Practice and Experience

Posted on December 14, 2025 by Athene Donald

It seems appropriate in this 250th anniversary year of Jane Austen’s birth to use a quote from Pride and Prejudice to kickstart this post. ‘If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.’ says Lady Catherine de Bourgh. The idea that one is naturally talented and would have been brilliant if only one had put in the time is a very attractive one. The idea that, if one started learning something, great things would have transpired; yes we can all see the attraction of that. But nothing happens without effort and, although – in the case of music that Lady Catherine was referring to – some of us may have larger hands or longer fingers making certain chords easier than for the average member of the public – the reality is, one will never be proficient let alone brilliant without putting in the hours.

I am rediscovering the tedium of practice as I attempt to pick up my piano playing 50+ years after I last had a lesson. And, as I only had lessons for two or three years, I was never much good anyhow. However, it is part of trying to rediscover the things that used to give me joy before science completely took over my life. I’ve written before about the piano I originally learned on, which is now far away so my granddaughters can learn to play on it. Currently I’m renting an e-piano to see if my elderly limbs can cope with the stretches required to play octaves and so on, given I’ve had problems with one of my wrists since teenage years.

However, the point of this post, is not to wax lyrical about musical recreation, but to remember that nothing comes easily. I’ve never forgotten the moment I realised that, just because I had a first-class degree from Cambridge, it didn’t actually mean I knew very much about Physics at all. It is easy to think that passing an exam or ticking off some other milestone means you’re transformed from novice to expert in a moment. Life – and knowledge – sadly does not work like that. Nothing can be accomplished without putting in the hours, and you never know whether the challenge is one that you are mentally or physically capable of mastering until you try. Think of all the aspiring ballet dancers who, regardless of talent, were turned away from a career because they were too tall or heavy; they were not ‘suited’. But we all have brains or bodies that work better in some directions than others. Why I could never remember the basic facts, let alone the intricacies of NMR and MRI, I never fathomed. But despite reading the topic up multiple times (I seemed to be asked to examine an inordinate number of PhD theses involving the technique), the facts always failed to stick. No doubt something fundamental in my brain wiring, or perhaps merely a lack of real application.

However, being an expert takes multiple forms. I worry that, when it comes to our schools, we are still cramming our children with facts – because these are the easiest to test in, say, a GCSE – rather than teaching them how to use the facts in unfamiliar situations, which will largely be what the world of work for them requires. We know children will have easy access to ‘facts’ (as well as misinformation) on the web, and be likely to use LLMs, whether or not they have a good sense of how to get the most out of them and spot a hallucination when they see it. The Royal Society wants to see a very different emphasis on mathematical, digital and data education in our schools – for all, not just for those who wish to pursue a more formal route into computing or mathematics – and to help students with AI literacy, again for all students. The skills the next generation need are not simply about memorising facts, and both what is taught and how it is examined need to be kept up to date. The recent Curriculum and Assessment Review had surprisingly little to say about the actual assessments themselves, so we are likely to see little transformation from what strikes me as the Victorian ideal of knowing and testing facts, to using them wisely.

Knowing how to approach problems, where to go for the necessary facts – even knowing which are the necessary facts – are a crucial part of solving anything, but remembering their details may not be the important thing. Knowing which questions to ask, without necessarily being particularly expert in a field, is a great skill. I expect most of us have encountered the professor (I knew at least a couple) who would appear to snooze through a seminar and then ask the killer question. Often prefaced with the humble ‘I may have missed this’ or ‘perhaps I misunderstood’, but usually leaving the speaker looking a bit foolish. Maybe there was an implicit assumption lurking underneath the analysis that the professor has spotted. Maybe they see an analogy with another field where they are expert and feel that the speaker has missed a trick by not looking there for understanding. Knowing what questions to ask is a skill every bit as important as knowing the facts that can easily be tracked down. Do we teach our students – of whatever age – enough about this? Are we moving on from regurgitating facts to knowing how to use and manipulate data?

As a scientist I believe I am capable of critical thinking, which this is one aspect of, as well as be creative, both skills the arts and humanities folk sometimes seem to want to claim as if they are a race apart from scientists. We all need these skills, although obviously creativity may manifest itself in different ways across the disciplines. Memorising and reproducing the second law of thermodynamics (to replicate CP Snow’s arguments) or knowing how to use Excel can indeed be demonstrated by a simple and easily marked test. But mastering more subtle skills of expertise, for instance to carry out analysis in an unfamiliar situation, is more challenging. Like a musical instrument, it takes time, practice and experience.

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What Voice?

Posted on December 7, 2025 by Athene Donald

It is more than 40 years since the American psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote her book, In a Different Voice, challenging the view that women were morally less developed than men, pointing out this difference arose because the schema had been developed from studies on (white) males. According to Gilligan’s analysis, women are more centred around caring whereas men prioritise justice. It has been criticised as reinforcing stereotypes and treating ‘women’ (and ‘men’) as homogeneous, regardless of other characteristics such as ethnicity, age or socio-economic status. It also begs the question – present in so many of these debates around gender issues – of whether there is an innate biological difference or simply the way we bring up our children that creates this difference. It is the nature versus nurture debate once more.

When I first read it, maybe 15 years ago, the book certainly resonated with me in terms of how I viewed my life and my place in it. It isn’t clear to me that, in a situation like this, the origin of any difference in the way men and women approach problems (one of Gilligan’s earliest studies was around attitudes to abortion) is relevant. What matters is that, in many situations, women and men may approach or envisage problems differently. In talks I give about women in STEM, I cite the word clouds Let Toys be Toys produced about toys for children. Those toys marketed at boys (specifically 4-8 year olds) stress words like ‘battle’ and ‘power’, whereas girls were directed towards ‘magic’ and ‘glitter’, with ‘beautiful’ being another oft-appearing word thrown in. It is hard to imagine children don’t receive messages from these words, at least at some subliminal level.

Historically, of course, women ‘knew their place’, and in the science community that meant that a rare woman had to tread carefully if she was to be heard and not shunned. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, eschewed such actions, and therefore got tarred with labels such as Mad Madge, and more comments about her dress, when she visited the Royal Society in 1667, than her thinking (which Samuel Pepys swiftly dismissed: ’nor did I hear her say anything that was worth hearing’) . Caroline Herschel was much more careful, even – or perhaps particularly – when writing to the secretary of the Royal Society to inform him she had discovered a new comet (the first of seven she laid claim to). As she put it

‘In consequence of the Friendship I know to exist between you and my brother I venture to trouble you in his absence with the following imperfect account of a comet..’ ,

a suitably modest way of daring to break into what was then solely a male preserve, and invoking her famous, if absent, brother to demonstrate her credentials. It is a very self-effacing introduction, while equally being forthright about the claim she is making, even without her brother looking over her shoulder.

We may have got beyond the need for women to be quite so modest, but nevertheless most successful women know they always have a fine line to walk between being seen as assertive and aggressive, between bigging oneself up and being seen as a threat to the establishment, primarily male, or coming across as overtly ambitious (not a trait that is seen as attractive in most women). But this difference in approach manifests itself in many ways.

Take Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna writing in the introduction to Venki Ramakrishnan’s 2018 book Gene Machine. This is a book in which he discusses his life and how he succeeded in unravelling the structure of the ribosome, the work for which he won the Nobel Prize, rushing along in order to beat others chasing the same prize. She says ‘the story is one of professional dilemmas, the serendipity of discovery and the deeply human nature of research, in which personalities play a central role.’ These sentences stress the interpersonal challenges everyone faces and the book discusses how they were tackled. In contrast, journalist Roger Highfield is quoted as saying of the book ‘this exhilarating account of the race to understand the molecular machine …..’ conjuring up an image of competition and individualism. Back to battle and power of the boy’s toy’s ads for Roger. Of course, both descriptions are right, but the emphasis is very different between them. Whether their different takes on identically the same book (and person) reflect nature or nurture isn’t the point. The fact is, what they see as the key takeaways are very different. An illustrative single data point to ponder.

I believe a key challenge for our (western) society, in science or other professions, is that the presumption remains that the male norm is the norm. Increasingly backwards-facing attitudes to DEI initiatives will not help this change.  How many young female scientists still feel a need to be understated, if not positively self-effacing, in case the males around them have their egos upset because the women are being ‘unwomanly’? How many of the men notice and try to encourage the women, rather than stamp on them? Clearly, stereotypes being the dangerous things they are, some women will be the ones doing the stamping and some men doing all they can to encourage the women. So, yes, ‘not all men’ believe in the importance of battle and power in our laboratories – or offices, or law chambers or wherever. But nevertheless, quite a few.

The question of ‘what voice’ should a woman use, however, to be most persuasive or most successful remains. Having had a supportive colleague once ask me if I’d thought of having voice coaching lessons to lower my voice (think Maggie Thatcher), in some senses I mean literally ‘what voice’ as well as what words to use. But there is also the of ‘what voice’ in terms of what sits centre stage: it could be a change from an  active to a  passive voice in the narrative, but it could also be a change in the dynamics of the narrative from – as the Doudna/Highfield example shows – one reflecting people to one reflecting power or control. Unfortunately, unless we change the subtle cues children receive from everything (including advertisements, but also all kinds of media) and everyone (parents, teachers and peers) around them, this delicate dance that women often feel obliged to execute will have to continue. It can be very exhausting.

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Botanists in the Family

Posted on November 30, 2025 by Athene Donald

It is difficult to know where to begin with this post, since several strands have got intertwined. I guess the prompt for this is, as with my last post, the meeting at the Royal Society celebrating women from the past who, whether or not they would have identified themselves as scientists/natural philosophers, certainly got involved with the scientific endeavour and made significant contributions. I did intend to write about Margaret Cavendish, but that will have to wait, as I’ve disappeared down a genealogical rabbit hole. This was prompted by seeing the name Francis Boott on one of the slides, I think certifying some botanical specimen. Francis Boott (1792-1863) was American by birth, a secretary to the Linnean Society, a physician in whose London house the first recorded use of an anaesthetic for a dental procedure was recorded – and (if I’ve got my generations right), my great, great, great grandfather. His mother-in-law was Derby-based Lucy Hardcastle (1771-1834), a botanist of some distinction and acquaintance of Erasmus Darwin (one of my heroes, as a polymath) and, more particularly, his two illegitimate daughters. It is not for nothing that my grandmother’s middle name was the otherwise bizarre choice of Hardcastle.

Lucy Hardcastle befriended Francis Boott when he was on an extended stay in Britain and, after a family disagreement when he went back to the USA, he continued his interactions with her upon his permanent return to this country. In due course he married Lucy’s daughter Mary and they moved to London. Through his introduction, Hardcastle started a correspondence with Sir James Edward Smith, a leading botanist of the day and the founder of the Linnean Society. She did many delicate drawings of plants and in 1830 she published a book about Linnean classification. Whereas her acquaintance Erasmus Darwin wrote a long poem in rhyming couplets on the same theme entitled The Loves of the Plants (1789), when Hardcastle wrote her book she carefully avoided the use of the words male, female and sex, no doubt feeling such words were inappropriate for a woman (particularly one who ran a school for girls), although the sexual parts of the plants were clear in her illustrations. I learned all this and much more from a fairly recent pamphlet about her life, The Rediscovery of Lucy Hardcastle, written by Jonathan and Anne Powers, available through the Derby Museum.[1] This museum holds a number of her drawings and letters. All this I have picked up in the last couple of weeks since the Royal Society event.

Lucy Hardcastle, Capsula, An Introduction to the Elements of the Linnaean System of Botany, for Young Persons, London, 1830, p. 75.

Lucy Hardcastle, An Introduction to the Elements of the Linnaean System of Botany, for Young Persons (London: Thomas Richardson, 1830)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But then, in trying to work out quite how many generations I needed to go back to get to Lucy Hardcastle, I fell into another rabbit hole concerning another botanical relative, or perhaps more precisely, a well-known Victorian gardener: the Reverend Charles Wolley Dod (1826-1904), who was my great great grandfather and whose son Francis married Lucy Hardcastle’s great granddaughter, Annette Mary Clarke. The genealogy is a nightmare to disentangle because, in the way of Victorian families which ran out of male heirs, surnames got changed along the route, and often the same first names were recycled. My reading is that the Rev Charles was born Charles Hurt, married Mary Wolley who then became Wolley Dod upon the death of the relevant male heirs. The Rev Charles then changed his name formally to Wolley Dod in 1868 and in 1877 acceded to the family estate in Cheshire. Up till then he had been a Master at Eton, but thereafter he could use the gardens around the Hall to experiment and breed new varieties. He interacted with the eminent gardener Gertrude Jekyll who said of him:

‘of all these friendly gardeners, the one whom I felt to be the most valuable was Rev C.  Wolley Dod, scholar, botanist and great English gentleman; an enthusiast for plant life; an experienced gardener; and the kindest of instructors.’

(quoted in Huntia). He is depicted in one of the south nave aisle’s stained glass windows of Liverpool Cathedral.

Coming full circle to the Royal Society event, that same Huntia article says how Ellen Willmott, would stay with the Wolley Dod’s and use the Rev Charles as an advisor. Ellen Willmott (1858-1934) was one of the many women discussed at the Royal Society, covering her role in financing botanical explorations and the importance of the role she played in a widespread network of collectors. She was identified as a central node in such network analysis, with a huge circle of correspondents. She used her family money to employ over one hundred gardeners at her home as well as covering the costs of international teams seeking new plants. Wilmott was able to penetrate the scientific establishment, becoming one of the first women fellows of the Linnean Society.

None of this has any bearing on why I was enthusiastic about science at school. I vaguely knew about the Rev Charles Wolley Dod, because we had a rose in our small garden referred to as the Wolley Dod rose, but he was never described to me as a biologist (after all, he wasn’t one, although he carried out a lot of plant breeding). And, despite my ornithological inclinations I was put off biology at school anyhow by a formidable teacher as much as by the then curriculum. But it is interesting to see these different strands come together, all prompted by attending an event celebrating 80 years since the election of the first women to the Royal Society – and thereafter making extensive use of the web to track down relationships.

[1] For what it’s worth, this pamphlet debunks the story in Desmond King Hele’s life of Erasmus Darwin, where he suggests – based on correspondence between Charles Darwin and Francis Galton – that Lucy Hardcastle (née Swift) was actually a third illegitimate daughter of Erasmus. Sadly, therefore, I must conclude I am no descendant of his!

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Where Were the Women?

Posted on November 23, 2025 by Athene Donald

I know that many people feel the Royal Society is a stuffy, white male institution, unwelcoming to women and other minorities, but I cannot agree. It may have had a long history of excluding women, but no more and, in my own personal experience, not over the past couple of decades at least. This year they are celebrating 80 years since the first women – Katherine Lonsdale and Marjory Stevenson – were elected with a series of events. Much more about these women and related events can be found out here. As part of that celebration, I attended a one-day meeting regarding historical perspectives. There will be further events in the coming months, including the unveiling of further portraits of women. For the current celebrations, they have acquired, on loan, the well-known painting of Caroline Herschel. There is no doubt the images around the building favour the male, but less so than when I was elected. Portraits take time to produce (not to mention are expensive), but in the short term there is also an excellent exhibition of photos of current women scientists that has been created for this year’s celebrations.

The meeting celebrated women active in science-related areas over the centuries, starting with Emilie du Châtelet, in a series of vignettes. In my own book Not Just for the Boys (now available in paperback too!), I included some brief accounts of some women from the past, including du Châtelet and Herschel, but I learned about a number of others whose names I’d not come across before this week. I’ve written in the past that, unlike female composers, where more and more from the past are receiving current attention, I didn’t expect many female scientists to emerge from history to claim a place in the scientific record, but perhaps I need to change my views, certainly as regards from the nineteenth century on. I believe in due course the recording of the meeting will be put online, so others can check who these women are.

Mary Wortley Montagu on the mystery of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’sMy illustration is of Lady Mary Montagu Wortley, with her splendid turban/hat. She spent a decade in (what is now) Turkey when her husband was Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and there came across the local habit of inoculation against smallpox. In the harems and Turkish baths frequented only by women, she could see that, unlike herself and so many of her British compatriots, the skins of Turkish women were not scarred from the effects of smallpox. She became convinced of the power of the practice in providing good protection against the disease that killed so many back home (including her brother and nearly herself), and disfigured many more. When she returned to England, she was vocal in support of the practice, and had her own daughter inoculated (her son had been inoculated back in Turkey). For these actions she was much reviled, including by the medical profession.

Although not a scientist in the modern meaning of the word, she had studied how the practice had been carried out in Turkey, not by medics but by more lowly folk. She noted they were careful to introduce only tiny amounts into the patient and then isolate them from others as a mild form of the disease took hold. In contrast, the medical profession in England, even when carrying out an inoculation, believed purging and bleeding were what needed to accompany the incision, not isolation, with predictable results. However, the royal family in due course inoculated their own children, which conferred a degree of respectability on the practice.  By introducing the practice into Western Europe,  she undoubtedly will have saved many lives. It was another 75 years before Edward Jenner came up with the idea of vaccination using cowpox rather than smallpox itself.

Let me single out one other woman from the many discussed:  Eleanor Ormerod (1828-1901). She was a so-called ‘economic entomologist’, in other words someone who studied pests which attacked crops to economic disadvantage. She built up an enormous circle of correspondents, creating what we might these days call a group of citizen scientists. She was much more formally a scientist than Montagu, including being appointed consulting entomologist to the Royal Agricultural Society and lecturer at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester. She also had something of a global reputation, winning awards from, for instance, both Russia and France. She became the first woman to be elected to Fellowship of the Meteorological Society in 1878 and the first woman to be awarded an Honorary Degree from the University of Edinburgh (1900), shortly before her death.  Nevertheless, she was very conscious of being largely excluded from the male scientific establishment and hers is not a well-known name. Apparently, Edinburgh’s cloud computing network is known as Eleanor, and I’m wondering how many of their undergraduates – or staff – have any idea why.

The day ended with Stella Butler and myself talking about what has changed since the first women FRS’s were elected in 1945 (three years, as I have to remind myself ruefully, before my own university even got to the point of awarding full degrees to women). Stella has just published a book Breaking the Glass Ceiling of Science, which tells the story of the first eleven women elected. Again, many of their names will not be well known. Most people will have heard of Dorothy Hodgkin, and possibly Kathleen Lonsdale (both, incidentally, very committed to promoting world peace), but are less likely to have come across the names of some of the others (in order of election after the first two in 1945: Agnes Arber [1946]; Mary Cartwright [1947]; Dorothy Hodgkin {1947]; Muriel Robertson [1947]; Sidnie Manton [1948]; Dorothy Needham [1948]; Honor Fell [1952]; Marthe Vogt [1952]; and Rosalind Pitt-Rivers [1954]). A group of women, none of whom were professors at the time of election, and many of whom survived for at least substantial parts of their careers on short-term and precarious contracts.

It is interesting to note that, despite the early nomination in 1902 of Hertha Ayrton to be a fellow, a nomination that was rejected on the grounds of her being married (you can find out more about her in the film that Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and I were involved with as part of the Royal Society’s 350th celebrations), there was a long period after the time the Royal Society had had to accept the legal argument that women were eligible to be elected, when strangely not one was nominated (from 1922 to 1943). You can read the details of how the first women came to be nominated, and how the politics of making sure the existing (male) fellows would accept the election of women came to pass in Stella’s book.

Once women were elected, it wasn’t long before they were serving on the Royal Society’s Council, so it would seem after the momentous step had been taken, they were fully included in the fellowship. As I say, I always found the organisation welcoming. I was struck that after I had remarked on this at the meeting, and how it was noticeably different from my experiences in Cambridge at around the same time, another Fellow came up to me to say how that chimed with her own experience, albeit in another university and more recently. Interestingly, I’ve just been going through a transcript of an oral history I recorded for the AIP (the interview was actually conducted about 18 months ago) in which I talk about this experience. There I stated about this time and how I had found the Royal Society more welcoming and inclusive than Cambridge:

‘I think just because they always treated me as a person, not as a woman. I’m just one of them, as it were, instead of being othered.’

Probably quite a succinct way of expressing the feelings of the years around my election in 1999.

There is much more about the historical aspect of women in science, those connected with the Royal Society and more broadly, as well as the current situation and the work that is now being done by the Society on their website. They may still be way off parity in the fellowship (I think they’ve reached around a third of the fellowship being women), but the numbers have been rising steadily. That’s not to say there isn’t still some negativity towards women lurking in some corners – but that’s true everywhere in our world, and probably getting worse. It’s not time to give up the good work and the fights where needed.

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The Importance of Community

Posted on November 16, 2025 by Athene Donald

I mentioned the book by Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard, AI and the Science of Being Human, in a previous blogpost. I love its optimism about how all of us could work with AI without letting it take us over simply to make money for Silicon Valley folk, although I’m not sure I share it. The idea that groups of individuals, in their daily lives or at work, might ‘fight back’, as it were, take control of the messaging so that humanity not money wins, is wonderfully positive, but it is based around imagined ‘stories’ as much as current reality. Can we get there from here?

One thing that is very obvious about how the authors describe their new world, is that it works via a sense of community, of people coming together. As it happens Maynard was a PhD student in my own department, the Cavendish Laboratory. We must have overlapped in the department, but I’m not sure we interacted back then, and my infrequent exchanges with him since have purely been digital. Nevertheless, he describes something I well remember: the importance of the Cavendish canteen and the tea breaks we all enjoyed.

‘I remember tea breaks and seminars from when I was a grad student, where we’d get together in person and talk about everything and nothing; in the process sparking ideas and hashing out new possibilities. Now we’re all in our offices (or more likely at home), doors closed, “connecting” through email chains that nobody fully reads.’

Those tea breaks were fundamental to the rhythm of the day for condensed matter physicists, both when I was a student myself and also, later, as a young lecturer. Every research group had its own timing for turning up and its own table(s) to sit at. So, you had the opportunity to talk casually about politics, or football – or science – on a daily basis with everyone else in your group. Group sizes varied from a handful to dozens of students and postdocs, and sometimes group technicians joined in (although workshop technicians had their own space in the comfortable chairs by the window).

It built a strong sense of community, which was often extended to the pub in the evenings. Different groups had a reputation for being more or less friendly. Some academic staff were more likely to be seen in the tea room than others, but in principle you could meet and engage with anyone there. Indeed, it was in the tea room that I recall Brian Pippard (already retired from the Cavendish Chair, the senior chair in the department, but still much in evidence) questioning why I wanted to get a research grant, when I admitted my first application had been turned down. He was definitely in the ‘you can do it all with string and sealing wax’ school (although for him, this would have been along with fantastic workshops and technicians to help build the apparatus, which were properly funded by the department under the funding mechanisms of the day.)

I mention this was the case for condensed matter physicists because, as I recall, the astronomers and high energy physicists always stayed away, with their own tea room(s). In due course the theoreticians got their own fancy coffee machine and were no longer to be seen, and over time that whole habit was essentially lost, except possibly amongst the workshop technicians for whom the 30 (I believe) minute breaks were sacrosanct. I note the new Cavendish building, recently fully opened as the Ray Dolby Centre, has preserved the idea of a large tea room, open to anyone without the need to get through the security gates with a University card. It will be interesting to see how it is utilised. I was struck, on arranging a meeting with an active member of the department (as I clearly am no longer) that they chose the canteen as a place to meet, rather than their office.

That is all a long-winded way to say that personal interactions matter, access to people you might not otherwise see during the course of your day crouched over some apparatus or screen. That sense of a community where you can ask naïve questions over a cup of tea as well as discuss the latest gossip is important for science to progress. As Abbott and Maynard say ‘Digital spaces optimize for transaction, not relationships…’ I’ve not forgotten the last huge US conference I went to, now many years ago but already people were sitting in the corridors staring at phones/laptops/tablets rather than attending the talks themselves. I found it deeply dispiriting and have avoided all such conferences since. I didn’t travel across the Atlantic simply to read the emails I could have read more comfortably from my desk.

Abbott and Maynard stress the importance of working in close collaboration and discussions with others in the context of AI, neighbours as well as work colleagues, and the importance of social interactions form the backdrops to another book I’m currently reading: Pete Etchell’s Unlocked about screen time and whether or not it is bad for us, particularly for adolescents. There is mass media discussion of how bad staring at a screen can be for teenagers, but the evidence is far from clear. In part this is because looking at email is vastly different from TikTok, which is different again from gaming or watching a film, let alone doom-scrolling. Obvious though that point is, it isn’t usually possible to detect that level of nuance in headlines. Nevertheless, people matter to adolescents as to PhD students and indeed to (just about) all of us. I am very conscious of this as a retiree, where I no longer have a place of work to go to and could just spend my life staring at a screen, even if I’m reading books on my iPad rather than getting worked up by what I find on social media.

The pandemic upended all our lives, for the current generation of adolescents and those a bit older probably more than for us older folk. I appreciate that I can give webinars without stirring from my desk, or attend committees without suffering the vagaries of the trains (Cambridge to London trains seem to have been particularly unreliable recently), but if chairing I find hybrid meetings unsatisfactory however convenient. I hope we will not voluntarily return to never being in the same room as other people as the default setting which was forced on us during the Covid era; or let AI tell us what it wants us to do, without human intervention and discussion.

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