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Choosing Your Image

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 | Leave a comment

What I Read In April

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

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 | Leave a comment

What do ‘Skills’ Mean to You?

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 | Leave a comment

In which I mark a milestone

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

An anniversary anthem – the gift of love

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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Introducing Humungous Biosciences

There has been much fuss and flapdoodle about a company called Colossal Biosciences that aims to use the wonders of modern genetic technology to call extinct species back from the other side of the rainbow bridge. Their latest scheme has been to ‘de-extinct’ an ice-age predator, the dire wolf, by inserting various genes copied from DNA retrieved from fossil dire wolves and inserting them into regular ordinary grey wolves. Critics say that the result isn’t so much a dire wolf but a duck with a hat on a designer dog. But those puppies do look adorable.

Others suspect that the enterprise isn’t so much driven by science as fantasy.  It has not escaped our notice that one of the authors of a preprint announcing the. retrieval of dire wolf DNA is George R. R. Martin, the creator of the sprawling Game Of Thrones series of fantasy novels, which engendered a popular televisual adaptation, and in which fantasy animals called dire wolves play a small part. (For those who have never watched Game of Thrones, the plot is basically this — that people have sex a lot, and then die).

Nonetheless, Colossal plans to reanimate the dodo and the thylacine, and has made some progress with the woolly mammoth, though the results so far do seem — how would one put this? — petite.

To the many critics of Colossal, and there are many, I say — Pish! Tosh! and Fie! We wouldn’t be living in the world today if scientists didn’t go off on one occasionally and engage in projects that seemed to their less visionary contemporaries as dribblingly insane. They laughed at Galileo. Also, Tesla.

And then there’s that name: Colossal. It’s the kind of moniker that puts one in mind of fictional corporations such as ACME, or Stark Industries, often founded by ridiculously wealthy but genius-level megalomaniacs who live in James-Bond-style lairs beneath extinct volcanoes in Secret Locations.

Being as I really am a genius-level megalomaniac who lives in a James-Bond-style lair beneath an extinct volcano in a Secret Location (near Cromer) I can only view Colossal as a challenge. So, in the spirit of free-market capitalism, I have set up a rival. Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Humungous Biosciences. Unlike many genius-level megalomaniacs who live in James-Bond-style lairs beneath extinct volcanoes in Secret Locations, however, I am not ridiculously wealthy. This means that the hand-pickled picked, top-flight scientists I’ve recruited for Humungous Biosciences have often had to resort to low-budget rather more creative solutions than those available to Colossal. But necessity is the mother of Frank Zappa, and they have achieved great things with squeegee bottles and miles of sticky-backed plastic the resources they have. Privation certainly hasn’t stopped them coming up with a raft of projects to bring back creatures from their unquiet graves, whether they want to be so reanimated or not. Some of their schemes are even possible using ordinary everyday household objects, so in the spirit of openness and citizen science, readers are encouraged to try out some of them at home (at their own risk). Here therefore is a selection from the latest call for funding prospectus.

Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius)

Take any ordinary everyday elephant — such as you might find around any home — and cover it in russet shag-pile carpet.

Woolly Rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis)

See ‘Woolly Mammoth’.

Giant Deer (Megaloceros giganteus)

Also known as the Irish Elk, this can be recreated by taking a red-deer stag and glueing very large branches to its head.

Glyptodont (Doedicurus sp.)

This gigantic relative of the armadillo can be recreated by covering a VW beetle with egg boxes.

Aurochs (Bos primigenius)

This legendarily ferocious progenitor of domestic cattle may be recreated by taking a large white bull; fattening it on testosterone, antibiotics, and supersized Happy Meals; and then shoving a scotch bonnet up its bottom.

Steller’s Sea Cow (Hydrodamalis gigas)

This project is still in the planning stages but prospective investors can get a good idea of what it would be like by watching me sea-bathing (from a safe distance), at least until the Sea Mammal Research Unit arrives.

Macrauchenia (Macrauchenia patachonica)

Macrauchenia was a litoptern, a group of extinct mammals only known from South America. Its claim to fame is that it was discovered by Charles Darwin. Macrauchenia looked like a large ungulate with a short trunk. It can be recreated by getting two short lengths of shower hose, glueing them together side-by-side, and attaching them to the forehead of any conveniently located llama. (Special orders only).

Giant Ground Sloth (Megatherium americanum)

There are no plans as yet to recreate this species. However, I’ve seen some of our scientists watching attentively and taking notes when I sit down to lunch.

Diprotodon (Diprotodon optatum)

This rhinoceros-sized cousin of the wombat can be recreated by feeding LSD to ordinary wombats. The wombats won’t actually be any bigger, but THEY’LL think they’re HUGE.

Aepyornis (Vorombe titan)

In a preliminary study, scientists  have attempted to  recreate the aepyornis, or elephant bird, by crossing an elephant with a bird. First results are not encouraging, producing elephants that can’t remember anything. They’re also lighter than air and tend to float away, endangering air traffic.

Giant Trilobite (Isotelus rex)

Efforts to recreate this 70-centimetre aquatic Ordovician monster are well advanced. The project involves glueing medieval plate armour to Roombas and letting them loose. The problem  is that when placed in water they invariably explode. The Humungous Biosciences marketing department is thinking of rebranding this project as a recreation of the giant Carboniferous (and land-living) millipede Arthropleura.

Unicorns

Humungous Biosciences is also responding to the challenge, set by Colossal with the dire wolf, of creating animals that never existed in reality. The first project is the unicorn, which can easily be created by taking any pure white horse that has been reared and handled by virgins, and glueing an ice-cream cone to its forehead.

Ents

In ‘Project Treebeard’, scientists at Humungous Biosciences have been trying to create ents by splicing actin and myosin genes into banyan trees. The results have been encouraging, if disconcerting. The trees really do seem to move around, but only when nobody is looking.

FINALLY: there is a good reason for not making fun of projects at Colossus. If they are as keen on creating animals from the Game of Thrones franchise as they seem, there can really only be one aim: to create the gigantic fire-breathing flying dragons responsible for incinerating so many of the cast … and, presumably, the competition. That’s why we at Humungous Bioscences intent to get there first.

Posted in Cromer, Dreaming, Research, Science Is Vital, Science-fiction, Silliness | Comments Off on Introducing Humungous Biosciences

Gender Pay Gaps: Getting Worse

This is the season when all larger employers have had to report their gender pay gap. Is it good news? No, things appear to be going backwards.

“Enduring gender pay disparities in Whitehall reflect low female representation in senior roles and over-representation in junior positions.”

says the Financial Times about the widening gender pay gaps in the Civil Service. The same newspaper reports that Lloyds Banking Group’s median pay gap rose by 2.7 percentage points to 35.5 per cent last year, meaning that Lloyds Bank had the fourth-largest pay gap of any employer with more than 5,000 staff.

Recently UKRI also reported an increase in the gender pay gap of their own employees. As they put it, this is

“largely influenced by distribution of males and females within the workforce rather than differences in pay within the bands”.

In other words, there are more men than women towards the top of the pay scales in senior roles at UKRI.  The explanation for the increasing differential in male and female salaries at UKRI is attributed to a refreshed scale for employees involved with research (for instance, scientists in one of their institutes) compared with others, such as clerical staff handling grant proposals. It won’t surprise anyone to know that there are more women in the latter, less well-paid roles and more men in roles that might take them out to sea on a NERC boat (the one that isn’t named Boaty McBoatface) or to running a large research group at the John Innes, Sanger or LMB. At least these institutes are still allowed to have links to EDI initiatives on their websites, unlike their American parallels, but the numbers speak for themselves.

Thus, across all these examples we are seeing a similar sort of gender segregation in roles. Changing this requires a total cultural rethink of who does what. However good anyone’s intentions – and I’m absolutely sure that from the top of UKRI down, intentions are good – our society still tends to push women one way and men another. This is, of course, not just a UK problem. It is well-known that the Scandinavian countries score highly on equality issues, and yet they are as susceptible to this sort of role segregation as any other country. Indeed, in some ways they are even worse. Nordics Info state clearly that

“Nordic countries also have greater horizontal segregation by sex than the rest of the EU, that is, most women work in different occupations than most men.”

They go on to say:

“In Denmark for instance over 60% of all workers are employed in a profession where their own sex accounts for 75% or more.”

– sectors such as education and the public sector. Clearly, creating a more equal society where, for instance, parental leave is more genuinely shared, is not sufficient to eradicate societal norms about what a ‘nice girl’ does and, just as importantly, what she isn’t expected to do.

Relevant to this, I’ve just finished reading Fiona Erskine’s book Phosphate Rocks: A death in ten objects, which highlights some of these issues.  Woven into her story about an unexplained body in the disused chemical factory at Leith, is her alter ego chemical engineer Fiona, the first graduate woman to work shifts at this factory producing fertiliser. She only hints at the problems she must have faced in the ‘80’s, but the reality is that, for the real Fiona working in this factory in a minority of one, it must have been hard. Fiona can’t be much younger than me, and also a graduate of Cambridge. In my own cohort of students there were precisely two women who took the engineering tripos (although I can’t be 100% sure there weren’t others doing chemical engineering, which was a final year option at the time, but one you could also approach via the Natural Sciences route).

But, somewhat younger than either of us was Shima Barakat, a woman who was the only female working on the Cairo underground many years ago, an experience she can now laugh about but which clearly wasn’t very funny at the time. Engineering remains stubbornly male-dominated at every level and, if anything, the profession is heading in the wrong direction. A 2024 briefing from Engineering UK showed that the percentage of women working in engineering and technology occupations had actually dropped from 16.5% in 2022 to 15.7% in 2023. Their analysis further showed that, although more women were entering the profession, the drop out at mid-career more than offset the increasing entry level numbers.

This is not the way to close the gender pay gap. What are organisations doing wrong? Are they not flexible enough for women whose caring responsibilities are typically more arduous than for men? Are their working environments so inimical to a pleasant atmosphere that women get to a stage of just not wanting to hack it anymore? Or do they get fed up when they see younger men being promoted over them because of unconscious bias in those doing the promotions? The EngineeringUK report simply looks at the statistics, so those questions are not addressed.

I have never forgotten a 2014 report from Murray Edwards (a women’s only College in Cambridge) who had surveyed their alumnae, which stated that

“the most difficult challenge they have faced in their careers is the non-supportive culture of their workplace. Shockingly, this is just as true for women aged 20-29 as for our older age group.”

That was true whichever sector the women were working in, but is likely to be heightened by isolation if, like Fiona Erskine, you are the only woman on a shift. OK, the report is more than ten years old but, given the statistics, it is hard to see the world has changed much.

Women still face workface harassment; they are still too often discouraged from entering some sectors, even if the discouragement is only subliminal; and society has not yet adjusted to the fact that it is not only women who do the caring, so that men taking (for instance) parental leave are too often stigmatised. The gender pay gap will never close as long as these and other systemic issues persist.

Posted in Equality, Fiona Erskine, parental leave, Science Culture, Shima Barakat, UKRI | Comments Off on Gender Pay Gaps: Getting Worse

What I Read In March

I apologise for the late arrival of this month’s book blog. I have been distracted by the publication of my own book, the subject of which is somewhat fin-d’espèce, if not fin-du-monde, and which you can read all about here.

Screenshot 2025-04-04 at 09.13.12Laura Purcell: The Silent Companions You’ll both no doubt recall that Mrs Gee gave me an anthology of horror stories for Christmas entitled The Winter Spirits, thus introducing me to a host of authors of whom I had not previously heard. One of these was Laura Purcell, whose story Carol of the Bells and Chains was High Victorian gothic horror set in the nursery of a grand house. The Silent Companions has a similar setting, and starts when newlywed Elsie Bainbridge comes to the decaying country pile of her new husband, who has – inconveniently – just died. Her only companion is her late husband’s rather vapid sister. With nothing else to do but explore the huge building, she unlocks a door that she shouldn’t, unleashing nursery crymes. The story intercuts with a tale in the same house just before the English Civil War, when the nursery horrors (the ‘silent companions’ of the title) first came into the house, bought by the Lady of the House from a remarkable curiosity shop run by a man called Samuels – a shop that subsequently disappears without trace. So, take Victorian Gothic and mix in aspects of Child’s Play and Needful Things. My concern, being a Red-Sea Pedestrian, is the anachronistic nature of Samuels, who is plainly Jewish, yet Jews were absent from England until the Protectorate. But this is a tale of the fantastic, so one can perhaps excuse it. And it is a fine spine-chiller.

Screenshot 2025-04-04 at 09.18.00Jess Kidd: Things In Jars Another author from The Winter Spirits here, of a story called Ada Lark about a street urchin who becomes the assistant to a fraudulent medium (is there any other kind?) Things in Jars is a mystery in which Mrs Bridie Devine, private investigator extraordinaire, is asked to track down the missing daughter of an aristocrat – a girl with remarkable powers. Mrs Devine, despite (and perhaps because of)  a chequered personal history, is quite at home in the rambunctious stews of Victorian London, and mixes with a cast of characters is picturesque and outlandish as anything in Dickens – from Clara Butter, Mrs Devine’s giantess housemaid, to the ghost of a dead prizefighter who claims to be in love with our intrepid heroine. All this and bottled mermaids too in a tale told in that spellbinding, endlessly creative yet somewhat elliptical style one finds in Irish-born writers from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to Roddy Doyle and Spike Milligan. All in all an absolute cracker. I want to read more about Bridie Devine.

UntitledNatasha Pulley: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street Pulley was the author of The Salt Miracles, my favourite story from The Winter Spirits — a mist-enshrouded and highly original tale about pilgrims to the Hebridean shrine of an obscure saint. In January I lauded The Mars House, a simply gorgeous SF trans bromance set on Mars, which is now Offspring#1’s favourite book. When we enthused to Offspring#2 about Pulley, she passed me The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, which was Pulley’s debut novel. It takes place in a slightly alternative Victorian London in which Thaniel Steepleton, a government telegraph operator, comes home to find a beautiful watch on his pillow. Pocketing it, the watch sounds an alarm just before a terrorist bomb explodes that destroys Scotland Yard. The works of the watch are traced to Keita Mori, the Japanese emigre watchmaker of the title, who is suspected of having made the bomb. Steepleton is tasked with keeping tabs on Mori, and eventually comes to live with him. A parallel strand has a young female scientist who is trying to prove the existence of the luminiferous aether before her mother forces her to marry. The writing is crisp, the plot clever, the dialogue (in places) laugh-out-loud funny in an Oscar-Wilde-Noel-Coward kind of way, but I have a sense that, like some of Mori’s clockwork, it’s all wound up a bit too tight. Perhaps this was stress-to-impress in what became a widely acclaimed debut, before Pulley learned to relax and let some more of her affectionate style in. Having said that, there is plenty of humour in the form of Katsu, Mori’s seemingly intelligent and wayward clockwork octopus. Having read more of Pulley, her signature, apart from gay romance, seems to be the gratuitous insertion of a loveable octopus, in the same way that Trollope put in scenes about fox hunting.

Screenshot 2025-04-04 at 09.47.33Natasha Pulley: The Half-Life of Valery K By now you’ll have guessed that I have become quite a fan of Natasha Pulley. Apart from anything else, she impresses by her range: from steampunk in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street to SF in The Mars House and now historical fiction set in Russia that seems in every way as authentic as anything by Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park, Wolves Eat Dogs). It’s 1963, and Valery K, a scientist sent to Stalin’s Gulag for some invented infraction, is transferred to a secret radiation lab not far from the Urals to be part of a team led by his old doctorate supervisor. The task is to monitor the local environment as part of controlled experiments on the effects of radiation on the flora and fauna. But there’s more to it than that, or course, and Valery risks being shot (or worse) as he tries to expose the secrets beneath the secrets. It’s rather grim (at times not even Pulley’s humour can alleviate the bitter cruelty and the Siberian chill) but is a fabulous read for all that, and contains her by-now-familiar bromance (Valery cultivates an unlikely friendship with his KGB minder). And, oh yes, an octopus. Because, why not? I have only one quibble — did they really have TV remotes in 1963?

IMG_8857Sophie Hannah: Haven’t They Grown? Beth hasn’t seen her former best friend Flora for twelve years, not since their children were small. Taking her now-teenage son to football practice, Beth drives past the house where Flora now lives, and, without being seen, sees Flora in her car with her own children who look exactly the same as they had been twelve years before. Such is the set-up for a crime thriller in which Beth dives down the rabbit hole to discover what’s really going on. No, not time travel, but a thoroughly convoluted, entirely unlikely but ultimately page-turningly compelling thriller. Once again, Sophie Hannah is an entirely new author to me, despite her having written scads of books (although she didn’t feature in The Winter Spirits, you’ll be relieved to know). Offspring#1 picked up this copy at a charity shop because he knows that I’m dead easy to buy presents for. I love books. Also, liquorice allsorts.

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