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What I Read In October

Posted on 1 November 2026 by Henry Gee

Paul Murdin: Exoplanets: The Search for Earth’s Twin The discovery and initial characterisation of solar systems beyond our own has been one of the great scientific successes of the past thirty years. More than 6,400 so-called ‘exoplanets‘ are now known, orbiting more than 4,000 stars, and they form a fascinating zoo, from gas giants far exceeding in mass that of our own mighty Jupiter, but orbiting so close to their parent star that they practically graze it;  to rocky ‘super Earths’; to ‘super puffs’ – planets as light as thistledown. The field is still growing fast and the definitive guide has yet to be written. This certainly isn’t it. The search for ‘Earth’s twin’ is a poor framing device. Part of the reason is that the methods of detection are not yet so advanced that one has a good, unbiased view of what’s out there, particularly for smallish rocky planets orbiting stars brighter than a 20-watt bulb. For good technical reasons, detection is biased towards planets that are very large, orbiting very close to small, dim parent stars, or both. We have as yet only a sketchy idea of exoplanetary atmospheres. And this book, as a book, is poor. It looks like a print-on-demand product, cheaply made, given the purchase price. The pictures are nice, but the lack of an index is startling and the absence of references, unforgivable.

Nick Hornby: High Fidelity Ah, nostalgia. If, in your youth, you used to haunt record shops, when there were still records (and shops), this will strike a (ahem) chord. The protagonist owns a scruffy and failing record shop in North London with two deadbeat friends, and their recreation is to compile charts of the three best this or that. I can’t really remember what happens after that, but suffice it to say that it’s a coming-of-age novel in which the characters are forced out of their state of arrested development. Charming.

Charles Dickens: Nicholas Nickleby Every so often I am driven to Dickens, mostly because I have to take a taxi to (and especially from)  that kind of party, so I listened to an audiobook. The reader was marvellous, capturing all the many nuances and dialects of the novel’s vast cast of grotesques. Nicholas and Kate Nickleby and their airhead of a mother are left bereft by the death of Nickleby Sr. who, as a result of poor investment advice (prompted by his wife) has  left virtually nothing, and the family is thrown on to the meagre mercy of Uncle Ralph (a prototype for Scrooge). The young Nicklebys are forced to seek employment. Nicholas travels to Yorkshire to become an assistant Master at Dotheboys Hall (Proprietor: Wackford Squeers), a kind of concentration camp where those of moderate means send their crippled, simple-minded and illegitimate offspring. (The novel threw light on the real-life scandal of these so-called ‘Yorkshire Schools‘). Kate becomes an assistant to a Mrs Mantellini, a milliner and dressmaker on the brink of ruin thanks to the gloriously spendthrift husband. And so the clockwork, once set, runs along: the good triumph, and the bad come to sticky ends. This cumbrous edifice of a novel skates just above the slough of despond thanks to the marvellous writing, the constant tone of sardonic humour, and the memorable characters such as Smike and Newman Noggs, especially those who try to rise above their natural and parlous state and so achieve some kind of redemption. These days one needs a certain amount of patience to enjoy Dickens, but people at the time lapped it up, presumably because there wasn’t much on TV and the internet hadn’t been invented.

Leigh Bardugo: Dead Beat This is the third in a trilogy. I have previously reviewed Ninth House and Hell Bent, and you really have had to have read the latter immediately before Dead Beat as it continues straight on, and without some reminder it’s hard to make much sense of what’s going on. The premise is this – where do all those promising witches and wizards go after Hogwarts? To Yale of course, where Lethe is a magical society whose task is to police the rituals of the other eight. We see the world through the eyes of Harry Potter Galaxy ‘Alex’ Stern, a feral Californian college dropout who has been recruited to Yale more for her magical powers and sheer cojones than for any academic merit. The Ninth House trilogy is very much in the Potter vein except that there’s a lot of sex, violence and violent sex, with or without drugs, and it’s much better written. In Dead Beat we find that Lethe itself is rotten to the core and, after our hero and heroine foil an attempt of the Demons of Hell to break into the waking world, go off into the sunset in search of more sequels. Or so I hope. Alex Stern is a well-rounded character, as is her beau, gentleman and New England blueblood Daniel Arlington V, and who wouldn’t want to fall in love with their housemate and helpmeet Pamela Dawes?

Buzz Baum: I: A Biography of the Biological Self A deeply personal account of how individual human beings are made of a myriad of fusions of smaller bodies, right back to archaea and bacteria at the dawn of life. DISCLAIMER: This book comes out in February 2027. I was sent a pre-publication copy.

Graham Farmelo: Hawking: His Life and Work This is the authorised biography of a truly remarkable person of whose existence I am sure you are both aware, and as I have written about it in extenso, and what’s more at length, I have posted my review separately.

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Event Horizon

Posted on 1 November 2026 by Henry Gee

Graham Farmelo: Hawking, His Life and Work This is the authorised biography of a truly remarkable person of whose existence I am sure you are both aware, so famed has he become in scientific and popular culture. No other theoretical physicist has featured in The Simpsons, Desert Island Discs, Star Trek and The Big Bang Theory, as well as authoring one of the best-selling nonfiction books ever. These days such fame would only be overtopped by appearances in Celebrity Traitors and Strictly Come Dancing, and I am sure that Stephen Hawking — for it was he — would have wheeled himself into the frame for these, if asked.

Promising but self-centred and lazy, the young Stephen Hawking found himself studying physics at Oxford in the early 1960s when he was diagnosed with a form of motor neurone disease (MND) and given only a few years to live. Galvanised by his diagnosis he worked furiously, achieving important discoveries in theoretical physics, mostly about the theory of gravity, and black holes, as well as travelling widely, partying hard, marrying (twice) and producing three children, while in the course of time becoming totally immobile and dependent on others — and living until his seventies.

This is no hagiography, though. Hawking could be selfish, narrow-minded, arrogant, aggressive and a bully, often taking all the credit for discoveries in which he had played but a part, perhaps getting off lightly because of his profound disability. It could be that disability drove him. Would he have succeeded without it? We shall never know.

Disabled people sometimes have to succeed by sheer bloody mindedness, and — as I discovered myself during a short spell after I broke an ankle a few years ago — when you are in a wheelchair, the able-bodied tend to treat you as insensate luggage. Those with a disability that results in difficulties of communication (and Hawking was a prime example) may become, with justification, especially forthright. I have known a number of people who, while able-bodied in every other way, are deaf, and have needed to dispense with social niceties just to get attention.

This book helped me get some vague understanding, albeit at a base level,  of something that had previously mystified me, even after two careful readings of A Brief History of Time, that is, the ‘no boundary’ idea for the beginning of the Universe. It’s all a matter of ‘imaginary time‘ (no, me neither).

I remained mystified by other things, though. First, why his long-suffering wife Jane married him at all, even when his MND had been diagnosed (ah, l’amour), and second, after they divorced, why his second wife, Elaine, deserted her existing husband and children and married Hawking,  when he was hardly anyone’s idea of a romantic lead, and his sparkling off-the-cuff wit required some preparation. The presence of bruises and some broken bones raised suspicions that the hot-headed Elaine physically abused Stephen, but Farmelo draws a veil over another possible cause. Another prejudice that attaches itself to disabled people is that they have no sex life. Hawking was clearly able to father children, but Farmelo doesn’t go into details. It’s only in The Theory of Everything, the Hawking biopic, when one of Hawking’s friends asks him how he manages it, that Hawking (played by Eddie Redmayne) says that his disability didn’t affect that part of his anatomy. Farmelo does allude in a sidelong way to the fact that Elaine and Stephen shared a bed, so perhaps any injuries Stephen accrued happened during sex. But I don’t know this, because Farmelo doesn’t ask, or if he did, he got no answer.

Motor neurone disease affects motor neurones – the clue is in the name — and not the vast and vastly underestimated and quasi-independent nervous system that controls the viscera — the lungs, heart, digestive system, urogenital system and all the rest of the mixed grill that keeps a body working, but which we take for granted until and unless it does something over which we have only partial conscious control, such as vomit, or have an erection.

More broadly, I’d like to have known more about MND. As far as I know, there is no known cause or cure, and the term ‘MND’ might cover a number of separate complaints. Hawking was, as Farmelo says, an outlier, partly because he got it so young (it doesn’t usually affect anyone under 50) and because he survived so long. As Farmelo says, his life was certainly prolonged by the great care he received throughout his life, including two emergency operations that saved his life, though, as John Gribbin suggests in his review in the Literary Review, Hawking’s longevity might partly be due to his refusal to capitulate.

Was Hawking a sexist, as some have suggested? The jury is out. I’d say that he was a man of his time, having been educated at all-boys’ school, and at what were then all-male Oxbridge colleges, and went to work in a very male-dominated field, so it’s perhaps no surprise that he admitted finding women ‘a mystery’. Hawking certainly loved women in general, and had a lifelong admiration for Marilyn Monroe. If you are repelled by the very idea of a disabled person confined to a wheelchair lusting after Marilyn Monroe, you should perhaps check your prejudices in at the door. Hawking did visit Epstein’s private island, but so did many other people, and it was a very long time ago. Whether, if he hadn’t been disabled, that would have gotten him cancelled, is a matter Farmelo doesn’t address either.

Farmelo’s biography is a great read, and will stand as the definitive meat-and-potatoes account, laying out as much as he can as plainly as possible. Hawking may have regarded women as a mystery, but he felt the same way about the way the Universe worked, and one might say the same about the man himself. The source of his incredible intuitions, his abilities in a sphere that almost everyone finds recondite, how he lived for so long and remained so active despite everything. For now, Hawking has disappeared over the event horizon, to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no information can ever return. Possibly.

Posted in Science Is Vital, Writing & Reading | Leave a comment

Guilt on Saying No

Posted on 30 October 2026 by Athene Donald

Retirement is a strange state, at least for me. I’ve written recently about one aspect of it, looking at whether or not I had achieved anything like a coherent ‘portfolio’. Writing that previous blog reassured me I had not taken on a crazy mishmash of activities just in order to fill my time. However, there is still the question of when to say yes and when to say no. This will be a question that can perplex an individual at any stage in their career, and it is another topic that has turned up previously on this blog. However, here I am thinking not so much of ‘roles’, ongoing activities that might be added to either the day job or a post-retirement portfolio, but the singletons. If someone asks you to come and do X, be it at the other side of the country or the other side of the world, what factors should you think about before giving an answer?

Everyone’s response to this will be different, depending on what they value, their domestic arrangements and their diary. Nevertheless, if the request is viable but not particularly attractive, or if it looks lovely but would put a significant strain on other parts of your life, it can be harder to make a decision. I realise, for me and I’m sure for others, guilt can also come in to play. This, I recall, was a conversation I had many years ago with Mary Beard, as her fame took off. People wanted a ‘piece’ of her, at schools, in the media or at festivals, to give a few examples of types of ‘piece’. As the requests were coming thick and fast, she was struggling to make choices between many worthy opportunities. If there is, technically, space in your diary, is it reasonable to say no to some deserving group? The answer has to be yes, because otherwise collapse, mental and/or physical might ensue. Collapse also of the space to think about the next piece of work, the next undergraduate lecture, book – or the family.

That was Mary’s conundrum at that point in her career. Now she is retired from a formal University role, like me, no doubt she is re-evaluating such decisions. As am I. Retirement may make it look as if one has all the time in the world to visit the extremities of the country (although my diary certainly doesn’t read like that), but retirement also means energy levels are not that of a twenty-year old, nor does new information necessarily stick so well in the brain, as brain plasticity slows down (depressing but true). So, I am having to rethink what is reasonable given these factors.

Many years ago, I was asked – and agreed – to present the prizes at a girls’ school at a location that was annoyingly difficult to get to by train (and I’m no great driver, leaving aside my carbon footprint). I went and realised that for an hour on a dais shaking teenage girls’ hands as I murmured encouraging words on their success was a poor return on many hours on multiple trains and a night away. I decided at that point that this was not something I would repeat, unless there were some additional motivation, such as combining the visit with something else nearby or a particular connection with the venue.

I’ve been asked to participate in formal debates, and decided – regardless of location or prestige –  that that did not coincide with my skillset, given I could be pitched, as a novice with zero experience, against those who’d spent many years perfecting skills in debating societies. Thus, when I was asked to take part in a so-called disputation elsewhere in Europe, however interesting the topic (and I forget what it was), it was easy to say no for that reason, quite apart from what was clearly going to be another tricky place to reach with a tedious, long-winded journey.

However, the guilt for me really comes in when it’s a school that’s putting in a request. I want to feel I can pass on some of my love for my subject to those just setting out. I get letters asking me to come in and inspire their classroom and, sometimes, I simply feel that to squeeze in another long train journey is asking too much and I have to decline. But it doesn’t stop the guilt lurking. I can’t help but notice that the requests tend to come from those schools which no doubt are used to lining up a series of such talks, rather than the ones where the pupils never get the chance to meet a real scientist.  The ones with a nice middle-class PTA and money to cover a speaker’s travel are the ones that put in a request. I would far rather go to a school in a disadvantaged area – there are plenty such not that far from Cambridge city centre – even while knowing the class I would meet is far more likely to be disruptive or bored. Yet, reaching one child to raise aspirations in such a school should be its own reward, Being just one speaker amongst many, where children have already mentally sorted themselves into interested in STEM or not, because they’ve been able to gain a good impression of what that means from previous speakers…doesn’t feel so inspiring to me. It is certainly one criterion on which to base my decisions.

Everyone, retired or not, has to decide what is ‘worth’ it for them, as well as their audience. Which invitations or new challenges to take up is very personal, but the guilt may still linger when saying ‘no’, necessary though that may be for the good of one’s health and diary.

Posted in careers, diaries, requests, school visits, Science Culture | Leave a comment

In which we stare down a universe of one

Posted on 30 October 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

It’s one of those days when the reality of academic loneliness hits hard.

Sometimes, you can be lulled into a false sense of complacency. It’s a peaceful period, your colleagues are available, you’re part of an amazing team. Projects steam-roll ahead because everyone is pulling the same way. You feel like you’re striding triumphantly down one of those long, bouncy pedestrian conveyor belts at an airport, superhumanly fast. The gates fly by on the left and right, clogged with sluggish crowds of mere mortals.

But of course, everyone is busy, the protagonist of their own private universe. This time of year, teaching is like a massive suck hole, stripping away your time, energy and will to live. Every time I step onto the podium, I give it my million-dollar all, and the students seem appreciative, even queue up afterwards to shyly introduce themselves and ask questions or seek advice. But the moment they filter out of the room and I switch off the AV, I feel like it’s me who’s been shut down.

Of course this is happening to my teammates as well, each of whom also has crucial deadlines that must sit front and centre of their attention. And this is when they go silent.

No matter how many times you’ve been there, it always feels like the first time. You have to remind yourself: it’s really just me on this team. It’s only ever been me. Anything else is just a passing, illusionary bonus.

We academics – at least in my field – are lone wolves. Sure, we meet up occasionally to run with the pack or crouch in a circle howling at the moon, but ultimately, we lope through the darkened forest and lick our wounds alone.

Posted in academia, staring into the abyss, Teaching, The profession of science | Leave a comment

How to Communicate

Posted on 18 October 2026 by Athene Donald

I recently had the pleasure of attending a discussion about the future of science communication, mainly involving early career researchers who had already slotted some communication initiatives into their busy lives. There were many insights provided into ‘what works’, but also substantial concerns about where and how to fit in this important activity into a career.

Above all, what came out was the importance of story-telling to grab the attention of the audience, but to do it in such a way that the audience feels involved and not talked down to. Everyone in the room had clearly moved on from the deficit model associated with ‘public understanding’ of science to the idea of ‘public engagement’. But neither approach is appropriate when dealing with a young audience, even a pre-school one for which picture books are likely to be the right medium. There was enthusiasm to reach into schools, which aligns with all Paul Nurse says about the importance of introducing a sense of wonder to act as inspiration in young people’s lives. However, there is no doubt that writing or talking to young children is a skill many scientists never acquire. Indeed, it has to be admitted, seeing senior scientists talking in obscure language even to their peers should remind us that not all scientists are equipped to communicate well to any audience.

Trying to imagine a world ten or twenty years hence, it is difficult to envisage how the world of science communication may change. There were several remarks about how changes in social media are introducing all kinds of issues. There was that brief moment when Twitter provided a wonderful platform for highlighting exciting developments that could then be spread widely. However, current social media seem very different and enthusiasm for TikTok, for instance was very muted amongst this particular group. Perhaps, despite being early career researchers, they are still older than the TikTok generation. Although YouTube videos have a good reach, there is no doubt that for minorities in particular that can be a double-edged sword, with vicious comments often appended. It seems easier to be an influencer in areas far from science.

But producing videos may inevitably anyhow look like ‘preaching’. Instead, should science communication in the future be about co-creation with different audiences? Where should this engagement occur and can it be shown to be as available in all communities and for all audiences? I have long worried, for instance about the Cambridge (Science) Festival, that too often may be thought to be preaching to the ‘converted’, the nice middle-class families who already probably possess a substantial amount of science and cultural capital. It is much harder to reach those children who aren’t routinely exposed to ideas about science, either through good teaching in their schools, books in their home or round-the-dinner-table conversations. If scientists – academics or industrialists – simply go into the schools near them, it is likely to mean the remote rural schools, or those in run-down urban areas, miss out. This is not equity.

To return to the aspect of communication that amounts to story-telling. Should this be taught? If so where in science education – at undergraduate or postgraduate level? How should it be taught? How should it be valued (or indeed assessed) both during the education path and as a practicing scientist? Academics being good at jumping through hoops means that they are more likely to take on something with a tangible professional reward; in other words things like promotion criteria can act as an incentive or, at the very least, should not act as a deterrent as historically they probably have.  These were all topics that got a lot of air-time. Most people in the room had taken up outreach and communication work through a love of their subject and a sense of responsibility to pass that love on. However, fitting in the time to do this without support from their institutions can frequently be a challenge.

Which matters more, that children should be inspired or that they understand how to challenge misinformation, for instance about vaccinations? Of course, they are both important, but I do worry what is formally taught in schools achieves neither. Our PISA results in England may be good and above the OECD average, even improving over the years in science. Nevertheless, the lack of practical work to give children that tangible feeling for the fun and doing of science, and the ongoing focus on memory work to pass exams rather than understanding how to question ideas that are perhaps dubious, mean that skills for the modern age may be missed in our education system. A knowledge-rich curriculum is well-designed for passing exams, but is possibly less important these days now that fast access to facts readily sits in your pocket. That view does not always go down well with educators.

Science communication matters on many fronts and for and with many audiences. How to optimise this, indeed how to scale up from talking to a single class in school or a small audience in a tent, to reach a much wider audience, remains a challenge. The last wish this particular group of researchers tabled was the desire that every child in primary school has the opportunity to meet a scientist (and this need not only be an academic researcher; scientists turn up in many guises). Wherever a school is in the country that ought to be feasible, but it requires each school to know how to find such people which, for the hard-pressed profession, may be tricky.  As scientists we should be conscious of this.

Posted in Communicating Science, primary school, science festivals, Tik Tok | Leave a comment

Keeping On Keeping Going

Posted on 12 October 2026 by Athene Donald

Listening to a webinar regarding women in management, I was struck by the panellist who remarked in irritation how her boss had once said ‘you must not have had any problems’ en route to the role she had. She was livid at this remark, and I can understand why. Success does not mean that there were no setbacks along the way. I do wonder whether a (male) boss would say anything similar to a male more junior colleague. To my mind the underlying implication when directed at a woman is that, if they had had any problems, they would likely have been derailed rather than keep going.

Sally Davies, former Chief Medical Officer who recently retired from her role as Master of Trinity College in Cambridge, summarised this well in an interview:

“Well, like most women of my age I’ve had to be better than the men to get the jobs, and then of course there is the inevitable you make and put forward an idea at a meeting and it’s only when a man says it that it’s taken up.”

That doesn’t sound like someone who’s never had any problems. Although she qualifies her remarks with ‘most women of my age’, suggesting the current generation of young women may not face the same issues, I fear I think that is too optimistic. Nothing I’ve heard from ECRs suggests they don’t have similar experiences.

I am reminded of this following an interview[1] I did this week with a journalist from the BBC World Service about why there were, yet again, no women Nobel prize winners in the STEM subjects this year. Where did the problems set in, I was asked. My personal belief is that they occur at every stage of a life essentially from birth. For women moving up the professional ladder, the thought process of any interviewer should be, not an assumption there have never been any problems, more a question about how they found the resilience to keep going in the face of inevitable hiccoughs or worse.

I watch the world of (classical) music as a kind of parallel world to science, with historically similar ways of writing women out of many roles. Marin Alsop, the US conductor, may have been the first woman to be appointed to lead a major American orchestra when she was appointed Musical Director for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007, but this led to open hostility from some orchestra members. Instead of giving up this dream job and simply retreating, she worked with the orchestra to overcome their concerns and then went from strength to strength. If you read her Wikipedia page, the number of ‘firsts’ to her credit is extraordinary: she was the first female principal conductor of a British orchestra, the first woman to conduct the Last Night of the Proms….and so on. However, if you watch interviews with her, it is clear how raw that experience at Baltimore was. No setbacks on the way to glory? Rubbish!

Sally Davies and Marin Alsop, in their different ways, did not give up on their path to leadership. Others may. It is too easy to be knocked off course. If you choose not to let ‘them’ win, you have to expend energy that could otherwise be directed at your science instead at manoeuvring, fitting in or finding allies to work with you. This could, of course, happen to men as well as women and to any minority in a situation where they feel excluded, but it does lead to time being eaten up and potentially a sapping of strength which others may not have had to overcome if their path has always been rose-strewn.

Take Nancy Hopkins, for instance. Not a Nobel Prize winner but an eminent life scientist at MIT. If you read Kate Zernike’s 2024 book The Exceptions about women faculty in the sciences there, it becomes clear, not just that she was treated most unreasonably, but that in order to gather evidence about the systemic differences in the way female faculty were treated, a lot of time and thought was required. Going around the labs at night to measure up the space allocated to male and female faculty to gather the evidence that women systematically got a raw deal took imagination as well as time. That she was willing to do this to make her case to MITs senior leadership, made a difference not just within her own faculty but with repercussions far wider when the ensuing report was made public, documenting the way women were systemically disadvantaged.

Hopkins was brave, energetic and yet still managed to outshine most of her male colleagues professionally. But to say she ‘must have had no problems’ would be ridiculous. I’m sure many women have done, in their own ways, what they can to level the playing field for them and those who come thereafter, but it will come as a cost. Does this play into why so few women get Nobel prizes in STEM? Probably not in a direct line, but the woman who is a team player, who fits in with the system so as not to be shafted or takes on the pastoral care and other ‘housekeeping’ that may be tossed in her direction, will be less likely to win this ultimate accolade (which, for all its glory and media attention, seems a very outdated kind of prize).

To be successful as a scientist can take many forms: to bring on the next generation, to contribute a small part to a wider whole, to inspire….it does not mean selfishness and treading on those more junior than you so that the prizes all come to you. Please do not follow the advice in entomologist E.O. Wilson’s quite old book (2013), Letters to a Young Scientist, (he was ‘merely’ a Pulitzer Prize winner, not a Nobel but ambition oozes through his book) to ‘Make excuses, dodge, plead, trade’ to get out of doing the important if boring tasks of administration. His book was all in favour of ambition and simply putting all one’s effort single-mindedly into one’s own research. The world would be a better place overall if the incentives in academia did more to encourage team working, support and a fair sharing of the load of making a department run well, rather than rewarding the selfish.

 

[1] I suspect this interview will only be available in a non-English translation, from what I was told

Posted in careers, Marin Alsop, nobel prize, persistence, Sally Davies, Women in science | Leave a comment

Are You Confused?

Posted on 4 October 2026 by Athene Donald

Do you look at your life and wonder what you’re doing? Perhaps you’re too busy ever to step back and consider its balance: balance between work and your outside life, be it domestic or social; and/or balance between what you have to do and what you want to do. It can be scary in the small hours of the morning, when sleep is AWOL, to lie staring at the ceiling asking yourselves those questions. It is often easier just to follow your nose and assume that there is joy enough in your life so that there is no point contemplating disturbing that.

One of the problems about retirement – and personally I’m no fan of the status – is sometimes it is inevitable that you have to look back and wonder about all the twists and turns you consciously or unconsciously made, whether forced upon you or happily chosen. This past week, two occasions have forced such reflection on me. Often I have felt, and continue to feel, that my life does not amount to a coherent whole. So it was reassuring to pause a moment to note that there was a degree of coherence after all, in what I have chosen to do beyond the day job. I have always believed one should seize opportunities (within reason, which is very much weasel wording, as it begs the question of what is reasonable), but that can lead to a degree of randomness.

This week I had the honour of planting the 1000th tree on the Churchill College site. It is now 2 years since I stepped down as Master, but this ceremony was designed to honour my ten-year tenure. Being asked to say a few words I decided to say a little bit about what I have been doing since retirement, not least to stop everyone asking me that same question over lunch. Later in the week I talked at the University’s Technician Conference, which turned out to be a big affair with over 250 participants. My role was to talk about the importance of technical support throughout my career and what – in the spirit of the Technician Commitment – needs to be done to improve technicians’ visibility and career paths.

1000th tree a
Members of the Churchill College community at the planting of the 1000th tree (an oak) on site

Both these talks enabled me to talk about the skills pipeline – not least through my role as Chair of the Science Advisory Council (SAC) for the Department of Education, as well as more local initiatives; the new challenges devolution is likely to make for post-16 education and the changing expectations for post-14 education everywhere and what this may mean for the wider skills landscape. Skills is an easy word to toss around, but when facing up to the growing problem of NEETs (not in employment, education or training), what happens during a child’s early life at home and at school has to be considered in depth, not just what happens at 16 or 18. This is a fast-changing policy space, and one that will, for instance, be likely to impact on the technician pipeline in years to come.

So, let me return to my own retirement and whether one can ever, at any stage, end up with a coherent portfolio beyond the normal demands put upon an academic. As retirement approached, one of the pieces of advice I was given repeatedly, was not to accept the first role I was offered. In practice, I didn’t follow this. I applied for many roles which I didn’t get – rejection does not simply come in the early years of a career – before the Department of Education role turned up, one which I immediately accepted. Looking back, most of the unsuccessful applications would probably have suited me much less well, and could indeed have led to a much more piecemeal combination of roles. Maybe my uncertainty of how some of these roles fitted me individually contributed to my failures. But, I want to stress, failure is not something reserved for the young. It can hit you – and hit you hard – at any stage. It can divert you from where you thought you were going, but nevertheless it will not always be damaging.

The second point to make is, if someone tells you a role takes X amount of time, think hard whether this estimate is realistic. Many years ago, I was told by the outgoing chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee, the time commitment was four meetings a year. Maybe that was all they did, but I found myself spending more like a day a week – and quite often in London rather than remotely – on the role. In part this was because it was a time of significant change in education policy under Michael Gove, and frequent consultations came out requiring a response. Perhaps I should have limited the time I was prepared to give, but then I would have derived much less satisfaction.  That experience told me to treat the advertised SAC chair role as amounting to 4 meetings a year with suspicion. It didn’t worry me, as I was looking for something fulfilling in my retirement, and I have been proved right. The role involves a significant time commitment, with lots of new areas to mug up on (eg getting to grips with SEND and the reforms). Learning new things is, in my mind, always stimulating.

And growing out from that role I have become involved in other education- and skills-related activities. Of my ongoing activities, there is nothing that I can think of that couldn’t be badged under over that overarching umbrella. Yet I cannot claim that I achieved that by a ruthless focus on it, so much as the roles that I have sought and then been offered have all come together under that heading. Giving this past week’s talks highlighting these activities was therefore reassuring to me about coherence.

However…if you feel you’ve ended up with a random collection of tasks on top of your day job (or in retirement) I would reiterate the key point I made in my TEDx talk some years ago. It was not for nothing it was entitled ‘nothing is wasted’. You try something new. You may or may not enjoy it, but if not you will know (as I did about such talks) you never want to do such a thing again. Or you may learn something that comes in useful many years later. That was what I felt about the role chairing the Royal Society’s Education Committee, because knowing something about school education was certainly a help when I became Master of a Cambridge college although, rather obviously, that was neither the motivation nor even in my mind, when I accepted the chair role. And so it goes. In retirement, as in the rest of a career, it is perfectly possible to look back – be it in the small hours of the night or any other time – and think, yes, there is some coherence there after all.

 

Posted in careers, Churchill College, Department for Education, education, job applications, Technician Commitment | Leave a comment

In which it all happens again

Posted on 4 October 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

orange pumpkin

Autumnal end-game

This is the time of year when I am most closely reminded of the cycles of time and their steady acceleration.

I am steeped in all the evidence.

It is a beautiful autumnal morning, vivid green foliage almost vibrating against deep blue skies. Some trees already start to turn: the leaves of the apricots and pomegranates are going golden, while those of the serviceberries and sumacs are edged in scarlet.

Our bees begin to harvest ivy-flower nectar; our hens start laying more erratically. Afternoons darken early, while mornings and nights are cold, sending us to work in the wrong clothing, sweating and uncomfortable in midday heat. The aurora borealis comes into season (or rather it becomes dark enough to appreciate at our latitude, on rare occasions). You look up at the waning moon, rising orange over the horizon, and swear it was waxing only yesterday.

The roses throw out a last desperate show of blooms. Some crops wither and die – courgettes, beans and cucumbers – while others still yield: grapes, tomatoes, chillies, apples, pears. Pumpkins ripen, parsnips patiently await the first frosts. Richard decides whether he should make wine this year, after having racked more than 70 bottles last year; it’s been a good season for the vines, with all this hot dryness, but it’s also a lot of fuss.

After the 2025 mast year, the nuts are disappointing. We had very few cobnuts from our little forest out back. In local woods, the sweet chestnuts start to drop their ferociously spiky acid-green casings, but their contents are desiccated after months of little rain. Almost ceremoniously, we see that yet again, a squirrel has stolen the sole walnut on our young tree.

Another term has started, the quiet Bloomsbury campus transformed into a crowdscape of youthful enthusiasm. You dust off and update your lecture slides and struggle through masses of people on the hour to reach your next lecture. You have to queue ages for coffee in the student union. (Soon, many will start skipping classes, and the chaos will subside.)

And of course, the ultimate fiducial marker of the passing time: my son recently turned thirteen, and the top of his head now comes up to my nose. If the pace of time’s passing does not slow down, soon we will be moving all his things to university accommodation, and the whole blur of hands-on parenthood will be a memory.

All is happening as it always does, but each year, everything seems to stream by more quickly. The future is no longer an infinite vista, but a rapidly narrowing cone that only ever ends in a single point of blackness. I try not to dwell on this, but instead hold on to what matters and makes me happy: the beauty of the world, the comfort of family and friends, the enriching effects of music, literature and art, the meaningfulness of my scientific work, the education and mentoring of the next generation.

My life has already been so long and rich that anything else is a bonus.

Posted in academia, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Joshua, staring into the abyss, students, The ageing process, The profession of science | Leave a comment

What I Read In August and September

Posted on 30 September 2026 by Henry Gee

Notwithstanding inasmuch as which I have been working hard on the first draft of my next book, provisionally entitled The Only Way is Ethics: Moral Philosophy the Modern Way, I have managed to read, or listen to, a surprising number of books over the past two months. I cannot account for this given that my devotion to The Only Way Is Ethics has been little short of monomaniacal. The draft has all the leviathantine lineaments of a behemoth. I’m contracted to produce a 70,000 word text in March. I am just over halfway through and it’s clocked up more than 61,000. Clearly I am having too much fun and I’ll have to take out all the jokes.

Apart from that I have been much engaged with my employment (by day I am with the Submerged Log Company) having spent much of a long, sweltering summer not only trying to keep my own logs submerged but attending to the submersion of the logs of vacationing colleagues. So I’m amazed at the number of logs texts I’ve listened to read consumed submerged experienced. The books I have read in dead-tree form have been delightful. Apart from that I am a confirmed audiobook fan. I listen when I am washing the cats, ironing the hens and performing sundry other household chores. Audiobooks have also, in the past few months, substituted for the news on the BBC, which I loathe. The news, that is. Also, the BBC.

Alastair Roberts Halcyon Years This veteran SF writer, up there in my personal pantheon of modern space-operateers with the late and very sadly lamented Iain M. Banks, has lately evinced a fondness for noir pastiche (see Century Rain). In Halcyon Years, private dick Yuri Gagarin is contracted to investigate two murders, seemingly unconnected but for the fact that the victims are both young scions of rich and influential families. His client is a femme fatale straight from the Lauren Bacall school of Femme Fatality. Someone keeps trying to stop him, and no wonder — solving this crime will uncover the dirtiest of secrets about Halcyon itself. Because all this happens aboard a generation starship. Of course it does.

Rebecca Stott Dark Earth I discovered this after hearing the author talk about the joys of mud on the BBC, and as it was a novel set in England in the year 500 — the very darkest (and muddiest) of the dark ages and thus my favourite period of history (see How England Began, below) — I thought I’d give it a go. The plot concerns two sisters, daughters of a master swordsmith. When the smith dies the sisters — one witchy, the other whiny — are cast on their uppers and, to flee the brutal son of the local Saxon warlord, flee into the labyrinthine ruins of Londinium. There they become part of a multi-racial, all-female and occasionally sapphic commune, after which the book might as well have been set in the Peace Camp at Greenham Common. In this version of history, all the female characters are wonderful, if fickle and complex, and the men are uniformly and one-dimensionally horrible, except for the smith (who dies early on), and the one who is black. Oh dear. Now, next to nothing is known about that period of history, which gives writers license to write what they want. But it’s always a risk imposing modern morality on a substructure that has not the strength to bear it. Suffice it to say that it was a disappointment. Though perhaps my expectations were too high.

Kyle Harper The Last Animal This remorseless analysis by a professional historian exposes the wholly remarkable fact that a single species of animal has altered the ecosystem of an entire planet in a space of just a few centuries. It’s unputdownable, in the same way that one is transfixed by a road accident in the process of happening. Is this the sixth mass extinction? Not yet—there might still be time to turn the tide. In the meantime, will the last human to leave the denuded husk of planet Earth please turn off the lights? DISCLAIMER: I was sent a draft copy by the publisher.

Stella Rimington Breaking Cover In which our heroine MI5 agent Liz Carlyle battles Russian infiltration, while MI6 across the river hires a Communications Officer, the consequences of which are decidedly mixed.

E. M. Forster The Machine Stops/ The Celestial Omnibus Most people will associate E. M. Forster (1879-1970) with magic-lantern adaptations of his excursions into High Imperial Edwardiana such as Howard’s End, A Room With A View and A Passage To India. A surprise, then, to learn that he had a bash at what we’d nowadays call Science Fiction. The Machine Stops is a short story set in a world in which each person lives alone, each in their own cell, and communicates by video screen (now, take a step back and realise that this was published in 1928). All their needs are met by The Machine. Yes, at the end, it stops (no spoiler here – the clue is in the title). But on the way its capacity slowly degrades, during which the population becomes accustomed to mediocrity. Horribly, horribly prescient, both of the way we live now, and of what Cory Doctorow, with that characteristically American obsession with excrement, calls ‘enshittification‘. The other tale in this small Penguin Modern Classics edition (loaned to me by Mr C. F. of Cromer) is The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and I can’t remember much about it at all.

Stella Rimington The Moscow Sleepers In which our heroine MI5 agent Liz Carlyle enjoys her final adventure and rides off into the sunset. After nine of these adventures I have to say that Rimington knows how to spin a yarn, but it’s very lightweight compared with, say, John Le Carre, and I don’t feel I have got to know Liz Carlyle any more deeply than her LinkedIn profile might have told, had she had one.

Nicholas J. Higham How England Began Now, when I came across this in a bookshop I felt my prayers were answered – a serious, scholarly look at the period between 410, when the Roman legions left Britain; and 597, when Augustine rocked up at Canterbury. This offered a number of perspectives I hadn’t really considered. First, many Britons expected the Romans, once they’d left,  to come back again (they were always coming and going). Any sense of finality is only imposed by us, in retrospect. Although eastern England and lowland Scotland became more and more Saxon, the West Country remained fairly Romanized for some decades. Villas were maintained and mosaics laid well into the 5th Century, until enshittification set in, more by slow degradation than sudden calamity. That, and the lack of hard currency. Second, whereas the eastern end of the Empire gave on to many other countries, Britain, at the northwestern extremity, was seen as Ends of the Earth. Romans treated Britons as distinctly third class. Although some Emperors were crowned in Britain (Constantine, notably, at York), no native Briton is known to have risen to any rank in the Empire. This lack of integration may explain why the Celtic languages of Britain survived, and English is a Germanic language, rather than a Romance one: whereas the barbarians who conquered the rest of the Western Empire became Romanised in speech (French, Italian, Spanish and so on), losing any indigenous languages they might have had (except Basque). Third,  most treatments of this period concentrate on the archaeology, given that of literature there is almost nothing. So it’s interesting that Higham gets deeply into Gildas’ The Ruin of Britain (composed in the early- to mid- sixth century), showing from his example and close textual analysis that Gildas would have benefited from an elite, Roman education – which must therefore have been available, if only in places, for a century after the legions departed. An eye-opener.

David Mitchell Ghostwritten This novel is so awe-inspiringly accomplished that it’s hardly credible that this, by the writer who went on to write The Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks and others, was his very first novel. Like The Cloud Atlas, and to some extent The Bone Clocks, the novel is less one coherent tale than a series of very loosely connected stories. It starts from the point of view of the cultist who spread deadly nerve gas on the Tokyo underground; moves to a jazz-obsessed youth working in a Tokyo record store; and thence to locations as varied as Hong Kong, London, St Petersburg, rural China and Mongolia, and ranging throughout the twentieth century. One tale features a disembodied head-hopping spirit in search of another of its own kind. I’m still not entirely sure what it’s meant to be about, but it was a hell of a ride. Paperback loaned to me by Mr C. F. of Cromer, though in the end I listened to the audiobook version.

Eric Idle Idle In Provence When writer, musician and comedian Idle found a remote house in the Var in 1971, it was love at first sight, even though the house lacked vehicular access, roof, floor, walls, electricity, water, sewerage or house. It did, however, have a view, and over the next several decades Idle turned it from a ‘shack’ into a ‘shackeau’ (though he didn’t do it all on his own). Although intended as a quiet retreat from the Running-Around Knees-Bend Advancing Behaviour that made his fame and fortune, most of Idle’s friends came to enjoy the view as well, so the story of the Shack is interlaced with pen-portraits of Idle’s famous friends including George Harrison, David Bowie and Robin Williams. But it’s only shits and giggles until someone giggles and shits, and the humour is jagged with sadness, even tragedy. The Shackeau narrowly misses destruction by wildfire; Idle goes through a painful divorce; friends die; and — and this was so poignant I had to stop reading for a while — Idle is up to his neck directing Monty Python’s final live show while his wife, in LA, is trying to get their manic-depressive daughter sectioned so she doesn’t harm herself. Insightful, funny, sad, thought-provoking. Well, I liked it. DISCLAIMER: The author kindly had his publisher send me a copy.

Wilkie Collins The Moonstone Collins (1824-1889) was a near-contemporary, occasional collaborator and longtime friend of Charles Dickens (1812-1870). He also led a thoroughly unconventional life and was addicted to opium. The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1859-1860) are the best-known of his many novels, stories and plays, some of which were regarded as ‘sensation’ stories at the time — that is, they are full of high adventure, serpentine plots, oriental exoticism and touches of the gothic and the macabre. The Moonstone, however, is an early example of what we would now call a detective story. It concerns the theft of a precious diamond (the titular moonstone) given to a young lady on her 18th birthday. But the diamond had been looted by British troops from a temple in India, and its guardians strive to reclaim it. It is written as a series of accounts, each by a different person involved in the case, from the genial servant Gabriel Betteridge and the urbane detective Sergeant Cuff to the pamphleteer and poor relation Miss Clack, allowing for many changes of tone and an element of unreliable narration. I suspect that the rather sad, opium-addicted medical assistant Ezra Jennings is a cipher for Collins himself. The Moonstone is as sexist and racist as one would expect given its date, so pearls will be clutched by the sanctimonious and self-selected arbiters of what we are obliged to call ‘taste’. This shouldn’t provide any more than momentary irritation for those less encumbered with over-tightened neck bolts when reading this overstuffed, melodramatic and thoroughly enjoyable farrago.

Robert Harris Agrippa Now, this is how you write a historical novel. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was a real-life Roman general, close friend and confidant of the man who would become the Emperor Augustus, and a prolific builder. Agrippa was a man of action rather than words, so the wily Augustus took the credit for Agrippa’s many achievements, almost writing him out of history. Robert Harris, whose playground is the Roman Empire (his books include Pompeii, a thriller set around the eruption of Vesuvius in 79; and a trilogy of the life of Cicero) has taken this opportunity to write Agrippa’s (fictional) deathbed memoir. And it’s nothing short of wonderful. The audiobook is even more wonderful having been read by Simon Russell Beale, and has a bonus interview between him and the author. Utterly splendid.

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It Ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It)

Posted on 29 September 2026 by rpg

RAF Fairford has been in the news recently.

I’m reminded of a personal anecdote involving RAF Fairford, and, seeing as I’ve just spent a couple of hours rebuilding an old website in order to find said story, I’m going to repeat it here for posterity.

Back in, oh, 1997, I went to the Fairford International Air Tatoo at RAF, um, Fairford in deepest Gloucestershire, with my friend, who I’m going to call Geoff, because that’s his name. We parked his Volvo (‘Harvey’) some way away from the show, and walked across a few fields to avoid the horrendous traffic queues along the Lechlade and Whelsford roads. It was a steamingly hot July day, and we had a great time. The B2 Spirit landed on English soil for the first time ever, at least publicly. There was lots of noise and smoke, a Tiger Meet, an F4 Phantom,  and did I mention the noise and smell of burnt JP8? Towards the end of the day, waiting for the Red Arrows to appear, we wandered around the statics.

And here we found a B52, surrounded by a guard wire. The B52 is a large aeroplane, with eight engines and wide, flappy wings. Both wingtips have outrigger wheels to prevent the wingtips from slamming into the ground during taxiing, landing or take-off. The wings are that wide and flappy. Importantly, the wingtips protruded over the guard wire, and on one wing the outrigger wheel was a good couple of feet off the ground, on the public side of the fence.

The USAF guards/RAF snowdrops were a little way off, so I said to Geoff, “Watch this,” and reached up to the wingtip. I grabbed hold of it, and pulled it down. Then I pushed it, and pulled it down again. On the next push up the entire wing had started to flap, like it was the wing of some giant predatory bird. At this point, Geoff grabbed my shoulder, said “Stop that!” in a somewhat startled and frightened voice, and started walking briskly away.

“Like I’m going to break it?” I wondered, but followed him at a half trot. When I caught up we slowed a bit: First rule of doing something slightly risky is ‘never run way; it only draws attention’.

And that is how I started terrorizing the USAF.

Postscript. I was checking my memory of the date, and came across this website. Interestingly, the author went both days (Geoff and I only managed the Saturday), and has this to say (my emphasis) about the Sunday.:

So everyone starts milling around the B-1 and B-52, with the crews chatting to everyone, pointing out things of interest and generally having a perfectly good time. And then the RAF police arrive, consider that having members of the public wandering around the B-52 isn’t a good idea, and so take up position under each wing where they can politely tell us all to keep back. Not sure why they thought the B-52 needed their protection when they weren’t the slightest bit concerned about the B-1, but obviously they had their orders from someone…

Ahem.

Post-postscript. I mentioned this to my sister a little while afterwards. She’d been on duty that day and said yeah, the Sceptics had their tits in a tangle over a security incident.

Post-post-postscript. I had the absolute delight of seeing Geoff and his lovely wife Beth again at Pawn 2’s wedding back in August this year. It must have been more than 20 years since I’ve seen them. That made me very happy.

Posted in aviation, B-52, Don't try this at home, Geoff, Me, Nonsense, RAF Fairford, terrorism, trouble | Comments Off on It Ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It)