of a young Englishman who finds himself teaching at an English-style boy’s public school in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1970s. On vacation across the estuary of the River Plate in Punta dal Este, Uruguay, he becomes the unlikely saviour of a penguin, the only one left alive after a colony has been fouled by an oil slick. Smuggling the penguin into Argentina where it becomes a kind of school mascot, the penguin – named Juan Salvado – provides inspiration for one and all, mostly by being a good listener. The book is charming and reminiscent of such tales as Tarka the Otter. I have heard that it is to be adapted into a magic-lantern presentation starring Steve Coogan as Juan Salvado.

Mouthy Al-Rashid: Between Two Rivers I have long been fascinated with the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, ever since I did a school project on Sumer almost half a century ago, reading the works of Samuel Noah Kramer and Georges Roux and becoming entranced with the Epic of Gilgamesh. Al-Rashid became entranced on her very first exposure to cuneiform writing, and offers a guide to the rises and falls of Mesopotamian civilisations through a unique lens. One of the many discoveries was a collection, all in the same stratigraphic level at Ur and in a palace that might have been the residence of a princess, of a series of Mesopotamian artefacts of widely divergent dates and uses. This, says Al-Rashid, could have been the earliest known museum. Al-Rashid uses these objects to tell the story of ancient Mesopotamia. I find my schoolboy interest rekindled.

James Rhodes: Instrumental The author is a renowned concert pianist who is unusual in that he came to the instrument late in life, and indeed for a period of ten years didn’t touch a keyboard at all. In this searing and very sweary memoir, the author recounts how his mind and body were scarred by sustained physical and sexual abuse from a gym teacher over a period of five years between the ages of five and ten. This led to a very uncertain life in which his deep psychological trauma remained — and still remains — unhealed. It also led to back problems caused by the spinal damage resulting from the repeated violent penetration of the anus of a five-year-old by an adult male penis. This is occasionally a very difficult read (or listen) and leaves one recoiling with rage at those adults who violate the young and the defenceless, and how society repeatedly fails to do much about it. Oh, and there’s some lovely music.

Natasha Pulley: The Bedlam Stacks Another month, another highly imaginative novel from Natasha Pulley. This one is set in the same fictional universe as The Watchmaker of Filigree Street but apart from a couple of scenes with the main protagonist of that book, the setting is very different. The scene is the early nineteenth century, and an British expedition is sent to Darkest Peru to steal cuttings of the cinchona tree for transport to Ceylon, so the quinine can be used to treat malaria ravaging the Indian subcontinent. The expedition makes its way over the high Andes into a region of dreamlike fantasy, where people with various disabilities and disfigurements live in New Bethlehem (hence Bedlam), a colony set on three tall islands (hence Stacks), set in a wide river, where magic is real and statues appear to move. The style is very much the Boy’s Own Adventure of tales such as King Solomon’s Mines (though with more modern sensibilities) with nods to Heart of Darkness and — dare I say it — the chilling Weeping Angels from Dr Who. Each one of Pulley’s novels has its own flavour, even if some are set in the same fictional setting. Whereas The Watchmaker of Filigree Street was crisp and telegraphic, The Bedlam Stacks is richly weird. The Half-Life of Valery K takes place in the Soviet Union of the 1960s — and The Mars House is set on, well, Mars. There are, however, things in common. The characterisation is sensitive; there is quite often a bromance between the two male leads; and all the novels feature at least one mention of an octopus.

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Skills, What Skills?

Posted on 30 May 2025 by Athene Donald

The answer to many of today’s problems seems to lie in the magic word ‘skills’, but this word can be used to mean so many different things, depending on audience and context, that in itself it is far from sufficient to cure anything. Yet, it is absolutely right to focus on the general area as one that needs attention, it’s just that it needs so much attention it might be better if we could find a new, more discerning vocabulary.

To some, skills means a technical skill: say that of a plumber or an electrician, whereas to others it might mean ‘soft skills’, such as teamwork and communication. The skills level could refer to someone with a PhD or someone who left school with few formal qualifications at all. It could mean foundational skills such as numeracy or literacy, or advanced skills such as operating a clean room or flow cytometry equipment. And who the provider of such skills should be will obviously depend on which skills we’re talking about. Certainly, all of schools, FE Colleges and universities need to be included in the list of providers, as well as employers.

If the work of Skills England is to progress, as they finally move out of their shadow form into solid reality, they have to know what challenges they need to face up to. Their new Board, announced this week, has their work cut out for them. Their remit is potentially vast, charged with: bringing coherence to the current incoherent state of play; working out where the ‘skills gaps’ are (which begs the question of which sorts of skills); shaping technical education to respond to the current needs, including how the new Growth and Skills Levy (the new name for the Apprenticeship Levy) can be spent; and provide advice on how this will feed into a clear plan appropriate for a growth economy. No small order then.

Under the old Apprenticeship Levy there had been a steady drift towards higher level qualifications at the expense of fresh school leavers, and already it is clear this will no longer be permissible: formally, level 7 (i.e. Masters Level) apprenticeships will only be available to those aged 21 and under, in essence stopping this route. Such a change was advocated earlier in the year by Alison Wolf in her policy primer Saving Apprenticeships, a publication containing, as she put it to me in a private conversation, ‘far more than you ever wanted to know about apprentices’. It is indeed a comprehensive discussion of the state of play at the time of writing (it was published at the start of this year).  She wanted a clear distinction between these higher level apprentices, which she saw as essentially employers accessing CPD on the cheap for their employees, and apprenticeships enabling youngsters to get their foot on the job ladder or adults seeking to gain new, sub-degree, qualifications and skills.

Adult education has long been a poor child of the education system. Gone are the days of easy access to multiple evening classes provided locally to allow those who had struggled at school to have a second chance at gaining qualifications. Money is too tight in the sector for much to be available. Furthermore, particularly at FE Colleges, there is often a shortage of teachers. But if (and so far it is an ‘if’, as it’s not really happened substantially yet as people try to work out how to make best use of it) AI is going to remove many jobs, there will be a pressing need for adults to retrain for where the jobs still are. In many more technical areas, FE teachers are in short supply because the pay is so dismal compared with what they could earn elsewhere (as is true for Physics teachers in schools). Indeed, FE lecturers are paid badly by any standards, typically about £10,000 less than an experienced school teacher.

With the plans for revitalising the construction industry workforce recently announced, adult learners will potentially benefit from £14 million of adult skills funding for construction to be devolved to local mayors. This initiative is expected to support up to 5,000 additional adult learners, and new level 2 courses relevant to the sector will be set up. So specific goals for the revised Growth and Apprenticeship levy are beginning to emerge.

Plans such as these are all very well, but every apprenticeship – at whatever level – needs an employer to take them on and to cover much of the cost, including salary. At present, there are far more people wishing to start an apprenticeship than openings available. The construction industry works largely with small firms covering, perhaps, just one or two specialities (electrical, plumbing and so on). These typically act as sub-contractors as part of a larger job and may well struggle to cope with trainin someone just starting out, not to mention being put off by the complexity of the current course landscape (anyhow limited by local availability and transport), funding mechanisms and overall bureaucracy. So, there are many challenges in ensuring a steady supply of SMEs willing and able to take a school-leaver (or, indeed, an adult) on an apprenticeship which will need to be ironed out if the ‘skills’ arena is to progress as the economy needs.

Thus, although the advent of Skills England, and the direction of travel implied by both the Growth and Opportunity Missions, suggest an ecosystem that is changing, the nature of that change and the effectiveness of new initiatives, structures and any new funding to handle the ‘skills’ agenda remains to be seen. Explicit disaggregation of what ‘skills’ are, so that in any context it is clear everyone is talking about the same thing, will be required if appropriate interventions can be successfully introduced as part of any new strategy.

Posted in Alison Wolf, apprenticeships, careers, education, FE Colleges, Growth and Skills Levy | Leave a comment

Choosing Your Image

Posted on 12 May 2025 by Athene Donald

We all know people who seem quintessentially comfortable in their own skins, who effortlessly fit in to whatever group they want to belong to and reign supreme in their world (at least socially). But, note my use of the word ‘seem’. It is worth pondering whether that is their own lived reality.

I’m prompted to this train of thought by hearing a Radio 3 presenter discuss Edward Elgar as someone who ‘often felt an outsider’. His reputation now implies that he represents the height of Edwardian ‘pomp and circumstance’, the imperial zeitgeist. Whether or not you think that’s a good thing, he would seem to have been right inside the system of the day. Yet, as a self-taught musician, that was apparently not his own sense of self. He felt an outsider, because he hadn’t been trained in the formal schools of music like his peers.

I can think of many colleagues who occasionally have let their masks slip to let their insecure inner self creep out. The amazingly successful professor, with prizes a-plenty to their name, who clearly was damaged by being a nerd at their posh public school where the ‘in set’ were the Rugby players. Knowing that, I could see how he always felt that he was on the outside, however much others felt that’s where they were while he was a key central player in the research environment.  It didn’t make him an easy person for others to interact with. Or the Fellow of that grandest of Cambridge Colleges, Trinity, who admitted he never felt he truly belonged because he had been educated elsewhere, whereas many on the fellowship were Trinity through and through. The College may have changed (after all, its current Master Sally Davies was not Cambridge educated at all), but that feeling of being an outsider will probably go with him to the grave.

Or there was the senior colleague to whom I was once unburdening myself of the feeling of not fitting in as a female physicist, who startled me by saying when things went wrong for him, or when people were rude, he tried not to believe it was because he was a Jew. Despite having known him and worked closely with him for many years, I’d never known (or indeed thought about) his religious affiliation. For most of us, at least for some if not all of the time, there will be some fear, niggling or much bigger, that everyone else fits in but you have some stain on your pedigree that somehow means you are only on the outside looking in, different from everyone else.

Reading Simon Fanshawe’s book, The Power of Difference, has introduced the word ‘covering’ into my lexicon. I knew the concept because, now I know it is a name, I know how I have used it at different times. It’s not dissimilar to ‘code-switching’, to move between different manners of speaking (something Michelle Obama discusses as a black woman navigating a predominantly white world in her book The Light We Carry); or to the ‘masking’ behaviour of autistic girls Gina Rippon discusses in her recent book The Lost Girls of Autism. Whatever you call it, you’re probably familiar with behaviour along these lines – at least unless you’re incredibly sure of yourself. The feeling you need to act a role in order to fit in with whatever group you’re currently amongst.

The time I remember doing this best, or perhaps I mean worst as I look back at how I behaved with some horror, was at an annual conference in my field. Being one of a paltry number of women, I wanted – fairly consciously – to be ‘one of the boys’. One who was welcome down the pub and seen as a good laugh. So I adopted a persona which was not my own; somewhat raucous and laughing at the double entendres of my associates, downing pints. At some point I decided I had had enough. Perhaps I felt secure enough in my affiliation to the in-crowd to feel I could drop that un-me persona, but I’m sure there will be a generation of men who believed that was the true me.

Was it worth doing? Maybe. It certainly seemed so at the time, yet in retrospect it just feels distasteful. There is a price to pay for acting outside one’s true self. It is important to work out what really matters and what is less important. In order to progress, in science or wherever, it may require you to put on a false sense of confidence as you give a conference presentation or take on some new committee role. That is probably worth doing since no one wants to listen to the lecturer mumbling away inaudibly (however exciting the results), or dropping the committee papers on the floor – less likely in this paperless age admittedly – due to nerves. But pretending to be someone you are not in other ways – as I did when I assumed a cheeky, extrovert and raucous character – is hardly necessary and may backfire. These are difficult balancing acts to get right. Yet each of us, every day, is faced with decisions big or small about how to portray oneself and align it with who we really are.

Posted in covering, fitting in, Science Culture, self-confidence, Simon Fanshawe | Comments Off on Choosing Your Image

Creating a library system using Airtable

Posted on 12 May 2025 by Frank Norman

I volunteer at the CYM Library, a music library based in north London, mostly helping with day-to-day jobs. Recently I undertook a project to improve the way that CYM Library records requests and loans and I talked about this project at the IAML UK & Ireland Annual Study Weekend in April.

Background

CYM Library is a collection of vocal scores and orchestral parts that can be borrowed, for a fee, by choirs and orchestras across the UK. We lend both directly to them and via other libraries through the inter-library loan (ILL) system. CYM Library is an independent, self-funding charity. In addition to a part-time music librarian (Ceri Mann) there are several volunteers. I’ve been volunteering there for two and a half years and have a good understanding of how it all works.

Until last October we kept track of music reservations and loans via a combination of Word and Excel files, stored on Google drive, plus paper loan records. We had lists of music on loan and a list of requests that needed action – invoicing, packing, posting. Separate lists recorded invoices and payment details.

This all worked, but there was much duplication of information between the different lists, creating additional work and with a danger that they might get out-of-step. We had no list of all our customers, and generating any statistics was an onerous task.

Project aims

As we considered how to streamline our records, we agreed that any new system should:

  • Save time and be less work
  • Be easy to implement and use
  • It had to be able to interface with shelves/packing/returns. That is, we needed to be able to generate a printed record sheet for each loan.
  • It needed to be available anywhere, so we could work on some tasks away from the library if necessary.
  • It needed to be inexpensive. We would struggle to find funding for a big system.

I explored Google Drive and Microsoft Office but was unsuccessful in my attempts with these. Possibly that’s down to a deficit in my technical skills, but I also had a sense (from previous experience) that whatever I did with Google or MS Office was going to end up being very clunky.

As I searched for software tools that were both powerful yet easy-to-use, one popped up that I recognised from my previous workplace – Airtable. I thought it was worth a closer look so I started playing with it on a one week free trial and immediately liked it.

Airtable

Airtable describes itself as a ’No-code’ database. This means a platform that allows users to create and manage databases without writing code. It looks like a spreadsheet, and has a drag-and-drop interface. It is cloud-based and very flexible. Airtable was founded in 2012 and is now widely used so there is a large community of users and good online support. It has many integrations with other software packages.

Pricing is based on the number of users, starting at a single user, and there is a charity and non-profit discount. This makes it very affordable for small organisations like CYM Library.

I read a useful eBook – Learning Airtable and registered for an online course which gave me a good grounding in the basics.

New system

My priority was to create a system that would allow us to enter details of a request just once, and then to amend the record as changes occurred to the status of the request. I also wanted to launch the system in a reasonable timeframe, so I deliberately limited the scope of the initial system to managing requests, loans and returns.

We switched to the new system on 1 October 2024, though I had been recording data in the new system from 1 May 2024.

The two key tables in our database are Customers and Requests, with a few others used occasionally.

The customer table currently has 230 records, and is still growing. It records names of borrowing organisations and the contact person, plus any contact details. We also record the type of borrower (orchestra, choir, public library, school etc).

The request table has more than 70 fields. That’s a lot of data to scroll through on a screen and would be unwieldy to work with but Airtable allows you to create different ‘views’ of your data.

When you create a view you can filter the records by one or more fields, eg to show only requests that have been confirmed and need an invoice to be paid. You can also hide fields that are not of interest at a particular point as well as sorting the records in a view. Thus you end up with a view that shows key fields from the requests that need some action to be taken. Updating a record in one view updates the underlying database, so any changes are reflected in all other views too.

We have created about a dozen different views to match the various processes through the lifecycle of a request.

The first stage is to enter the details of a new request – composer, title, edition, number copies, dates needed (from and to), customer, quotes for charges (price or number of BL forms). There is a view that makes this straightforward, and also a form that can be used for the same purpose.

When a customer confirms they wish to proceed with the request, we then change the request status from Provisional to Confirmed and we print out a loan sheet from Airtable. It was important that we could generate a piece of paper for each loan, so that key details would be available when we’re at the shelf picking copies, at the packing desk, or at the returns desk.

Airtable’s Page Designer tool lets you create a printable version of a record and is very flexible. You can choose any fields, and position them in boxes wherever you want on a page. Then you can format the text in the box, add more text and images.

The Request Tracking view shows confirmed requests and what stage they’re at – invoiced, whether paid, packed, etc. as well as whether the music is to be posted or collected. Some loans are booked well in advance, so this helps to keep track of what needs to be done when. Different colours in fields provide helpful visual clues.

The list of current choral loans and reservations, shows alphabetically by composer/title what choral sets are out on loan or provisionally reserved, and when they are due back.

Some of the fields are formula fields, derived from a number of other fields. Sometimes I’ve used these to make the lists easier to read, other times there is some calculation or logic involved – eg calculating prices. The formulae look a bit scary, but I quickly learnt how they work. It’s a great feature of Airtable.

Results

We made the changeover with no noticeable affect on the service and broadly speaking we’re happy with the result. It is easier for us to record a new request now. It is easier to follow a request through different stages and change its status. The information is all brought together in one place and we don’t need to keep opening different files, using different programs. Claims to the BL for ILL payments are easier – we’ve just done our second batch of these.

We will be generating annual statistics soon, and I expect it to be easier than in the past (fingers crossed). As time goes on I think we will gain new insights from analysing data about our loan activities.

Printing out packing sheets (equivalent to the old loan sheets) has worked well, though we have needed to tweak the format and layout a few times.

The database is accessible anywhere – from the library or when working from home. It is also available via the Airtable phone app if necessary.

We have only needed one userid so the software cost is manageable. It was a bit of a hassle to get validated by Airtable as a charity, but worth it.

We have already found some additional benefits of having an up to date customer list. It allowed us to identify new customers and add their email addresses to an email group that we send updates to. We’ve also been able to start centrally recording the postal tracking details for parcels of music that we send out.

Challenges

Switching to the new system was a bigger challenge than anticipated – it took several weeks to get used to how it works. It’s a cliche, but more time for training in advance would have helped.

We’ve had to devise some workarounds to cater for non-standard requests — time extensions, additional copies, discounts. The basic data structure though has proved to be solid.

Reports are not as easy as I’d expected, though data can be exported to Excel for more analysis. The Page Design feature is cumbersome.

Though the community of Airtable users is large, not many of them are libraries, so the support forums tend to deal with more business-focused applications. It would be good to find other libraries who are using Airtable.

Future developments

We have some new volunteers and I plan to give them Airtable training. I hope they may have ideas for improvements that we can incorporate into Airtable.

I would like to automate some operations, such as calculating prices and parcel weights, and generating invoices. I’d also like to create a webform on the CYM Library website, for requestors to enter new requests. This could feed straight into our Airtable database. A next step would be to integrate the catalogue into the webform.

A bigger challenge would be to expose part of our Airtable database via the CYM Library website, making it into a ‘live catalogue’ that shows the availability of copies.

Conclusion

It is possible to use a general database tool (no-code) for record keeping in a music library.
No-code databases are much easier to get started on than traditional database products.

Posted in Libraries and librarians, Library automation, Metadata, Music libraries | Comments Off on Creating a library system using Airtable

What I Read In April

Posted on 11 May 2025 by Henry Gee

I apologise to you both for the late arrival of this post. I have been otherwise preoccupied with promoting my latest book Demure Mindfulness the Taylor Swift Way as well as contending with a great deal of business at the Submerged Log Company, after which Mrs Gee and I enjoyed a short break. And, like Jenny, I am of the age where one begins to wonder why one bothers, realising (not for the first time) that I appear to be one of the few greyhounds in the stadium to realise that the hare they are chasing is only a toy. But I’m here now, and here is what I read in April.

Screenshot 2025-05-11 at 07.53.15Adrian Tchaikovsky: Shroud In my opinion few writers can match Adrian Tchaikovsky in his evocation of alien life and its struggle towards intelligence (see his magisterial Children of Time, reviewed here). Here he has a crew of a spaceship forced to crash-land on the eponymous moon of a gas giant. The moon is optically dark but radiates vast quantities of radio chatter. The novel — mainly a two-hander between the surviving crew members of a crippled escape pod — concerns the meeting between humans and the alien life-forms on the moon that have evolved a kind of distributed intelligence based on radio chatter, during which the aliens seem to understand much more about the humans than vice-versa.

 

 

IMG_8871Travis Elborough: Atlas of Unexpected Places I had expected this to be as charmingly liminal as a superficially similar book, Off The Map by Alastair Bonnett (reviewed here) but it turned out to be less a meditation on the subject of topophilia (a love of place) as a compendium of more or less random find spots on the globe with interesting anecdotes about them, from an ornate but largely unused railway station in Spain to the caves of Lascaux in France. It’s the sort of book of short but amusing stories one would  put in the lavatory of  one’s guest wing to entertain visitors while they are on the throne..

 

 

Screenshot 2025-05-11 at 08.12.31Jess Kidd: The Hoarder This rambling mystery comes from the rich haul of authors I ran into while reading The Winter Spirits (reviewed here) and whose wonderfully gothic Things In Jars I reviewed here. Whereas that was Victoriana, The Hoarder takes us up to the present day with social care worker Maud Drennan who is sent to look after the cantankerous Cahal Flood in a decaying mansion crammed full of rubbish. Like Bridie Devine in Things in Jars, Maud is both Irish and psychic, forever accompanied by one or more saints, quick to advise her on what to do with her difficult charge. Maud is convinced that there’s a mystery in the House of Flood. Which of course there is. I love Jess Kidd’s writing. The prose is charming; the characters, beautifully realised  (Maud’s landlady, a transvestite retired magician’s assistant is especially memorable); and the dialogue exceptional. I’d be surprised if this didn’t make my end-of-the-year selection, though what with other rich pickings from The Winter Spirits it will have stiff competition.

Screenshot 2025-05-11 at 08.29.12Adam Roberts: Lake of Darkness A somewhat schizoid author who when not indulging in Tolkien-related silliness writes sere, biting and award-winning SF such as the very wonderful Jack Glass, about a criminal with igneous ingenious and incarnadine ways of breaching containment. Lake of Darkness is set in a post-scarcity future in which the crew of one of two spaceships exploring a black hole is murdered by the captain, Raine, who appears to have gone rogue. A historian specialising in 21st-century serial killers who interviews the imprisoned Raine is infected with what seems to be the same contagion (echoes of Silence of the Lambs). Whatever it is has — impossibly — escaped from the black hole. But what? An alien menace? Satan himself? What starts out as an everyday SF locked-room mystery turns into a tough, uncompromising exegesis on the physics of black holes… and the nature of good and evil. Not everyone will enjoy this. I found it mindbendingly brilliant.

 

Screenshot 2025-05-11 at 08.47.30Andrew Michael Hurley: The Loney Yet another author from The Winter Spirits, to which the author contributed The Old Play, a story about a drama performed as a traditional community ritual whose continuity appears to depend on the commission of a kind of  human sacrifice. These themes echo in The Loney, in which the devoutly Catholic Smith family goes on an Easter retreat to a remote part of the Lancashire coast, where there is a shrine to St Anne. Their story is told through the eyes of the unnamed teenage younger Smith son, protector of his older brother Andrew who is mute and has learning difficulties. The family hopes that Andrew’s exposure to holiness will cure him. And, well, he is cured (no spoiler – this is made clear in the Prologue) but what appears to be a miracle has not quite the holiness that the family imagined. The novel gets much of its power from the things that are left unsaid, the grown-up conversations that the narrator cannot quite understand, so that the horror dawns slowly on the reader who is ever eager to learn how Andrew’s miracle comes to pass. I’ll give no further clues, but there is a parallel in Ursula Guin’s 1973 short story The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas.

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In which I lurk on the edges of the playground

Posted on 5 May 2025 by Jennifer Rohn

Sunny path lined with blooming cow parsley, nettle and hawthorn

I’ve just finished Richard Powers’ latest novel, Playground. This is not a book review (although I can highly recommend it), but more of a reflection on its aftertaste. Cryptic spoilers below.

I’d consider the book ‘lab lit lite’ – there are three scientist characters whose work is ancillary to the main plot. This is not really a story about science as a profession. It’s more a cautionary tale/homage of artificial intelligence and human over-reach, somewhat reminiscent of two of his earlier works, Galatea 2.2 and Bewilderment, with a Gaia-esque dash of The Overstory thrown in.

And at its base, like a celestial plug-hole, the hard gravity of Urbana-Champaign, pulling the reader into the author’s recurring collegiate dreamscape. Like most of us, I suppose, there is nothing more compelling than the place where we learned to adult for the first time. I have similar feelings for the small campus in Oberlin, Ohio, where the scent of apple blossoms in the present day never fails to propel me back to the springtime of senior year, when I was riven with unrequited love and about to set off to earn a PhD in Microbiology on the other side of the country. It is no exaggeration to say that the future seemed to stretch out into infinity, then, much as it probably does now for my 11-year-old son.

As always, Powers has made me feel existential. Not that I need much of a catalyst in that department, these days. The slightest thing can set me off as I move ever further along the timeline, and occasionally contemplate what might lie beyond. I feel genuinely old: I am plagued by aches and pains, alongside low-level exhaustion of the body and spirit. The deaths of singers and actors that inspired me as a youth seem to happen on a weekly basis. Meanwhile, the roller-coaster of lab-related acceptance and rejection hurtles onward – one grant and paper in the former category this past week, and one grant in the latter – but it no longer feels so high or so low – just the bland normality of my precarious academic situation, averaging out.

In my heart, I also sense the cooling down of political fire to the numb embers of resigned acceptance. The thought of organising a petition, let alone a full-scale street rally, seems like something from another life. I have passed the torch long ago, and do not envy them the fight ahead.

And does anything lie beyond? Most days, I think not. But occasionally I get glimmers of potential. Yesterday, after Joshua’s last rugby training session of the year, I felt weary and sat down on a bench well away from the furore, watching my son queuing for a sausage bap and then fussing over the ketchup packets, while across the crowd, Richard was chatting with another rugby dad, smiling at some shared joke. Neither of them knew where I was, nor had yet registered my absence. And that’s when I wondered if this might be what the afterlife is like: not being a ghost, inserted no matter how incorporeally into the lives of your successors, but simply a silent point-of-view. A regard of fondness and familiarity, with the grief of separation totally blunted. You could follow your friends and family forever, a mute, all-seeing omniscient narrator who no longer has skin in the game. I am not sure if this is heaven or hell, to be honest. But, as I write these words, I suddenly realise that this concept might be part of what Powers was getting at when he skilfully unfolded his jaw-dropping reveal at the novel’s end.

Meanwhile, back in reality, it’s the dregs of a bank-holiday weekend, cold and blustery. I’ve crossed a few gardening tasks off my list, admired Richard’s runner bean supports, made stinging nettle soup from plants (carefully) foraged from the path behind the rugby club, enjoyed some me time.

Still very much of this world, and taking nothing for granted.

Posted in careers, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Joshua, Lablit, staring into the abyss, The ageing process, The profession of science | Comments Off on In which I lurk on the edges of the playground

What do ‘Skills’ Mean to You?

Posted on 27 April 2025 by Athene Donald

We frequently hear the word ‘skills’ tossed about, as in ‘there’s a skills shortage’ or ‘a skills mismatch’, but put a bunch of people in a room, and ask them to discuss skills, and – with no additional qualifying words – people will head off in a myriad different directions. Having been involved in two very different round tables recently, with skills as the topic of discussion, I can vouch for the diffuseness of the ensuing conversation, meaning that it is hard to drill down into any specific aspect of the challenge.

There is no doubt this topic is a challenge, something recognized by the Government in myriad ways. Skills England – charged with ‘bring[ing] together key partners to meet the skills needs of the next decade across all regions’, no small task – is about to spring into existence as soon as the snappily titled Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill has completed its passage through Parliament. Imminent, we are told. Then, if you read the Industrial Strategy Green Paper back in the autumn you would have seen skills mentioned as a key barrier (indeed, the first in the long bullet point list of barriers). It is encouraging to note that the February minutes of the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council (ISAC) identify that Members noted that ‘people and skills cuts across all workstreams and growth-driving sectors, requiring a focused join-up between the ISAC, Skills England and the Department for Education.’ And that Phil Smith, the new Chair of Skills England, is ex officio  a member of the ISAC. Continuing on the theme of how skills transcends Government departments and that the Government fully recognizes this, they feature in both the Growth Mission and the Opportunity Mission.

However, as I say, my experience of a bunch of people sitting over a nice dinner with skills as the topic of discussion shows just how multi-dimensional the problem is. To different people it might mean (in no particular order):

  • What is AI going to do to jobs and hence the skills people will need in the future?
  • How can NEETS be best supported?
  • Are we producing the right number of doctoral students in the right fields?
  • What should happen to the apprenticeship levy as it morphs into the Growth and Skills Levy?
  • What would lead to an optimum form for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement when it finally takes effect?
  • What should be done to make sure graduates leave university with the ‘soft’ or transferable skills employers seek?
  • How should regional variations in skills needs be handled?
  • What can philanthropy do to help socio-economically disadvantaged students?
  • What should be done to upskill adults whose jobs are disappearing?

You can see the list is long and varied and, in a couple of hours discussion while the food is served and wine consumed, it is impossible to come up with any in-depth solutions to any, let alone all, of them. But, the length of the list illustrates the scale of the problem, even before one starts worrying about the finances of any potential solutions one might dream up.

To reflect some of the issues I’m currently involved with in the Cambridge area, let me turn to one specific issue, that of asking what should be done to ensure that the well-recognized problem of an ageing technician workforce is addressed,. Even focussing just on this specific topic can be a minefield. Who is a technician? Are we talking about those with PhDs who go on to join research groups and make a significant contribution through a detailed understanding of a crucial and complex piece of kit, or are we talking about an animal house technician who may have left school at 16 with few qualifications under their belt?

Recently, there has been more attention focussed on technicians in the HE workforce by the work Kelly Vere has led at Nottingham University: the TALENT Commission and the accompanying Technician Commitment. More than 120 organisations have now signed up to the latter, demonstrating a determination to treat this part of their employee base with more care and attention. But that doesn’t in itself address the technician pipeline. Who becomes a technician and what qualifications do they or should they possess? It’s back to skills. I have previously argued that universities should play a more substantial role in training young people for these roles, whether or not they are going to stay in the HE Sector, as part of their ‘civic duty’. Universities should be in a better position to train school leavers, for instance, than a small start-up in a region, but these people may go on to make a substantial contribution to the regional economy through their ability to translate new ideas (‘diffusion’) and contribute to absorptive capacity.

Some of these could easily enter this technician pathway through an apprenticeship. Although it has been stated that there will be changes made to the current Apprenticeship levy, possibly including the removal of Level 7 (Masters) courses from its remit, the full shape of the changes is yet to be revealed. The changes to convert the current system into a future ‘Growth and Skills Levy’ need to ensure that employers invest more productively into the training of their workforce, to counter years of decline. Alison Wolf has persuasively argued that a clear distinction should be made between investment in apprenticeships for those first joining the workforce, and upskilling existing employers through degree apprenticeships (levels 6 and 7, corresponding to degree and masters’ courses), something that essentially amounts to CPD. Both are clearly important, but also significantly different and should be formally recognized as such.

No one should be in any doubt that the issue of skills is a problem. However one drills down into the question, the challenges are manifest. But, in order to make progress, it really is important to know which part of the question one is addressing, rather than lump everything together in one large basket of headaches labelled ‘skills’.

Posted in absorptive capacity, apprenticeships, careers, education, Technician Committment, technicians | Comments Off on What do ‘Skills’ Mean to You?

In which I mark a milestone

Posted on 22 April 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 | Comments Off on In which I mark a milestone

An anniversary anthem – the gift of love

Posted on 14 April 2025 by Frank Norman

At the end of August 2024 I set a hare running which has just reached its destination. A brand new piece of music now exists, because I commissioned it.

Church of the Immaculate Conception, Penzance, Cornwall

Church of the Immaculate Conception, Penzance, Cornwall

I have written before about the big part that singing in choirs has played in my life – symphonic choirs, chamber choirs, church choirs. A few years ago one of my sisters, A, started singing in a choir too.  She joined a community choir and then more recently joined her local church choir in Penzance. I enjoyed hearing about her experiences, and talking to her about singing church music. I remembered that it can be difficult when you first start and she found the same, so I sympathised but told her it will get easier. A is just two years older than me, so of all my siblings she is the closest to me in age and we had many shared experiences from our early years. Now we have a new shared experience.

Commissions

An anthem is a short piece of devotional music performed in church. Sometimes they are called motets, if the words are Latin rather than English. Anthems are sometimes commissioned for particular occasions or places. I’ve often noticed the dedications on anthems giving the details of why they were commissioned.

One famous commissioner was Walter Hussey, a clergyman and lover of the arts. He was vicar of St Matthew’s church, Northampton for 18 years and then Dean of Chichester Cathedral for a further 22 years. In both places he commissioned many pieces of music. The anthem Rejoice in the Lamb by Benjamin Britten was written for the 50th anniversary of St Matthew’s church. Hussey also commissioned Lo, the full, final sacrifice from Gerald Finzi (1946). At Chichester Hussey’s most well-known commissions were Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and the 1975 Chichester Service by William Walton.

Benjamin Britten wrote many commissions – his Antiphon was written for the 30th anniversary of St Michael’s Tenbury and his Wedding Anthem was composed for the marriage of the Earl of Harewood and Marion Stein.

William Matthias’ anthem Let the people praise thee, O God was composed for an even grander wedding – that of (then) Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. The choirmaster of a choir I once sang in wrote an anthem for two members of the choir who got married, a setting of O Perfect Love. We sang it at their wedding.

A golden wedding

When I realised last year that my sister A’s golden wedding anniversary was coming up in 2025, an idea started hatching in my head. I subtly enquired whether she was planning to have some sort of party. They had thrown a party for their ruby anniversary, and for their thirtieth anniversary they’d made a renewal of vows in their church in Penzance. My sister said that they were indeed planning a party.

I mulled over the idea of commissioning of an anthem to mark their golden wedding, like those I’d observed. I contacted the choir director at my sister’s church, and ran the idea past him. He was positive about the idea, though was concerned that the new piece should be appropriate to the choral forces available.

Composer’s Edition

I knew nothing about commissioning music, so I wasn’t sure where to start. In March 2024 I had attended a Making Music webinar on sourcing music and I remember hearing Dan Goren talk about Composers’ Edition (CE), a contemporary music publisher that he founded. Among other things Dan said that CE aimed to make it easy for choirs and orchestras to commission new music, so I looked further at them. I put an enquiry into their website describing my plans and soon after that Dan himself called me to discuss the potential commission. He explained the process and asked a few questions about what I wanted. Dan said he would send details of my proposed commission to all the composers on the CE list, to solicit ‘bids’ from them.

I was excited about the idea and put out a post on Bluesky:

Just had a call with someone from Composers' Edition, about my plan to commission a short choral anthem to celebrate my sister's golden wedding. This is a new thing for me – looking forward to the next step, when I will hear from some composers.

— Frank Norman (@franknorman.bsky.social) 2024-09-04T09:24:32.800Z

A few weeks later I had responses from eight composers, with varying backgrounds. I considered all of them, looking at the composers’ experience of choral and church music in particular, and listening to recordings of some of their music via the CE website. It was a bit like sifting through job applicants. Some of the composers addressed the points I’d made in my proposal, some ignored my proposal and just wrote about the music they would like to create.

After much cogitation I settled on Liz Lane. She has written church music previously and has a style that is very approachable. We had some email correspondence and then a Zoom call, during which I was able to fill in a bit more background about myself and A and the reason for the commission.

Realism

I had heard my sister’s Penzance church choir sing a few years earlier and they seemed very competent, singing a wide range of music. However lockdown had a negative impact on many choirs, and this one has shrunk in size to between 6 and 9 singers.

My own regular church choir has shrunk too and now typically has between 6 and 12 members on a Sunday morning so I’m very familiar with the challenges. We make regular use of OUP’s Easy and Flexible Anthems collection and the Novello Short Anthems collection. I think many church choirs will be in a similar position.

When talking to Liz Lane I mentioned the need for flexibility, referring to the examples of collections like these two. While a large-scale anthem for many singers would have been lovely, I wanted my commission to be performable by more meagre forces – a modest number of voices plus keyboard accompaniment.

I also passed on to Liz the comments that the Penzance choir’s director had made about the need for the new piece to be readily singable, not excessively discordant, and straightforward to learn.

I put some more Bluesky posts out.

I've had some proposals through & have chosen a composer. We had a good chat over Zoom yesterday and made good progress. I think she will do a great job. She asked whether the church choir has any instruments other than organ available. I said no, but now I wish I'd said 'onde martenot and tamtam'.

— Frank Norman (@franknorman.bsky.social) 2024-10-08T09:24:10.072Z

(This morning I've been listening to Messiaen's Trois Petites Liturgies, but you probably guessed that!).

— Frank Norman (@franknorman.bsky.social) 2024-10-08T09:25:08.508Z

 

Text

The next challenge was to choose a text to be set. I wanted it to be clearly suitable for religious use, but not overly ‘holy’ if you know what I mean. It should be a celebration of enduring human love. Consulting with friends who knew their liturgical music they advised that I might choose a poem, or Biblical text. I liked the famous words from 1 Corinthians 13, and also the words of the hymn ‘O Perfect Love’ seemed apppropriate. I looked at a few psalms, but they didn’t seem to fit the bill.

Liz told me that she had previously set texts by the poet Jennifer Henderson. Jennifer kindly drafted an original poem for consideration, called Joyful Promise. I liked it, but again it didn’t feel right for the anthem I had in mind. Eventually we settled on the Corinthians text and I chose some of the lines that I wanted to be included, leaving it to Liz whether she included additional lines. This is the final text that Liz set:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Love never fails.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love

Confirmation and composition

In late November Composers’ Edition drafted a contract and Liz and I both signed it, so we were legally committed to the project. I paid Liz the first instalment of the commissioning fee. CE kept in touch periodically, checking that things were proceeding OK.

My sister already knew that I had been in touch with her church choir’s director, but she didn’t know the reason. Now that everything was confirmed I told her what was going on, resolving the mystery. I think she liked the idea of the commission.

As luck would have it I visited Bristol in December and was able to meet up with Liz as she teaches at UWE and lives in the area. We met over a cup of coffee at St George’s Brandon Hill and had a good chat.

In late January Liz sent a draft score of the new piece. I sang through it and found it very tuneful. I don’t have the ability to imagine how the whole score sounds just by looking at it, so I couldn’t judge what the complete effect would be but it looked good.

I sent the draft score to my sister’s church choir director for him to review. He and Liz had some conversations about a few points. Soon the final version was agreed and everyone was happy with it.

Production and performance

Liz sent me a selection of possible cover images and I chose one. We agreed on the precise wording that would appear on the score, to describe the commissioning and the occasion. Jennifer also kindly agreed to allow her poem to be printed in the score booklet.

Cover of the new anthem, The Gift of Love, by Liz Lane

Cover of the new anthem, The Gift of Love, by Liz Lane

The anthem was printed by Composers Edition and a set of copies was sent to A. The choir started to rehearse the music and they liked it. They put in a good deal of work to learn it ready for my sister’s wedding anniversary in April.

The score is very well produced – the printing is clear and legible and it is a good size. The setting is SATB with an optional descant and an optional congregational part. The choir sing sometimes in unison, sometimes in four parts. The main theme comes round several times, so you become familiar with it. It is written to be singable. The accompaniment can be played on piano or organ. It moves at some pace, and is about 3 mins 30 secs long.

The church choir generously allowed me to sing with them for the first performance.  I travelled down to Penzance midweek and joined them for their Wednesday evening rehearsal, then sang with them at the main morning mass on Sunday 6 April. The Gift of Love was sung as the communion anthem that day.  At the end of the service the golden wedding couple were given a blessing by the parish priest.  Their four children were in the church to witness this and to hear the new anthem.

I liked the title which Liz chose – The Gift of Love. This struck me as very apt. The anthem is about love, 50 years’ worth of love, which is a great gift. The anthem itself is also a gift, from me to A and her husband, in recognition of my love for them.

I hope that other church choirs will want to sing this new piece. I have bought a set for the church choir I sing with regularly and I hope we can schedule it in a service when appropriate.  If you know of a wedding anniversary (or even a wedding) coming up then it would be a good choice.

Thanks to everyone involved – Composers Edition, Liz Lane, the choir and their director in Penzance, the organist, and of course my sister and her husband for showing us what a gift love is.

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