Research Culture, Fairness and Transparency

Posted on September 20, 2020 by Athene Donald

A week after the Science and University Ministers announced with respect to chartermarks such as Athena Swan

“We have therefore asked the OfS, UKRI and NIHR to ensure that they place no weight upon the presence or absence of such markers or scheme memberships in any of their regulatory or funding activities”

as I discussed in my last blogpost, there seems uncertainty what that means in practice. Research Professional quoted a UKRI spokesperson as saying

“UKRI has made clear that embedding equality, diversity and inclusion in all our processes is critical to supporting our commitments to address barriers and inequalities, and drive transparency and accountability…. In that context, UKRI will continue to utilise recognition awards where they contribute to the achievement of our aims.”

Does that mean they will give a toss about Athena Swan awards, the Race Equality Chartermark and other sector kitemarks? I have no idea.

The Athena Swan process in its recent form undoubtedly needs substantive change and it would appear that the reforms the Athena Swan Review Group recommended are being implemented, after an initially rather lukewarm response from AdvanceHE. The Review Group (of which I was a member) published an open letter this week, in response to the ministers’ announcements, stating

“Our report was published in March this year. It included 41 recommendations which together we believe would deliver a streamlined application system, a robust and transparent assessment process and an effective mode of governance. …. Initially, there were warm words of welcome from Advance HE but it soon became evident there was no real appetite to drive the change needed. We have continued to make our case behind the scenes and we now have greater confidence that the process of implementation is about to begin…..Is it too late? Does Athena SWAN no longer have a place or a value? We sincerely hope not. The pandemic has shone a cruel light on gender equality across the sector, as it has on other equality, diversity and inclusion matters. It is women who have borne the brunt of lockdown and the additional burdens it has brought of caring and domestic chores; not surprisingly, the impact on academic outcomes is already being felt. So let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Meanwhile UKRI is also exploring the need for real cultural change in our universities through the medium of a blogpost from Ottoline Leyser, the rather new CEO. I have known Ottoline for some years both as a fellow professor in Cambridge and around diversity work: for instance, she took over from me as Chair of the Athena Forum back in 2013. I know she is a passionate believer in equality and wants to see a research culture that is supportive not toxic. Her appointment should mean UKRI can act decisively to improve the working environment for all, and reconsider what is rewarded – and encourage universities to do the same. As she puts it in her blogpost

“‘A central question for the community then is how to create a system that values difference? What does this really mean for our day to day interactions, and what does it mean for our definitions of excellence?”

But, so far, she gives no hint of how she would answer the question. It is reasonable that she wants to carry the community with her, but I hope she will soon be setting out what concrete steps she believes need to be taken by UKRI itself, even if set out as a consultation. There is no doubt that currently UKRI itself is seen as part of the problem in the landscape. For instance, I know how long it took those who were challenging UKRI to release detailed breakdowns of grant funding by different characteristics to get any movement, and how the challenge was taken to the Science and Technology Select Committee in an attempt to get hold of the data. When the figures were finally released this summer, they did not make for pretty reading on various fronts, with the headline figures demonstrating

“The median award value for female awardees is approximately 15% less than the median award values of males (£336,000 vs £395,000). Similarly, the median award value for ethnic minority awardees is approximately 8% less than that of white awardees (£353,000 vs. £383,000).”

I am sure that Jennifer Rubin, as their Executive Champion for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Karen Salt, who is deputy chair of the ED+I Committee, will be working hard to see how things can be improved.

Yet my Twitter feed tells me there are ongoing problems, not least with regard to transparency and equality, and ones that Ottoline did not address in her blog. In what follows I can only base my reflections on what others have written and not first-hand knowledge of the specific situation. The challenge that I am seeing comes from 10 black women who have written an open letter to UKRI concerning a call for funding relating to the impact of Covid on the BAME community. The letter states that none of the six awarded grants went to a team with a black academic lead, despite the relevance of the call to this community; and that

“UKRI confirmed that no equality data was collected on this call; and that one member of the awards assessment panel is co-investigator on three of the six successfully awarded studies.”

They are calling for three specific short-term steps:

  1. Make transparent and public the panellists and selection criteria involved in forthcoming research call assessment
  2. Consistently collect equality data without exception
  3. Remove any panellist from the call assessment process if they are also associated with applications in that specific call.

These do indeed look fundamental and important. I would particularly like to pick up the last point, on which I have quite strong views. I have written before about the rigour of the ERC processes when it comes to making funding decisions. Ottoline will be very familiar with these, as she has served on their panels; I know having encountered her on one during one of my drop-in visits (as a Scientific Council Member) on panel meetings in Brussels. The rigour extends to the fact the referee pool is drawn from around the world and not, almost exclusively, from the relatively small and potential close-knit community of a single country, as UKRI panels often are. Furthermore, you may not serve on a panel and submit – or be involved with – a grant application to the same round. Thus, it would be impossible for a member of an awarding panel to be a co-investigator, as seems to have happened in this recent case highlighted in the open letter I mention.

UKRI will defend themselves, and probably already have done so, that the panel member would have been sent out of the room during any discussion of a grant in which they were involved. However, bias is a funny thing, in whatever unconscious way it appears, so let me tell a cautionary tale as to why I think that being out of the room as opposed to ‘being out of the call’, as the ERC put it and require, is inadequate.

This story derives from my time as a rather young researcher, serving on what was a committee of BBSRC’s predecessor AFRC (the Agriculture and Food Research Council). It will be seen therefore to have been a long time ago, but it stays in my mind because of the lessons to be learned. We had a firm and decisive chair, and a scientifically diverse committee because it was a wide-ranging committee (I was there covering food physics, but there was much that was fundamental biology and animal health). For one grant the applicant was a panel member who, of course, left the room. It was not a well-written grant and the raw scores would have seen it fall well below the cut-off. At which point the chair, a friend and I suspect collaborator of the PI, said something along the lines of

“well, we all know that Dr X will do a good job, and what they meant to write so we should bump the scores up.”

This was a shocking comment, and I’d like to think there was a stunned silence although I don’t recall. You cannot rewrite one person’s grant because you know and approve of them, and judge everyone else’s simply on what is on the paper in front of you. The chair, on this occasion, was stepping right out of line – and was called out on it (not, I’m afraid to say, by me; I felt far too junior to do such a thing at the time). Did the chair know how biased they were being? I have no idea.

The key point is, because the panellist was well known to us all and was a good panellist, there was a real danger that that approval-as-panellist or as colleague could have overwhelmed the objective rating. It is hard to avoid being biased. It is hard enough, within the UK community, not to know many of the people applying and being swayed by how you’ve interacted in the past – for good or ill – which is why I believe UKRI should be using a much broader range of panellists and referees from all round the world (possibly easier in the current zoom-driven world), just as the ERC does. But, discussions of conflicts-of-interest need to be taken very seriously and need to be declared. It may be hard to say that you once had a furious argument that has never been resolved with the PI whose grant you’ve just been sent to referee, but it is nonsense to say you can’t judge someone from your university whom you’ve never meet, but can judge a grant from someone who you have a close professional relationship with elsewhere (even if not formally a collaboration). And there should be no opportunity to serve on a panel to which you are submitting grants, either as PI or co-I. Such a conflict of interest should mean you are instantly removed from serving on the assessment panel.

I hope as Ottoline moves to set UKRI on the path to facilitating a better culture for all researchers, she will be able to oversee a transition to greater transparency and fairness, including addressing the concerns of the black women who have written to her.

 

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We’ve Come a Long Way But…..

Posted on September 14, 2020 by Athene Donald

When Rita Colwell was born in 1934, neither Oxford nor Cambridge Universities had yet appointed a female professor in any discipline; Dorothy Garrod, the first woman to hold such a chair (the Disney Chair of Archaeology at Cambridge), was not appointed until 1939. Colwell herself went on to a distinguished career in environmental microbiology – she was particularly important in unravelling part of the life cycle of cholera, especially the nature of its dormancy – which contained many ‘firsts’ of her own. Notably, she was the first woman to be Director of the National Science Foundation (from 1998-2004). In her recent book A Lab of One’s Own: One Woman’s Personal Journey through Sexism in Science  she details her career and all the hurdles she had to face before reaching such a position of eminence.

It made for sobering reading. It is good to be reminded of just how far we, collectively, have come, even if the playing field remains less than even on multiple fronts. The book reflects the author’s nationality (American) and discipline, so that in some ways it did not totally resonate with my own experience of the world, starting out 20 years later. It nevertheless included numerous fairly horrendous episodes, some of which I could certainly relate to. For instance, Colwell reports another woman remarking

“If two women stood at an elevator, a man would come by and say ‘What are you two ladies plotting?’”

That took me back to 1992 when we had the ‘grand opening’ of the new Tabor Laboratory, our new lab for colloid research at the Cavendish, which was officially opened by Edward Leigh. He was then a junior minister whose ability to do a competent job of unveiling a plaque was thrown into question, as the photograph shows.
edward leigh 92However, that laugh aside, the relevant comment I remember being made by a male colleague catching myself talking to Anne Campbell, then our local MP, and the female editor (whose name I can’t recall) of the local newspaper  was

“Having a hen party then?”

It struck me then, as it strikes me now when the Colwell anecdote brought it back to mind, just how inappropriate such a remark was. Clearly the man – who I got on with perfectly well in general – just couldn’t abide three senior women chatting over a sandwich. Did he feel threatened?

Some anecdotes, mercifully, are beyond my personal knowledge. Such as the one in the book told by Nancy Hopkins

“Before I could rise and shake hands, he had zoomed across the room, stood behind me, put his hands on my breasts, and said ‘What are you working on?”

The man was Francis Crick. The year was 1964. Perhaps the indignity closest to this that I’ve suffered was at a reception for the University at St James’ Palace, when a senior professor marched up to me, said

“I do like kissing games”

and proceeded to act that out. Why didn’t I slap him? I guess because I was too surprised and it hardly seemed appropriate to make a fuss in such august surroundings. After all, nice girls don’t make a fuss. That would have been in 2009, when the University was celebrating its 800th anniversary – 800 years during which women had, of course, only been allowed to be full members for around 60 years (Garrod would not have been allowed to call herself formally a BA, even though a professor, as women could only gain ‘titular’ BAs before 1948).

There are still many men out there who assault women to greater or lesser degrees, and many of them will never be called out. Many women will be deterred from pursuing their dreams because men – not all men of course, but some – will harass and ridicule women and overlook them when it comes to career opportunities. My experience tells me you don’t have to be junior to be harassed; you can work out how old I was in 2009. We continue to need firm action to ensure the talented women are just as likely to progress as the talented men. Because of this I am worried by the announcement last week by the Science and University Ministers, Amanda Solloway and Michelle Donelan respectively, that – as part of the ‘bonfire of bureaucracy’ – Athena Swan awards (and other similar accreditation kitemarks) will no longer be valued by UKRI in forming judgements about departments, nor a requirement for those institutions seeking NIHR funding.  As they say

“We have therefore asked the OfS, UKRI and NIHR to ensure that they place no weight upon the presence or absence of such markers or scheme memberships in any of their regulatory or funding activities.”

As a member of the Athena Swan Review Group I am deeply disappointed that our work over the past 18 months looks like it may be wasted. As the Review Group said right at the outset of our Report

“… it is clear that the Charter process has become increasingly burdensome in terms of the amount of time and internal capacity required to comply with the needs of the application process. Given the multiple pressures on staff time, the Athena SWAN Charter must reflect a more proportionate use of time and resources so that universities and research institutes are able to make the commitments needed to improve outcomes around gender inequality for staff and students and meet wider inclusivity aims.”

Our recommendations, not immediately wholly accepted by Advance HE, to our regret, were very much designed with lightening the load in mind. There is no doubt that the sector has struggled with the burden, and many resented the time required to obtain all the data, taking time away from actually making the changes needed. The trouble is, without the carrot (or was it a stick?) of getting such an award, I fear many institutions will simply decide equality issues can be permitted to slide down the agenda. In this pandemic age, that was always going to be a danger. Without such external pressures, however, too many departments and organisations may just feel it is a ‘luxury’ they can do without, even though equality is indubitably not a luxury for those who are at the sharp end of disadvantage, bias and outright harassment.

With Ottoline Leyser at the head of UKRI, at least one can be confident that there is someone at the helm who cares passionately about ensuring the individual survives and thrives and that equality does not get neglected. I will look forward to seeing what alternatives to the formal Athena Swan award she may wish to introduce. I still believe the Review Group’s recommendations – and you can see them in full on page 10 onwards of our Report ­– would have made a huge difference, without necessitating downgrading the value attached to the whole process. In the meantime, all those people, predominantly women, who have battled so resolutely to get Athena Swan applications ready may be feeling both relieved and angry. I hope that in the bonfire we don’t lose the progress we have made so far, when there is still so much to do.

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Feeling the Fear

Posted on September 6, 2020 by Athene Donald

Readers of the Guardian may, over the years, have had reason to dip into Oliver Burkeman’s columns. As he hangs up his metaphorical boots, he summarised what he had personally learned from the exercise of writing these ‘self-help’ articles. In this last article he advises, for instance, something that will resonate with many an academic, harried even over the summer vacation by the endless to-do lists and the innumerable tasks that don’t ever get ticked off on those lists. His advice:

“There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating.”

Whereas I accept the first part of that sentence from bitter experience, I’m not sure I have ever managed to reach the stage of being liberated. In my experience, there is nothing less liberating than waking at 2am remembering the urgent task on that list, however small, that you have neglected to do for the nth day running. It simply leads to the next day being less productive than it should have been – so even fewer tasks get completed – because of a lack of sleep. There will indeed, always be too much to do. The challenge is to sort the urgent from the important. Burkeman gives no advice on that.

However, his take on impostor syndrome is something that academics, aspiring and established, should definitely take to heart.

“Remember: the reason you can’t hear other people’s inner monologues of self-doubt isn’t that they don’t have them. It’s that you only have access to your own mind.”

I have always stressed that just because other people look confident, you should not be fooled. His words are a different version of the same belief. Most of us are capable actors, at least some of the time. Even if we don’t ooze bravado, we are often capable of hiding our fears behind a mask (an imaginary one not textile, of course, in this case). Often it is very necessary to do so. We, naturally, know that this is indeed a mask and the inner person is a shrinking violet, a nervous wreck or whatever other metaphor you choose to describe the internal turmoil that lies behind that mask. But the person you are talking to doesn’t know that. They see the swan gliding smoothly on, while they feel a muddle of jitters and insecurity and wonder how you manage to be so calm. Burkeman’s advice here is pertinent and worth remembering:

“It’s that you – unconfident, self-conscious, all-too-aware-of-your-flaws – potentially have as much to contribute to your field, or the world, as anyone else.”

Academia is not alone in being stuffed full of insecure individuals, but the nature of our sector means it is rife with competition and the knowledge of being constantly judged by that evil referee 3 (for grants and publications) as well as less anonymous folk – your supervisor, your departmental head even your peers – is ever-present. We know, whatever may be said to our face, others are forming their opinions every time we utter. It’s not surprising we can feel nervous if not downright scared. The inner impostor should not be allowed to win. As Burkeman also says

“The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it.”

In other words, if you feel nervous today you will probably continue to feel nervous in the future, although not necessarily about the same things. In my experience, whatever stresses you face, other people telling you ‘you’ll be fine’ doesn’t necessarily get rid of the nerves. The best cure is simply doing something repeatedly – speaking in public, for instance – learning from what went wrong (better, what went right) and making sure you improve the next time. However, there will always be new challenges if you follow another of Burkeman’s suggestions: choose ‘enlargement’ over happiness.

I take this to mean, don’t rest on your laurels. Knowing you’ve achieved something well, may give you happiness in the moment. However, if you let that mark the end of your trajectory you won’t grow, which is how I translate ‘enlargement’. Complacency can go hand in hand with happiness, but will ultimately lead to boredom – and that most certainly is unlikely to equate with happiness. So, although I most definitely never had a career ‘plan’, I’ve consistently believed in the need to try new challenges. Some challenges are more welcome than others. Leading a Cambridge College during a pandemic is most certainly not something I would ever have wanted on any career plan or to-do list; but there it is.

Enlargement, trying out new things, never staying still, of course is a wonderful way to keep the inner impostor alive and well. If you’re trying out new things then, by definition, you will not be experienced in the new challenges. One’s training at the bench is not going to help with many of the skills needed as a faculty member. This, I believe, is often a problem for new group heads, who suddenly find themselves expected to be expert in everything from HR to costing grants, yet feel inadequate on all fronts. Sometimes, their inability to empathise with a struggling student, or even to see the mask of bravado a struggling student may adopt, can lead to misery all round. I well recall getting caught out in this way, fairly late in my supervisory career when I should have known better, when a student who was writing up their thesis, repeatedly assured me all was well. I believed them until, as the weeks passed, I finally managed to appreciate he really was fobbing me off. Once I’d broken through, so he felt safe admitting just how badly he was struggling, everything went better, both for him and for me.

Professors, however eminent, will – if they are seeking ‘enlargement’ – be just as likely to be doing something for the first time as a PhD student. I’ve written before about how wide-ranging a day can be, and nothing in my current life makes me feel I am stuck in some well-worn rut where the inner impostor is unlikely to get loose. The crucial thing is not to let that impostor get the better of you. There are many wise words to help you get beyond the instantaneous feeling that you can’t do something. whereas everyone else is an expert. Some of my favourites are

“Feel the fear and do it anyhow”

(not that I’ve read the book of that title, but the sentiment resonates with me); and

“Ever tried. Ever failed. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”

– a few useful sentences from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The important thing is to find your own route to suppressing that impostor that lurks within (nearly) all of us.

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Investing in Education and the Levelling Up Agenda

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Athene Donald

Early years provision has suffered during austerity, and is continuing to see cutbacks, as Polly Toynbee pointed out last week. Yet children who fall behind at the outset of their education will find it very difficult to catch up later. If letters and reading are a mystery at 5 or 6, let alone at 7, how hard it will be to get decent grades at GCSE without a huge amount of support and 1:1 teaching which, sadly, few state schools are able to provide. To imply that early years’ investment in education is less important than at university, as David Willetts did in his book A University Education, strikes me as naïve. The child who struggles with studying because of their difficulties with reading, will simply not be able to get to (or aspire to) university.

I always feel worried with the messaging that, if a university such as my own would just get its act together about widening participation, then social mobility would flourish. It is too easy for politicians to put the blame on universities, over which they can – currently – exert less direct control than on schools. It ignores the fact that students need to be able to thrive at university and we cannot remedy those problems caused from systemic disadvantages right from birth. It also ignores the fact that collectively my own university, for instance, already works hard to ensure it admits people from as diverse a range of backgrounds as possible. Indeed, I suspect, when the statistics are finally fully available, it will become apparent that, one side-effect of using the CAGs (Centre Assessed Grades) rather than OFQAL’s allegedly ‘mutant’ algorithm for A levels has, at Cambridge, actually worsened the various widening participation statistics I mentioned previously.

This would be consistent with the findings of a recent UCL study which showed

“Among high achievers, where under-prediction is most common, the team found 23% of comprehensive school pupils were underpredicted by two or more grades compared to just 11% of grammar and private school pupils.”

Thus, for Cambridge entrants who will belong to this high-achieving cohort, using predicted grades is likely to be more advantageous to the kid from Harrow or Winchester than the one from a random comprehensive. This runs perhaps counterintuitively to the public outcry about results, but mine is not the only college where the finding seems to hold true that the widening participation statistics were (just a little) less impressive after the government’s U-turn on A level results.  (Note, the UCL study notes other outcomes for different ability cohorts.)  This is not to say that bias against the state school child has not been a significant problem with Cambridge admissions over the years. However, at least in the majority of colleges, I believe those days are past.

The mantle for social mobility has been placed on the shoulders of universities by the government, with the Office for Students demanding ever more stringent measures of widening participation. But there is a limit to what universities can do, when so much of the damage to a child’s education lies far earlier in the system. As Stefan Collini has recently argued in an illuminating article, that

“One of the most obvious [contradictions] is between our de facto endorsement of a bitterly class-divided society and our fantasy that universities can not only escape the consequences of this but can positively correct it.”

The idea that, simply by admitting more students to universities, the ills of austerity and more – the ‘more’ now including of course the effects of the pandemic in reinforcing gaps in educational provision and hence attainment – can be obviated is, like Willetts’ position on early years’ education, naïve.

It is not reasonable to think that universities are the catch-all solution to social mobility. We should be thinking much harder about what our educational landscape looks like at every stage and in every format. Collini, in the same article I cite above, argued that

“One reason why further education is the Cinderella sector is that the parents of those who tend to go into further education are nowhere near so powerful and noisy a voice as the parents of those who tend to go to universities.”

I think that understates the problems regarding the further education system. It isn’t just that the parents aren’t vocal, it is that the politicians themselves do not recognize how that self-same ‘bitterly class-divided society’ impacts directly on this long-neglected ‘Cinderella’.

University – historically – was the preserve of the middle class (and indeed the aristocracy) while those lower down the pecking order had to be content with apprenticeships and vocational training, at best. Whereas universities have (socially) opened up, the attitude towards further education has remained mired in an unhealthy neglect of the vocational route due, at least in part I believe, to our historic class divisions and societal attitudes towards what would have been seen as manual labour. Artisanal may have become a positive attribute for gin-making or pottery, but still being an artisan may be taken as a negative descriptor by some.

This problem was even more explicit in the days of my childhood; indeed it still is in a few English locations. Then the division into those who might ‘make it’ and those who definitely wouldn’t, was highly visible through the 11+ exam. The fortunate few who passed were creamed off to grammar schools; the rest bundled off to an ill-resourced secondary modern. However, hidden though this tension may have become by the widespread if not universal comprehensive school system, it seems as if much of the content of that legacy remains, just for a slightly older age group.

Philip Augar explicitly identified this problematic legacy in his Review of post-18 Education, stating

“Further education is the poor relation to higher education and its position has been weakened and undermined by reductions to its budgets and a complex funding architecture.… The system accentuates the perception that routes into higher education that begin in further education are inferior to the A-Level/ undergraduate degree option.”

Just as Polly Toynbee pointed out that cuts in early years’ provision is at odds with the government’s stated ‘levelling up agenda’, so are the weaknesses in the existing FE provision.

One of the phrases I learned when I chaired the Royal Society’s Education Committee was ‘absorptive capacity’: an organisation’s ‘ability to identify, assimilate, transform, and use external knowledge, research and practice’. It requires, not just lots of whizz kids at the top of technical companies making smart acquisitions, but a robustly capable workforce at all levels who can adopt and adapt new working methods as technology develops. In the context of the technical/technician workforce – who, one might think, are likely to be the products of apprenticeships and FE at least as much as the university sector – Paul Lewis, in a report written for the Gatsby Foundation, has spelled out the importance of these technicians for driving innovation via their absorptive capacity.

It is as true in university research as in industry that technicians are crucial to facilitating many strands of ground-breaking research. Perhaps these people are the ones running the equipment on which so many PhD theses rest – an NMR or PCR machine perhaps – or the ones developing small gizmos without which the data cannot be collected. In my own area of research, I well recall how important the workshop technicians were in building sample-holding cells that were capable of delivering the results we wanted. A student could describe what was wanted, without having the faintest idea about which materials would withstand the experimental conditions (such as heat and pressure) let alone carry out the requisite machining in the workshop.

We should be investing in the training of a technically-skilled workforce, even if they can’t differentiate or integrate some horrendous function sufficiently accurately to pass an academic exam, or remember or even care about, the Krebs’ cycle. We should recognize the value these people bring: to themselves, to others and to our economy. With the ESRC’s new Productivity Institute just launched, I look forward to seeing research into how these different training routes contribute to innovation and productivity. Given that universities cannot, whatever this government may think, solve social mobility and its best friend, levelling up, we need to think much more broadly about what can be achieved and delivered in the wider educational sphere and then fund it appropriately.

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Pandemic Staycationing

Posted on August 23, 2020 by Athene Donald

As far as I’m concerned, this is not a year for travelling for a holiday. Indeed, given some of the recent events, there hasn’t even been time to take any sort of extended break. However, we have been taking days off to get some healthy exercise, on bike or foot. Staycationing is, I know, all the rage, so I’m just on trend (for once). And very pleasant it is to get out and about, at least when the weather isn’t either scorching hot or the country is being ravaged by apocalyptic thunderstorms.

What I’ve found strange, no doubt just another weird consequence of the pandemic, lockdown and our current extraordinary way of life, is how much every time I go out my thoughts wander off to far distant memories. Why, when cycling out into the countryside north of Cambridge and hearing jackdaws (hardly an unusual sound, even in the city) was I suddenly transported back to childhood holidays in Cheshire? I suspect in my early home in London there were none around; perhaps the visit to my great uncle’s house was the first time I’d noticed hearing them. What I cannot remember is whether this was before or after the 1962-3 winter, that winter known as the Big Freeze when snow lay on the ground till early March having first fallen (in London) on Boxing day. I do know I associate their call with the sound I heard when stones were thrown on the ice of the frozen ponds on Hampstead Heath that year.

Elsewhere, seeing a ruined farm building, my mind went back to all the bombsites that still occupied so much of the London of my youth. Somewhere near Kings Cross, on one particular site, my mother and I encountered a black redstart, to our great pleasure. I think they found these derelict areas suitable for their nests. A quick Google suggests, national rarity though they now are, they may still be found in that vicinity, even though the bombsites are long gone.

Collared doves are of course common across most of the country now. That wasn’t so in 1962 when one turned up in our London garden. It was so rare that most of the bird books we possessed didn’t even show us a picture to help our identification (no Google then to help us out), but we did eventually work it out. Now, no one would get interested in such an arrival in their garden, beautiful though they are (despite their maddening repetitive call), but somehow seeing one as I cycled past took me back to that childhood excitement.

I am sure there is some reason why this distant past is so intruding on my present. Perhaps it is an attempt to remember a time when life was safe and ‘normal’. Clearly bombsites are not a good record of that in a logical sense, but to a child that was just the way my world was. There were bombsites all over the London I recall. My mother, being part of that world when bombs in London were a daily occurrence, would regularly talk about those years, and walking through thick wartime fog in the blackout.

My brain – if not yours – is finding weird ways to try to cope with the new normal. The impact of the pandemic intrudes into my dreams, which is hardly surprising. What I resent more is the way it also intrudes into my reading. It doesn’t matter which novel I pick up, I find myself thinking: the couple shouldn’t be holding hands/getting into a cab together/eating in a restaurant, they aren’t from the same household, they’re putting themselves at risk. This is just annoying. That was then and this is now. And now is not a comfortable place to be.

Staycationing does offer some opportunity to get out and about in a desultory attempt to get more exercise. I am baffled why, since I no longer go up and down to London at least once or twice a week, since I don’t even have to cycle around Cambridge to get from one meeting to another, let alone attend the regular diet of college dinners (and I don’t just mean in Churchill but all over the collegiate university) that seems to go along with my job, time seems in even shorter supply than usual. I had hoped that, given the absence of formal dining and entertaining, I would be eating a healthier and lower calorie diet leading to the shedding of a few pounds. Unfortunately, the concomitant reduction in cycling seems on the contrary to have had the opposite effect. I may not have succumbed to eating frozen key lime pies straight out of the freezer, as seems to have beset one Guardian columnist, but clearly loss of exercise has won over the loss of formal dinners. The absence of extra time I can probably attribute to the plethora of additional problems to be solved when all our tried and tested protocols have to be torn up and new ones devised on the hoof. I’m not just talking about Admissions here, but everything the College does. Wonderful team of staff and Fellows that I have in the College, nevertheless I do feel I need to be on top of what is going on, even if they are the ones doing the heavy lifting on writing all our new plans.

It seems my brain is cluttered with a distant past which has come back into focus. At the same time, days rush by without much rest, yet the time I do spend on reading novels – as opposed to protocols about households, or returning students, or how to give a supervision remotely – is troubled by the mental clash between behaviour in real life up until about March 2020, and what is deemed acceptable and wise now. Sometimes it feels a battle to try to remain grounded and as content as possible.  It often feels as if life has always been like this, the passing months just a blur of nothingness while we’re left standing still waiting for life to start moving forward again. Simultaneously, many of us have never had to work so hard learning new skills we’d never sought nor wanted to pick up. We all look forward to that uncertain date when face coverings, Zoom (or its near relation, Teams) and crossing to the other side of the street when another pedestrian approaches you, are not our daily fare. When greeting friends with a hug and being able to offer them a cup of tea, or something even stronger, while sitting at less than two meters is, well, just normal once more. In the meantime, it seems the old normal and the new normal will continue to clash and interweave in unexpected ways in my brain.

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