In Transition

Readers may think I’ve given up on my blog, but the reality is more prosaic: as my ten-year stint as Master of Churchill College comes to an end (at the end of September), I have been moving out of the rather wonderful and spacious Lodge provided by the College for the Master and back to our newly refurbished and significantly smaller house of more than 40 years. Despite the house being extended during the refurbishment, there still seems not to be enough space for the life-time’s accumulated detritus of a couple of academics. Maybe others have long since thrown away, not only the lecture notes for the first course they ever gave, but also their own undergraduate notes, but not me. I am always amazed by the neatness – not to mention legibility – of the notes I took at pace during my own student days, but I have definitely subscribed to the view you never know when they will come in useful. Just occasionally (for instance, when setting exam questions) they have – although that is not a task I will have to face up to in the future.

I have spent an inordinate amount of what one might term ‘creative’ time, time that could have been spent writing this blog for instance, trying to work out where furniture might fit in rooms that aren’t quite the same size as they used to be due to large amounts of additional insulation being introduced (we’ve come off gas and are now running an air-source heat pump, which really requires extensive wall insulation to be effective). Further complications arise from the fact that, during our ten-year absence more furniture has been acquired. This dates from when I emptied my late mother’s house and brought back some ancient, familiar, solid-if-battered items which fitted neatly into the Lodge. Sadly, they fit less neatly into our house, and that only after endless drawing and redrawing of room layouts. I have to offer most sincere thanks to the hard-working team who managed to get my grandmother’s lovely old desk (probably more correctly termed a bureau) up two flights of twisting stairs to my new office location in a loft conversion. It was no mean feat, but they accomplished it with great good humour, if also a lot of sweat.

During this move into the next, and completely uncharted part of my life that amounts to full retirement, I have spent many, many hours going through my belongings and throwing out what I can. Clearly this wasn’t enough to get the volume down to the point needed, and the process will need to continue, although perhaps a little more slowly now the move is actually accomplished. I do feel as if my headspace has been full of moving logistics for months. Various items have still to find a home, and several rooms contain an extraordinary number of boxed-up books for which we still lack bookshelf space. These may definitely be first world problems, but problems they certainly are.

I have learned over the past month or two that my strength is no longer that of a young person, nor is my stamina. But that doesn’t mean I want to sink permanently into an armchair by the fire. I will definitely be wanting to use, at least in some part-time capacity, the different skills I believe I have acquired during my career. So, I am on the look-out for challenging opportunities in areas where I hope I have gained expertise, both as a professional scientist and as a leader of an institution. Mentally I have been trying to work out what I enjoy and what I can do but with less enthusiasm. Everyone who has been through a similar process has warned me not to take on roles just for the sake of it, but to be sure anything I do take on genuinely aligns with my interests and strengths.

In the meantime, the net effect of this transition has meant that the creative time and mental bandwidth that I used to put towards writing this blog regularly have not been available to me recently. Time will tell whether, now that phase is mercifully over, I revert to writing as frequently as I used to. It was always a task I found satisfying and, in some ways, liberating, as I moved away from the formal prose of paper-writing to something a bit more personal and free-form; where I could choose my topic and approach, building on whatever matters of interest (and sometimes dismay) crossed my path.

Those of you who read this frequently in the past (and I note I am approaching the 14^th anniversary of starting this blog next week) will know that one topic I often used to write about was the issue of women in science. Having written a book on the subject published last year, it would be nice to think that everything that needs to be said about this I have said. Sadly, that is clearly not so, and the issues have not gone away (see this year’s A Level results, for instance, which show how the proportion of students taking A Level Physics who are girls remains stubbornly low). More may yet need saying here, although I doubt I will be writing another book on the subject. Nevertheless, I think in the back of my mind is the feeling that, on the assumption I keep writing, I will broaden the topics I write about. Watch this space to see how this pans out….