Did Humphry Davy suffer from Impostor Syndrome?

Posted on November 25, 2021 by Athene Donald

When I think of Humphry Davy, I think of a scientist, someone who became a star attraction during the early days of the Royal Institution and inventor of the eponymous Davy Lamp (although at the time others accused him of plagiarising earlier designs). Of course, the word scientist did not exist in his day and, as Jan Golinski’s book The Experimental Self makes clear, Davy had a range of personae during his lifetime which reflected different aspects of himself and which he played up to different extents at different periods. (Undoubtedly he also thought of himself as a poet and someone who knew a thing or two about fishing.)

Don’t we all have such multiple personae? Golinski indicates how, in Davy’s lifetime, the concept of a ‘man of science’ was only just emerging. Part philosopher, part ‘enthusiast’ – which was verging on a term of abuse at that time, as overdoing things a bit and potentially dangerously radical – part discoverer (and also, part dandy and part traveller to complete Golinski’s list, although these are less relevant to a scientist). A fair degree of issues of class crept in too when people contemporaneously passed judgement on Davy: he came from a poor family in Cornwall but made a very advantageous marriage to a rich widow. (Incidentally, on Radio 3 a local Cornish group sang an amusing folksong about him as I was writing this post.)

The various epithets that might be tossed in the direction of a scientist these days might be different, although philosopher/philosophical might still be directed at some of us, but the fact that we exhibit different personae in different groupings is as true today as then. Take impostor and impostor syndrome. Many of us suffer from this, but many of us equally know how to cover it up and may come across as confident, even overly so by way of compensation, so that the underlying condition is hidden from view. I was amused to hear a mutual (scientific) male friend described to me by a woman as typically male-confident, when he was someone I knew perfectly well hid his own insecurities under an effective mask. Don’t we all? (Or nearly all.) This woman herself I’m sure would come across to the external world – and she is very much visible to the world through her writing and interviews – as confident, but she knew internally how different she was. The same mistaken belief, no doubt, could be applied to me.

When I wrote about impostor syndrome in the early days of this blog, implying women suffered from it more than men, one of the people who publicly responded over Twitter to my post, suggesting that men too, himself included, were very prone to it, was David Spiegelhalter. The pandemic has been full of his writings and pronouncements about the statistics of death, vaccination etc, all so beautifully clearly set out. He seems on the surface to be confident and willing to speak up in extremely public fora, despite his admission to feeling a fraud, an impostor. Equally he is willing to admit to his failures. I was amused by a recent tweet of his

 

indicating how he’d failed to unmute during a live interview – something else we are all liable to do in different situations. I did it very obviously in a meeting with the last Minister of Science, Amanda Solloway; it’s always the stress of a high-profile moment when these things go wrong. It would seem to be a natural tendency to feel a fraud, but then to put on a different external persona; those people you think are arrogant may indeed be quaking inside. I would suspect that Davy himself suffered from impostor syndrome, and hence he ‘invented’ these different personae to mask what he no doubt felt to be inadequacy, not least because of his humble roots.

David Spiegelhalter is a colleague of mine, on the Fellowship at Churchill College (not that I knew he’d become a colleague back in 2012 when I wrote that particular blogpost; I didn’t join until 2014).  But the College perhaps has surprisingly strong links to Davy himself, or at least to a current AHRC-funded project on the Davy Notebooks, on whose Advisory Board I sit. This is a fascinating project aimed at transcribing all his notebooks via Zooniverse, a crowd-sourcing platform (or citizen science if you’d prefer). They are, incidentally, always looking for new people to join in the transcription project, no previous experience required!

I learned a lot of what I know about Humphry Davy from the wonderful Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, an alumnus and Honorary Fellow of Churchill (again long before I joined the College).  He too is on the Advisory Board. I have written previously about the past and present meanings of ‘impact’ in science as discussed in an earlier book by Jan Golinski, a Professor in the History Department at the University of New Hampshire who held a postdoctoral fellowship at the College; he is also on the Advisory Board. The fourth member of the Board associated with Churchill is Alice Jenkins, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Glasgow who is an alumna.  For a college so heavily associated with STEM subjects I find this grouping of the four of us on an AHRC-funded project fascinating. I hope it illustrates that, despite being also the College of CP Snow (he was a Founding Fellow) we absolutely don’t believe in the two cultures being distinct and never speaking to each other. I am proud of that.

 

 

 

 

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Skills, FE and Levelling Up

Posted on November 17, 2021 by Athene Donald

As we await various key Government papers – specifically the long-awaited response to the Augar Report and the Levelling Up White paper – the news is full of labour shortages. Whereas delivering some of Augar’s recommendations about funding for FE Colleges may not do much for the number of HGV drivers on the road, it may make a difference in the medium term to some of the smaller companies that sit somewhere on the low productivity tail. Much is frequently made of the contribution of high tech IT developments to the economy; the discussion of the future of ARM is not unimportant here. Nevertheless, the significance of employees in much lower tech companies who need to have the skills and confidence to use a spreadsheet to facilitate ‘just in time’ logistics, or to update costings if they have to raise pay for employees due to the loss of EU workers, is no small matter. This is where ensuring that FE Colleges are funded well enough to deliver that level of skill to a wider swathe of the population is so important. And, alongside that, that as the Lifelong Learning Loan Entitlement comes into play (unfortunately not till 2025), workers will have the financial means, if not security, necessary to return to education to gain the skills they need which either may not have been available to them when they were 16, or been obvious to them then that they would be useful.

The evidence that increased R+D intensity drives up economic prosperity and GDP seems broadly accepted now, as well as that that public sector funding crowds in private sector investment. Thus, the increase in money in the budget for research and innovation funding is a huge positive. Much of this money will provide a welcome fillip to the university sector, where there will be many people ready to take advantage of it. Backing up the researchers will be a team of technicians, whose input is often crucial in sustaining and delivering a project, particularly when they provide long-term stability and knowhow as research students and postdocs come and go. However, their own career progression is often forgotten, an issue the current TALENT Commission is examining in depth (a project I am pleased to be associated with), along with a survey of their experiences, with a report due to be published in the New Year.

But what about technical support in industry, broadly defined. By which I mean, industry not just in high tech areas, but other areas such as more basic manufacturing, logistics or public health-related, for instance? This is where upskilling the workforce comes into play as being a vital component. Here I would include IT skills as part of this technical support, not so much as a stand-alone component, but as a necessary contributor to overall skills. If you are entering data, let alone analysing it, these skills are vital.

A Royal Society report from earlier this year highlighted a worrying trend of this part of the workforce ageing and not being replaced by youngsters entering the pipeline. Choices children make at 14 or 16 probably play into this, and they are not necessarily getting access to good careers advice to help them make those choices. But, additionally, they may not find the courses they need to put their aspirations into action if the local FE College is unable to provide them. This comes right back to what is going to be delivered – not least in terms of funding – and to whom, when the Augar response is finally published.

The Skills for Jobs White Paper, published at the start of the year, suggests the Government is aware of the issues, with excellent overarching goals, of which three are particular pertinent to my arguments here:

  • Investing in higher-level technical qualifications that provide a valuable alternative to a university degree;
  • Making sure people can access training and learning flexibly throughout their lives and are well-informed about what is on offer through great careers support; and
  • Supporting excellent teaching in further education.

As the second of these bullet points shows, it is most certainly not just for school-leavers that thought must be given. The decline in opportunities for adults to upskill or reskill is an indictment of our society. The introduction of (initially) £9000 fees for university courses has had a massive impact on part-time adult learners at universities. The position over ELQs (Equivalent or Lower-level Qualifications), making it impossible to retrain if you already have a qualification at or above the level you are wanting to retrain at, has recently come back into sharp focus with recent comments by Chris Skidmore and Jo Johnson, both former HE Ministers, both calling for a rethink on this and associated entitlement to loans.

However, rhetoric and practice may be two very different things in this space and, despite the warm and encouraging noises, policy isn’t fixing the problems yet. The threat to defund BTECs, deferred but not removed, in favour of T Levels remains a concern when considering the education of those whose tastes may lie in less academic subjects. (BTECs have a good track record of facilitating entry to university for those who haven’t taken A Levels.) However good the concept of T Levels may be, it would seem that not enough thought has been put into how courses are going to provide the obligatory 45 days of placements in industry for each student. If this is the only route to qualifications post-16 other than A Levels, that’s a huge number of placements required and no guarantee of successfully finding them. By killing off BTECs, at speed, without resolving this issue, it is hard to see these vocational routes will succeed in their stated aims.

So we are in a position where there appears to be lots of good intent but without the wherewithal to achieve them. I would identify four issues in particular where words and action don’t completely align:

  1. Plans to offer loans to adults wanting to upskill, but who may have severe and utterly understandable reservations about taking on the requisite level of debt imposed by such loans;
  2. ‘Great career advice’ at every stage should be a no-brainer, but it is something that has not shown much sign of appearing and would need substantial additional funding;
  3. New vocational training routes, that require plenty of on-the-job training, but no guarantee the placements can be found;
  4. Nobody could object to the idea of ‘Excellent teaching in FE’, but without a response to Augar about funding this is unlikely to be able to materialise.

Levelling up touches all of this because, where the jobs are, where the people with the right skills are, and where the FE Colleges to deliver are may be non-intersecting sets and, without appropriate joining up of these key dots improved regional economies are unlikely to be transformed in the way that levelling up might be taken to mean by local populations. The stagnation of the UK’s productivity since the financial crash of 2008 is well-documented and undoubtedly has had a major impact on the reality of lives lived in ‘left behind’ regions. Investment in research and innovation is a crucial part of national recovery and regeneration, but money alone without people with the right skills is not sufficient. Current thinking about how lifelong learning will be delivered in ways that can actually make a difference still seems to be a bit foggy. One can only hope the Augar response and the Levelling Up White Paper finally part the clouds.

 

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Vaccines, Emotion and the Status of Women

Posted on October 17, 2021 by Athene Donald

I’ve been catching up with some reading this weekend: a year’s worth of (hard copy) THE issues, picked up now I’m finally able to get back into my department, and Vaxxers – sub-titled The Inside Story of the Oxford Astrazeneca vaccine and the Race against the Virus. These cover the same period, but from rather different viewpoints. Take the period April-June in the THE articles, so many focussing on Covid-related topics: the rapid adoption of online teaching, the ‘Zoomiverse’, the dawning appreciation of the potential damage to careers, particularly for early career researchers and those with caring responsibilities, plus the likelihood that a researcher’s productivity will plummet and the need to be kind to oneself and others when this happens.

With hindsight, perhaps we were too optimistic that this situation wouldn’t last long and that within a few weeks, which then stretched into months, all would return to normal. Of course, it hasn’t. To different degrees around the world, life is still strange, worrying and, for many, Covid-related health issues remain. Carers’ lives are still upended and the lasting impact on careers unclear (but unlikely to be positive). Although for a lot of us, by this point some meetings are now held in person, many are still not conducted remotely. What ‘normal’ will eventually look like is not yet clear.

But long before Covid hit the UK, the Oxford vaccine team were already moving into top gear, as soon as stories of a strange illness began to surface in Wuhan. Sarah Gilbert – the one who has a Barbie doll in her likeness – and Churchill College alumna Cath Green, had read the China tea leaves and realised it was time to direct their existing vaccine platform to target this specific virus to give themselves – and the world – a head start in developing tools to weaken (though not yet neutralise) the virus’ impact. While most of us were adapting to working from home, this pair and their teams were flat out in their labs, working out all the necessary steps to produce the vaccine in record time. As the recipient of two doses of the Astra Zeneca vaccine, I can only be immensely grateful for their dedication, intellectual prowess, a firm grip on logistics of an incredibly complex chain of steps plus their ultimate achievements.

Their book is a gripping account, not just of these steps in some detail, explained in simple terms for the non-experts in their field, but also the emotional roller coaster of their work, the sleepless nights and the nerve-wracking interactions with the media as well as funders (there was no guarantee of success; funders are risk-averse and not used to working at the speed this situation demanded, but the money did come through). This all had to be followed by the anxious wait to see if the vaccine succeeded in Phase 3 trials (which, as we now know, it did). Scientists rarely speak up about some of these issues that can lurk under the public face of their work or the written word of journal publications. Rarely do they have such an intense media spotlight shone on them, week after week, as this pair did. Nor are the stakes often quite so high. It will be interesting to see if the BioNTech scientists, with their alternative route for successful vaccine development, choose to write their own story to complement Vaxxers.

As two immensely successful female scientists, I am also interested in what they have to say about the subject of emotional content. Their family lives intrude to some extent (both Green and Gilbert are parents, the latter of triplets, although none of their children are toddlers constantly interrupting zoom calls or needing much help with home schooling), so the huge problems many mothers have had to face while working from home did not beset them. Nevertheless, making time for family in the midst of handling the massive task they faced was by no means trivial. But it is more the commentary on the simple fact that they are female that intrigues me, inserted in passing in their wider narrative. Most of what I learned came from Green referring to Gilbert (they each wrote their own chapters from their own perspectives, more or less alternately throughout the book) rather than a first-hand account by the latter. Maybe this was a deliberate strategy.

For instance, Green quotes Gilbert as saying ‘something like’

“This is 2020. Why are we discussing women scientists? I’m not a woman scientist, I’m a scientist and more than half my colleagues are women and we do the job.”

The frustration at being seen as a woman first and a scientist second is palpable. That feeling will resonate with many, myself included. I have written previously about how the media referred to Dorothy Hodgkin when she won the Nobel Prize (“Oxford housewife wins Nobel“, according to the Daily Mail of the day.) Similar sorts of out-of-date comments were, perhaps unsurprisingly and as quoted by Green, used in describing members of the team: serious redhead mother to triplets (describing Gilbert), not your stereotypical Oxford boffin (Green) and Irish mother of two for Teresa (Tess) Lambe, a third team member. As Green remarks wryly, one of the men on the team has ‘never been described as ‘male scientist Andy Pollard’ nor, presumably, has his parental status been laid bare in the media.

Nevertheless, the balancing act between being annoyed by the gender issue or motherhood constantly being raised and using the opportunity to excite and inspire future generations of young women by being a visible role model is a delicate one. Not many scientists get to feature in Vogue (nor is it likely to have been an aspiration to do so for many).  A decade ago an article in The Lancet stated that

‘It’s impossible to be 100% sure, but Molly Stevens is in all likelihood the only person ever to have graced the hallowed pages of both The Lancet and Vogue.’

Whether or not that was true in 2012, Sarah Gilbert has undoubtedly joined her in appearing in that rare pairing of journals. As Green writes in Vaxxers

‘One of the more surreal moments of this year was Sarah’s high fashion photoshoot in the basement of the Jenner Institute. Sarah had already been to a London studio for a shoot for Vogue’s ’25 Women Shaping 2020’ earlier in the year. She said she thought it would be fun [we don’t get told if it was!] and not something she was likely to be asked to do ever again. But not long after Vogue she was approached by Harper’s Bazaar…she describes their shoot…. as ‘all slightly ridiculous’.’

Nevertheless, as Green makes clear, her view is that this is important and not ridiculous. Again, this resonates with me. When I won the L’Oreal/UNESCO 2009 Laureate for Europe for Women in Science I endured numerous photoshoots and interviews. I never actually saw, I’m relieved to say, the huge blown-up photographs of me that were plastered both on the side of L’Oreal’s Hammersmith headquarters or in Charles de Gaulle Airport, though I have a copy of the issue of Le Monde which had a full page devoted to my photo. However disconcerting for the individual, these photos convey an important message for the casual passer-by. Women do do science. Everyone should feel confident encouraging their daughters and other young women of their acquaintance to pursue science if that is their passion. If girls don’t see the faces of women scientists in their textbooks (and they don’t, as a recent American Chemical Society report made clear), they need to see them elsewhere in their daily lives. However uncomfortable I felt then, as Molly Stevens may have felt appearing in the pages of Vogue and presumably Gilbert did this year in all the publicity, it isn’t a bad – let alone vain – thing to do. It is, unfortunately, still necessary.

2020 was a weird year, as both Vaxxers and all those back issues of the THE make clear. Women do science, they do it at the top of the game, and yet too many are held back by caring responsibilities, by attitudes and by unconscious bias still operating. 2021 is little better as a year, but the battles must continue to ensure both that excellent science gets done and that the opportunity to do so is open to all.

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The Problems of Measurement

Posted on October 12, 2021 by Athene Donald

How should we measure what is a good outcome from a university education? As David Willetts puts it in his latest report published through the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) ‘The Treasury cast their beady eye over the evidence and worry universities are not delivering the earnings boost which they used to’, demonstrating one sort of answer to the question. Another recent publication, this time from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), considers social mobility and the lure of London using earnings as the framing of a good outcome for the individual. Is it all about money? Should it be all about the money? It seems to me a very narrow figure of merit for either society or the graduate.  Furthermore, I believe the IFS analysis is oversimplifying the interesting data they have analysed.

The IFS study explores the mobility of those with and without degrees, considered by socio-economic status and ethnic origin, but it is framed as mobility – and this is geographical mobility that is being analysed, not social mobility – as necessarily desirable, as if anyone who doesn’t move has ‘failed’, although that is not their explicit phrasing. I worry about this framing, relevant though it may be to the levelling-up agenda. For instance,

“Places with high average earnings attract graduates through migration. Graduates who grew up in places with low average earnings are more likely to move away.”

They note that non-graduates are less likely to move to London and other large cities than graduates.  Inevitably, these patterns of behaviour also lead to their final conclusion that ‘patterns of mobility exacerbate regional inequality in skills’, so that there is a ‘brain drain from the North and coastal areas’. By framing what is a good outcome of a university education in terms of money, the implicit messaging being given to graduates is ‘it’s all about the cash’. This is a travesty of what a university education should be about. The idea of public good, as opposed to personal gain, cannot be seen in that framing, but becomes relevant when trying to determine what might be done for the areas (Grimsby and Wisbech are pulled out as examples) where the current loss of graduates is marked, and social deprivation is highly visible.

Let us take the specific example of a Muslim woman who wants to stay close to her family and teach in a primary school: she will neither be a high earner nor have demonstrated an appetite for mobility, but she will be of huge benefit to her community, and an excellent role model for younger women. Such a woman should be highly valued, not put down as a statistic of someone who didn’t aspire to geographical mobility. (I wonder how the likely increasing trend to working from home, possibly home being located far distant from the location of the employer, will skew future analyses.) Interestingly, the IFS findings show that Asian women who do move earn less than those who stay put (in contrast to every other group), and that young adults of Indian and Pakistani heritage are significantly less likely to have moved by age 27 than their white peers of otherwise similar backgrounds.

Income can be measured.  Value to a local community is much harder to quantify, but it is still value. It is obvious that high paying jobs are often in metropolitan areas which will therefore act as an attractor to many, and if income is used as the only figure of merit, then the metropolitan areas look ‘good’. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that the well-heeled parts of the country are the ones to which graduates may aspire to move, which will definitely exacerbate inequality.

However, here as in so many instances, metrics should be used with care. Willetts highlights the dangers of using, as a proposed criterion for the OfS (Office for Students), graduate outcomes a mere fifteen months after graduation as a means to determine university performance, a time when many (if not most) graduates are still finding their feet in their careers. Fifteen months is far too soon, as he makes clear, and it still relies on using earnings as the figure of merit, this time to score university courses. As so many commentators have pointed out, such a metric will necessarily imply that many courses are inherently seen as low-value; not necessarily the STEM courses I typically consider on this blog, but courses in music and the arts, for instance, and those wishing to become nurses, work in the charity sector (a popular choice for Cambridge graduates I understand) or who aspire to be that primary school teacher I mentioned above.

Willetts is a great believer in universities of all complexions and wishes to see less distinction made between academic and vocational pathways, as well as less between those institutions providing either. He has, it would seem, little time for his alma mater of Oxford, or indeed mine of Cambridge, accusing them of snobbishness, in large part because they don’t teach non-academic courses (while, a little confusingly, simultaneously pointing out that engineering and law are vocational, courses very much taught here). He highlights the potential benefits to the local economy if new universities were to open up in towns from Wigan to Peterborough. Such benefits would pertain at least as much to workers in low-paid jobs as to the graduates themselves. However, the IFS study would imply such graduates would, possibly should, then migrate to the bright lights of London or Manchester, removing the possible gains to the community.

What about Oldham? I highlight this town, sitting within Greater Manchester, because it is in the process of carrying out an economic review, led by Alun Francis, the head of the local Further Education college, Oldham College. (Willetts sees FE Colleges as a great undervalued resource in the education landscape.) What can a run-down old mill town do to improve its economic performance, pushing up median wages from their current miserably low level, and to keep those young people who get qualifications at level 4 and above in the area to boost the economy? As long as the public discourse is framed in ‘geographical mobility is necessarily good’ – to paraphrase the IFS study – or graduate earnings are the only measure of the value of further and higher education, as the Department for Education appears to want OfS to think about the matter, we will not get anything approaching levelling up, because those who can, will migrate to the city lights, and those who advise them will encourage them to do so.

Apologies for early readers of this post, who will have seen that, for some reason, the text appeared multiple times. Thank you to those who drew this to my attention!

 

 

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University Traditions

Posted on September 20, 2021 by Athene Donald

This is the time of year when students are in the process of returning to their many campuses (or going for the first time as Freshers). Cambridge University term starts later than many, and as a result few students are yet back. Consequently, the University has been cramming in, in the diary but not in numbers attending, ceremonies in the Senate House to confer degrees and to celebrate those who took their degrees in absentia last summer. The occasions are not what they would once have been – no proud parents or friends in the Senate House, no clasping of the hands while the degree is conferred – but I hope they still feel like a special occasion. (I wrote about the form of my University’s ceremonies, as indeed other graduation events in which I’ve participated in different guises, in a relatively early post on this blog).

The pandemic has changed everything, across University occasions and well beyond the Senate House. A few people still seem intent on shaking hands in social situations – and I’ve been giving them a metaphorical cold shoulder – but I wonder whether the Cambridge tradition of clasping hands in the Senate House will ever return, although I certainly hope the presence of families will. There are so many aspects of life, traditional customs which may seem totally inappropriate in the future. The Continental way of hugging – be that with two or three pecks on the cheek, I was always confused which to expect from whom – which increasingly seemed to be replacing the cool British handshake, even between academics, seems as unsuitable in these pandemic days as that handshake. I don’t think the bumping of elbows is very likely to catch on, more appropriate though it may currently seem.

I am very conscious of the approaching start of the Cambridge term, with its formal sequence of events, ceremonial and pedagogical, but also looking back, almost with horror, as I realise the 50th anniversary of my own matriculation is fast approaching. While Churchill finesses what new procedure we will follow – not all freshers coming into the Master’s Lodge one after the other and shaking my hand and then my husband’s, while a couple of sentences are exchanged at close range – I try to remember what my own matriculation was like. No formal dinner, it would seem. I’ve found the letter I wrote to my mother all those years ago, and it is not very enthusiastic:

‘I may say the matriculation ceremony was a farce (I didn’t even wear a gown for it – tatty old jeans instead!). It consisted of filing into the praelector’s office and signing our name in two places – one swearing to obey the rules, regulations, ordinances [which I couldn’t spell, getting confused with ordnances] etc, and the other the college register. No pomp and ceremony and not even a glass of port.’

Was I disappointed or relieved? I’m not sure. There is no doubt that too much ceremony can overwhelm freshers who aren’t used to that sort of formality and are convinced they will get things wrong. The matriculation dinner so many colleges – including ours – do have, may simply feel like an opportunity to demonstrate their ignorance by using the wrong knife or putting water in the wine glass. I always feel sorry for those who are placed next to me, in case that makes their anxiousness soar yet higher, although I’ve had some amazing conversations with students who have done phenomenally enterprising things before they left school, or simply thought deeply about the issues that matter to them and which they are keen to discuss.

Nevertheless, myself as a fresher had little positive to say in this same letter about ‘the Mistress’s reception’ (I was at Girton College, then for women only, and which has always had a Mistress).

‘Tonight was the mistress’s reception which was another farce. A sweet looking old woman, who gave the impression of being unused to making speeches and it didn’t really look as if she was going to try to make personal contact with everyone – so we made off.’

Oh dear. Is that how people regard me, sweet and unused to giving speeches? Checking Wikipedia, I see that the said Mistress was rather younger than I am currently so ‘old’ feels, to my present self, very harsh. It is undoubtedly wholesome for me to look back at what a young student may feel about the strange events that greet them when they first arrive in this venerable University. I should remember this! I still have to write this year’s speech for the Fresher’s dinner, but I’ve been getting plenty of practice at giving speeches to other cohorts of students and alumni, so I hope I don’t resemble that ‘old’ Mistress of mine.

It is intriguing to note that, in my next letter home, I refer to being exceedingly exhausted:

‘I have just returned from playing squash for an hour at Churchill. Made a real fool of myself but at least I know better what it entails.’

As far as I recall, that was the only time I set foot in Churchill during the six years I was in Cambridge completing my first and second degrees. I was pleased to note that my opponent from that day came up to me at an alumni event a few years back, remarking (with pride, perhaps?) that he had been the one to introduce me to Churchill. We had not, to my memory, spoken from that squash day to the alumni event; he clearly had not been impressed by my squash-playing skills either. My defence is that it was my first time.

We may all be hoping for an academic year that is closer to the ‘normal’ we used to know. However, I think we also understand that all kinds of differences will assail us, ranging from what incoming students will know, how confident they are and how they settle into a life that is still going to be punctuated by mask-wearing, one-way systems in buildings and – on top of the pandemic fall out – limited food choices in our catering facilities as much as in the supermarkets. It will be a long time before we know what the new normal looks like, and what habits and customs will never return.

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