Dodgy Encounters with a Fragile Piece of Equipment

Posted on August 31, 2022 by Athene Donald

Doing a PhD is hard work, stressful and uncertain. Even with the most understanding of supervisors, the clearest goals and routes to get there, there will be hiccoughs and worse en route to getting the letters after your name. And, of course, for many, things will be tougher than ideal circumstances might imply, with lack of clarity over the objectives, equipment that does not work and peers who rub you up the wrong way (or worse).

My PhD is a long, long time ago. In speeches, for instance to the College’s graduate students, I point out that mistakes and disasters during the course of research are only to be expected and certainly need not be terminal. Just because things go wrong is no indicator the student is inevitably not cut out for research.  The particular mistake I made that I recall most vividly was repeatedly breaking a delicate piece of equipment (the tilting cartridge for a Siemens 102 transmission electron microscope, aka a TEM, if you’re really interested). It could be – and was – fixed by the skilled workshop technician who, strangely, was the father of the technician in my own group 20 years later. Perfecting such technical skills was obviously something that ran in the family, along with a great desire to help the novice researcher find their feet.

Talking about breaking this piece of kit, time after time, is something that feels worth spelling out to help those setting out on their careers that failure doesn’t mean they should walk away from their PhD. I’m not afraid to admit I was completely ham-fisted, something I had always suspected. It was not by accident that my final undergraduate year was dedicated to theoretical  and not experimental physics; I thought I knew my limitations, but then decided a theoretical PhD was even more beyond me than tangling with equipment.

This all comes back to me because I have been sorting through the letters I wrote to my mother during those turbulent months in the second term of my PhD, spelling out just how difficult I was finding things (retrieved from her house after her death). They contain a level of detail I had forgotten. I knew I had left Cambridge for a couple of weeks, retiring to my mother’s house and feeling most uncertain whether I should continue with research. I came to the decision ‘I was not a quitter’, quite explicitly, and made my way back to Cambridge to try again. But, what I had forgotten was it wasn’t all plain sailing from then on. I appear to have found it really hard even to set foot in the department: the first day I popped in for just a few minutes, that being all I could face. I obviously – and this is what I’d forgotten – had to screw my courage up to breaking point to get going again. It seems I slowly built up the confidence to spend a whole day in the department, and ultimately to start doing experiments again.

Whether or when, during the course of my PhD, I ever used that particular tilting stage again I cannot be sure. I do recollect that much of my work was done on a different make of TEM, and the central point of the project was to use a brand-new microscope, a scanning transmission electron microscope (or STEM), which arrived early on in my time, being only the second such instrument in the UK. I also know that the results that formed the meat of the thesis (from the STEM experiments) were almost certainly incorrectly interpreted, and that the part of my research that has stood the test of time (still cited just a couple of months ago) was a completely accidental finding. Serendipity is a wonderful thing.

The tilting cartridge for the Siemens instrument reappeared in my life in a much more positive way during my postdoc years in the States, although again being ham-fisted was relevant. By the time I had started my second postdoc, and moved from an unsatisfactory attempt studying metals to (amorphous) polymers, I was confident enough to tackle the Siemens again, with the same sort of delicate cartridge. However…I didn’t break it, but I managed to fail to zero the angle of tilt, thereby observing the craze (a precursor to a crack in a material like polystyrene) not at normal incidence. The tip of the craze was therefore splayed out in a way that hadn’t been observed before. Eureka – it supported a theory about what the craze tip would look like, as my wonderful supervisor Ed Kramer instantly spotted. Once I’d satisfactorily proved I could reproduce the results, obtain stereoscopic pairs of images (i.e. two images with a small and controlled angle of tilt between them that allowed a 3D reconstruction under an appropriate viewer), a paper was rapidly penned. This was within about 6-8 weeks of starting working with Ed. My life was transformed. Another piece of accidental mayhem, it couldn’t even be called serendipity on my part though perhaps it was on Ed’s, but this time with a happy ending.

The rest of my career, as they say, is history. It could so easily have ended after my first encounter with that fragile tilting cartridge; I might have gone off and become a teacher or worked in industry, who knows. In which case, there would be no blog, no strings of papers or letters after my name. So much is chance, and one should never forget it. I was lucky. Far too many people get discouraged, lost or break things (like me) and move away, perhaps completely away from science. Research is full of luck and serendipity. I have always tried to tell my students that. Shortly I will have the pleasure of meeting up with many of them, and collaborators more generally, at a conference to mark my retirement, albeit two years late due to the pandemic. I’m very much looking forward to seeing once more many of the people who have made so much difference to my professional life.

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Celebrations are in Order

Posted on August 21, 2022 by Athene Donald

A Level results are out, and students are now either celebrating, or sitting in misery having had their worst fears confirmed. Cambridge colleges, such as my own, will be assessing whether or not we’ve hit our multiple targets – by subject, by the various widening participation metrics and, of course, by gender. When I arrived in the College, the gender balance was not good. As a College whose statutes require 70% of its students and fellows to be in the STEM disciplines (broadly defined), in line with Churchill’s own wishes to found a college resembling MIT, that had perhaps not seemed so surprising to some. But, to me, the figure of 28% women that the 2015 intake of students comprised, seemed frankly not good enough.  For the last couple of years and now, as I understand (things aren’t quite finalised yet) once more this year, we have managed a much healthier, near equal balance of numbers.

That is as it should be, but this academic year about to start marks a different and significant milestone in our history regarding women: the 50th anniversary of their first admission to the College. Churchill was the first of the historically all-male colleges (in either Oxford or Cambridge) to vote to admit women. 1972 (the year after my own arrival in Cambridge, at Girton) saw it and two other colleges, Clare and Kings, admit limited numbers. I believe in Churchill the number was around 30, out of an overall entering cohort of around 135.  Those women may have felt ‘special’, but they certainly also felt outnumbered (made worse by the fact the two years above them would of course have been purely male).

I met some of these pioneers a month or so back when the 1972 matriculands were back to celebrate their 50th anniversary. I didn’t get a chance to quiz them in great detail about their experiences, although I certainly hope that some will be recording their oral histories of those times for the record. Nevertheless, it was clear they had been very conscious at the time of the lack of numbers of women around them, and were delighted to hear that the College was of a very different composition now.

Anybody who has found themselves in a tiny minority in a group will be aware there is likely to be a slight associated discomfort. Be it a man in a knitting group or a slimmers’ meeting (and I have met men who’ve been in both situations) or a woman in an engineering or physics lecture, feeling ‘other’ is hard to avoid. Whether or not there is any intention to exclude, it can end up happening anyhow simply due to discussion topics that are of interest to the majority not necessarily being of interest to you. I think you need at least a third of the minority gender for this effect to cease to be obvious.

I have felt the difference an increase in the number of women in a group makes in my role as ‘head of house’ (the collective noun for college heads). When I started as Master in 2014, around a third were women, but I think we all felt slightly uncomfortable and discouraged from expressing opinions when we were gathered together by the atmosphere around, and sometimes pointed comments were made when we tried. In formal meetings none of us (male or female) was addressed by name but as ‘the Master of Churchill College’ etc, which I found unfriendly and unnecessarily stiff. For a newcomer it all felt somewhat alien. Over the years since, more women have come in. Somehow things have become much more relaxed and women’s words are now heard as much as men’s. It feels as if this is down to the increasing numbers of us – currently it’s pretty close to 50:50 ­– but there is no control experiment, so the change could simply arise from the specific individuals involved. After all, the overall balance has shifted away from their being primarily academics, and that might also be relevant.

For those first women in the College, how hard did they find it to fit in? In lecture rooms and practical classes, there had been women present for years, coming from the three all-women’s colleges, but only in tiny proportions. I remember thinking I just had to get on with it if I was the only woman in the room during my student years. With 3 colleges each admitting, say, 30 students in 1972, that represented only about a 1% increase in the total number in the University, possibly nudging it over 10% for the first time. Women were still a rarity.

The sad thing is, though, that in a subject like Physics, the numbers may have increased from a mere 10% in my day to the giddy heights of, perhaps, 25% in a good year in Cambridge now that all colleges are mixed (excluding Newnham and Murray Edwards, which remain female-only). But our schools still manage not to encourage numbers of girls in equal numbers to boys when it comes to physics A level (and the same is true in reverse for English literature, the subject which saw the biggest overall drop in numbers in this year’s A Levels). As long as teachers believe, as the headteacher Katherine Birbalsingh appears to have done as she presented to the Commons Select Committee, that girls ‘just don’t like hard maths’ (or any other outdated stereotype), ensuring a College like mine, with its heavy STEM emphasis, has gender parity will always be a challenge.

Churchill is proud of its tradition as being a college ahead of the curve on matters such as this, and aims to be as inclusive as it can be. Although probably every college by now has its eyes firmly fixed on widening participation, we have a much longer tradition of admitting large numbers of state school students, right from its foundation. I am looking forward to our celebrations this year of the first admission of women, knowing so many of them have gone on to do spectacular things in the wider world.

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Joining the Dots Around Skills

Posted on August 10, 2022 by Athene Donald

You don’t have to read beyond the first few lines of the summary of last week’s House of Lords’ Science and Technology Select Committee Report to recognize they are sceptical about the Government’s direction of travel when it comes to research and innovation. Indeed, the title rather gives the game away: ‘“Science and technology superpower”: more than a slogan?’ With a long-standing commitment to raising spending in the UK to research and development to 2.4% of GDP, the report spells out that ‘Despite welcome steps and laudable rhetoric, we are concerned that the Government is not on course to meet its ambitions.’ (They don’t comment on the fact that GDP might not be as healthy as pre-Brexit, pre-Covid predictions might have suggested, so that 2.4% in absolute terms may likewise represent a smaller figure than anticipated, while inflation surges so that anyhow the cash goes less far.)

They have now put out a call for evidence around people and skills in STEM, recognizing in the course of their earlier enquiry that achieving ‘superpower’ status requires an appropriate supply of the right people in the right place. Some of these people will be in academia, of course, but many will not. The usual rule of thumb is that there needs to be twice as much private investment in research, as public – and the power of the government to influence that is limited. Particularly if, as the report spells out, ‘industry does not yet feel engaged with the strategy process.’ One might ask, what strategy? There are plenty of warm words and aspirations, few explicit actions, levers or incentives in evidence in (prime) ministerial words. Indeed, currently we don’t even have a Minister for any or all of Science, Innovation and Research, unless you count the Secretary of State himself.

Getting the skills issue right is crucial in order to ensure we move in the right direction for innovation and productivity, including as we move towards net zero.  The current soaring temperatures highlight just how important it is we (globally as well as within the UK) should be focussing on this latter, but rhetoric again falls short of action in this space. The Office for Science and Technology (OSTS) has identified ‘the sustainable environment [including net zero]’ as one of its four priority areas, but specific targets of the aims under this, as well as the other three headings, are sadly lacking. How will it be achieved if the appropriate mix of skilled personnel are not available, including those who can translate novel research and ideas into practical solutions, followed by scale-up? Diffusion of information requires the presence of adequate absorptive capacity both in individual firms and across a given region, a topic I have written about before in the wake of this Spring’s report from the Royal Society on Regional absorptive capacity: the skills dimension. Bright ideas alone will not increase productivity or contribute to the wider economy if they cannot be delivered at scale.

The levelling up agenda (if the next Prime Minister remains serious about this phrase) means it isn’t sufficient to have lots of graduates moving to London for big salaries. Indeed, salary is a very imperfect measure of educational outcome for many reasons, and won’t have any immediate relationship to local needs or job opportunities. (It is certainly not a reason for pitting arts and humanities against the STEM disciplines, as too often attempted). One of the key concerns is that workers with sub-degree skills and qualifications are less likely to be willing to move away from their home area than graduates.  They are also in short supply, as highlighted in a 2018 report for the Gatsby Foundation by Simon Field, which showed the UK had the lowest number of them (in terms of numbers per thousand in the population) relative to comparator nations. So, if there is to be a high-quality clothing factory to be opened or expanded in Alfreton in Derbyshire (to take a recent example written up in the media), where will workers skilled in logistics capable of designing the requisite supply chains come from or alternatively will they be trained locally? These individuals don’t need to be STEM graduates, but they certainly need to be adequately competent in maths and IT.

Opportunities in ‘left behind’ regions are crucial if they are instead going to be ‘moving ahead’ regions, but the lack of coherent strategy in government thinking, highlighted in the Lords’ report around research and innovation, is just as visible in the skills agenda and needs to be swiftly addressed. To take another promising recent media story, directly relevant to the green economy, are the plans by Scottish Power to build a 100MW green hydrogen plant at Felixstowe, to provide fuel for the expanding fleet of lorries transporting goods from the docks (Felixstowe has freeport status and is due to expand very significantly) and machinery on site. The port itself is already struggling to recruit workers with the right set of skills, a problem that can only be exacerbated – in the absence of a better supply of people – by the creation of a new plant on this scale competing for the same sorts of people with technical expertise. Yet such a plant, aiming to be able to fuel 1300 trucks when at capacity, is sorely needed to reduce emissions from lorries on our roads (or trains in principle).

Felixstowe is literally at the end of the line (from Ipswich) and has some extremely deprived areas. The creation of new green jobs in the area offers massive potential if the relevant dots are joined up. Unfortunately, BEIS and DfE seem determined to keep their distance and not work constructively together. Despite ‘skills’ being a word tossed around liberally by politicians, delivering the education and training that is needed in schools, FE colleges and on-the-job in order to provide a workforce which can deliver and is recruited from the local area (not imported from other areas which may already be thriving), doesn’t appear to be considered holistically by the two departments. ‘Skills’ has to be more than just another slogan which isn’t thought through or invested in. FE colleges can only be effective it they are properly funded, as well as well-connected to local enterprises. The response to the Augar Review and the Levelling Up white paper were both lacking in robust plans on this front.

None of this issue is hard to understand, but the way politics is tied to soundbites and silo mentalities means that the key players seem to be unwilling or unable to join the dots between skills, innovation and industrial policy as needed to deliver a revived and greener economy, both locally and nationally, which is (to use another oft-used if now apparently outdated phrase) ‘built back better’.

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To Travel or Not to Travel?

Posted on July 27, 2022 by Athene Donald

Now the academic year has come to an end, it is possible to start to reflect on the year past and what next year might, and I emphasise might, look like. This year has not been as full of Covid-stresses as the last couple, thank goodness, but the feeling of burn out across academia still feels palpable, and my own feelings are no exception. I have no confidence the UK has seen the back of the pandemic, but at least for now it seems most people are willing to relax their vigilance about infection. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other bugs around, as a recent prostrating stomach upset reminded me. The ONS has been reporting extremely large numbers of Covid infections, although it is possible this wave has now peaked (but I still wear a mask in shops and on public transport).

It is starting to be possible to imagine a ‘normal’ existence again. The trouble is, knowing what the new normal is, or what one wants it to be. It isn’t obvious to me how to balance travelling to meetings in person, to get together with people with whom one has been working with for much of the last two years via Zoom, versus the advantages of staying stuck at the desk staring endlessly into a screen and ostensibly getting more work done. However, there is nothing like a heatwave to remind us (if not all politicians around the world) that spending carbon on travel should be carefully ‘costed’, quite apart from time taken, even if it’s only a train to London, which (for me) only adds up to less than an hour on the actual train.

How much work is productively done in the margins of a meeting, over a coffee break for instance, when one can quietly try out new ideas or strategies, find allies to demolish (figuratively) the nay-sayers or merely let off steam about long-winded committee members? The reality is these sideline conversation can be extremely helpful, although obviously not always. I think the two years without most of these conversations being feasible has definitely not helped community dynamics, at least in some communities. That is a clear argument for it being worth travelling to get to that meeting, to meet people ‘in the flesh’ and to have these less organised conversations.

Counter to that is the effort it takes to get to a meeting on the other side of the country for an hour or two’s meeting. Not so long ago I had to give a presentation to a committee (of which I was not a member), with a time slot of 45 minutes allotted for both presentation and discussion. Being used to Zoom, I chose not to go up to London (not that far away in reality, albeit there’s additional travel time at each end to add in in terms of one’s diary), and then regretted it. After my talk, the single panel on my screen devoted to the eight or so people who were physically present in the meeting room meant they were but mere pinpricks on my screen (there were others on Zoom who were much bigger!). I couldn’t see who was who at all clearly – no handy nametag to glance at underneath their Zoom faces – and audio wasn’t entirely brilliant, even though the room was meant to be well-adapted to handle this. Nor could I judge how my presentation was received as I gave it, since all I could really see were my own slides. In hindsight, I wish I’d gone.

In quick succession, and in the identical room, I attended another meeting through the screen, but this time there were fewer committee members in the room, and I knew who they were, as a committee member myself. The chair was in the room and managed to keep a good grasp of who had their hands raised both electronically and physically, and the discussion felt very engaged and constructive. And soon after that, at a third meeting of another committee (same room), I was in the room along with a handful of others, but the chair was present virtually, as were a number of other committee members. This, to my mind, was the least satisfactory hybrid arrangement of all, because the chair – in just the same way as I had found when I had done my own presentation at the first meeting – simply couldn’t see who was in the room, nor notice if they’d put a hand up, whereas they could easily spot the Zoom hands and bring them into the debate.

For some meetings, hybrid works absolutely fine, but my experience with these three variants in quick succession tells me that there are many situations in which they are far from ideal. I think that tells me that, as far as possible, I will attempt to attend meetings in person unless the meeting is set up to be entirely Zoom and not the mix and match of hybrid. Zoom has been a wonderful interim measure during the dark pandemic days. For some meeting, with few people and those ones you know well, they will continue to serve well, but for tricky decision-making meetings, for meetings with more present than fit easily on a single screen (say eight people), I think not.

This of course only deals with the question of ‘local’ meetings. For those who are planning that trip to a conference in some exotic location, the calculations will be entirely different. I do hope people are working out their carbon budgets carefully, given the way the world is warming. Surely, we should all be carefully assessing what could be extremely enjoyable, but could as well be done remotely from a scientific point of view? That is, assuming conference organisers make this viable. ECRs would, of course, derive significant benefit from mixing with the big names in their field, building contacts and learning from experienced voices. However, since some of these (as was happening pre-pandemic often enough) might just drop in briefly for their own talk and, perhaps, a dinner with friends, it may be that invited speakers should be encouraged to give their presentations remotely since in reality they are not making themselves available to newcomers. I know some of my colleagues would take grave exception to such a recommendation, but we can’t go on ignoring the melting world.

The trouble with this solution is that it leaves the ECRs talking to themselves – no bad thing of course; and it can be brilliant for them – and unable to penetrate senior networks. I don’t know what the answer to this. I am sure it is a question we should be thinking about carefully before we blithely return to jet-setting conferences, from which the benefits are sometimes unclear.

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Marking UKRI’s scorecard

Posted on July 21, 2022 by Athene Donald

UKRI is still a relatively young organization, trying to find its way in a funding landscape that has been impacted by Brexit, a pandemic and now soaring inflation eating away at the value of every grant or PhD stipend. Nevertheless, it has had four years to try and work out its raison d’être and how it is more than the sum of its nine constituent parts. The Grant Review looking into its operation and which has just reported, does not seem convinced it has managed to do this, reflecting that

‘Most of the evidence I have received supports the original case and objectives for UKRI, resulting from the 2015 Nurse Review – a single cohesive UKRI incorporating nine previously separate organisations. My review notes that UKRI has partially met the objectives that were set at its formation but that gaps remain.’

Furthermore, it identifies ambiguity about how this multi-pronged organization is operating, with some confusion as to the nature of the entity.

‘In carrying out this review we found that UKRI responsibilities are currently perceived to be held either by i) one or more councils ii) jointly by all councils or iii) centrally. It is the view of this review that ii) and iii) should be seen to be one and the same and are described as such. Today they are not.’

This seems to be a serious failing. What is UKRI? If it continues to act as a nine-legged beast, how can the research community derive any benefit from the synergies that I believe were originally envisaged in the 2014 Nurse Review, which gave rise to its creation? When will it work out its identity beyond being a conglomeration?

The Grant Review covers a lot of ground, around governance and systems. Here I will just pick out a few issues close to my own heart. Others will no doubt highlight different aspects.

When Paul Nurse wrote his Review he was clear about many potential benefits, two of which were that such an over-arching organization:

  • would be able to oversee the redistribution of money between research councils as areas for research evolved, in place of the essentially static distribution of the research funding cake that had been in place for decades, and
  • would have the ability to fund interdisciplinary research appropriately, without proposals getting batted between individual councils and never finding a true home.

One can argue that the first of these has been hampered by the lack of long-term funds being committed by the government, but the recent Spending Review means such redistribution can now be done. On the second point, the UKRI’s CEO Ottoline Leyser has herself admitted (when speaking to the Lords Science and Technology Committee) they haven’t done a great job about this. At one point it looked as if the Strategic Priorities Fund would handle this strand of research, with the 2018 Strategic Prospectus stating that the fund would:

  • Drive an increase in high-quality multi- and inter-disciplinary research and innovation by encouraging and funding work in areas which previously may have struggled to find a home.
  • Ensure that UKRI’s investment links up effectively with Government departments’ research priorities and opportunities, encouraging funding for research that crosses boundaries between UKRI councils and government departments.
  • Ensure the system is able to respond to strategic priorities and opportunities.

That Fund is now being wound up, without it really having achieved these high-level objectives, although undoubtedly some interesting programmes have been funded. However, it has not been the panacea to multi- or inter-disciplinary research I, for one, had certainly hoped to see. As the Grant Review laments ‘the potential for interdisciplinary research has not been fully realised’.

However, more optimistically, it also states that

‘The 2021 SR settlement gave UKRI greater flexibility in their approach to funding multi and interdisciplinary research …. New cross-cutting funds will now be allocated through a shared pool with decisions on prioritisation and spend made by UKRI. The multi-year settlement should allow UKRI to embed this new approach …., for example there are plans for councils to pool funding for talent development and interdisciplinary research over the SR period.’

So, I will have to live in hope that one day, in the not-too-distant future, the long-standing problems around interdisciplinary research will finally be cracked. (I should make clear, I do not mean grand challenge type research which probably works well, but the vital underpinning research that can spawn new, perhaps unexpected directions and approaches).

The Grant Review report has a lot to say about efficiency, highlighting the surprising growth in numbers of staff employed in the central Corporate Hub, often with apparent duplication of function with those sitting in individual research councils. A 55% increase in staff at the centre was noted. One of the issues that has long concerned me personally lies in communications. This was an issue I raised with Mark Walport, when he was still at the helm. If my memory serves me right, I was told there were 137 staff across the whole organization involved in communication, perhaps part of this central hub swelling. Yet, I would suggest, communication has not been the organisation’s strong point. Think of how they handled the ODA cuts; or the sorry ResearchFish saga in which UKRI seems to have encouraged ‘appropriate action’ against academics who got fed up with the clunky ResearchFish impact-tracking process.

Another extraordinary episode, reported yesterday and this time involving a NERC-funded DTP, suggests an unhelpful attitude towards the cost of living crisis, with PhD students being advised they could find spare-time jobs to supplement their stipends as babysitters or Avon consultants. Although this cannot be laid directly at UKRI’s door, when I asked Ottoline herself about the problems research students face back in March, she batted the question away, stating – no doubt entirely correctly if unsympathetically – that UKRI had a fixed pot of money to dole out. Since then, they have had plenty of time to work out a strategy, not to mention a comms strategy, that does not leave students reduced to selling make-up to make ends meet.

If there really are 137 communication experts across the organization, perhaps they need additional training in how to communicate in a way that builds trust, rather than destroys it. The Grant Review does not particularly focus on this aspect of the Corporate Hub, looking more at IT issues and non-standardisation of forms and procedures, but it does note a high turnover of staff. (To be fair, this seems true in many organisations post-Covid, so it may not reflect a general unhappiness with working conditions.)

The final aspect from the Review I’d like to touch on relates to how UKRI fits into the wider ecosystem, and in particular with its masters in Whitehall. This seems to be another area of ambiguity, with the decision-making process being unwieldy and slow. Of course, the blame for this cannot be laid solely, perhaps even mostly, at UKRI’s door, but it certainly leads to problems for the community, and – again – strong messaging from the UKRI centre could reassure that there is pushback and plain speaking in the interactions. That ESRC is still lacking an Executive Chair is a particularly stark example of how the interplay with Government is failing. As the Grant Review says more generally.

‘BEIS should ensure that UKRI has the stability and autonomy it needs to effectively plan and deliver. This will require setting out a clearer line of responsibility between BEIS and UKRI on strategy and delivery, as well as the criteria used to assess performance.’

Paul Nurse may have believed a benign Whitehall would work well with a strong pan-research council organization, and that ministerial interventions would not get in its way. Sadly, that does not seem to be quite how it has panned out in practice.

Across the board, there are clearly areas for improvement at UKRI noted by David Grant. The community will hope the report has impact, as they say, at HQ.

[It will not have escaped notice that my blog has been silent for some time. The reasons for this are many and various, perhaps best summed up as post-pandemic-induced writer’s block, but of course that doesn’t really give much of an explanation. Suffice to say, it is not a deliberate cessation but equally, just because I am tempted back to writing a post by the publication of the Grant Review, I cannot promise to return to my erstwhile regularity of writing.]

 

 

 

 

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