About Jenny
By day: cell biologist at UCL. By night: novelist, broadcaster, science writer, sci-lit-art pundit, blogger and Editor of LabLit.com. I blog about my life in science, not the facts and figures.
Category Archives: Domestic bliss
In which I capture the present, but forget why
I have always been a compulsive chronicler, ever since I was a small child starting off my first journal. I still write an entry nearly every day, taking a few months to fill in all the pages with my increasingly … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Art, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Music, Nostalgia, The ageing process, Work/life balance, Writing
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In which my lab is a garden
It’s a grey afternoon, the light already fading. R. and I have just done a circuit of the back garden – ‘inspecting the troops’, we call it. The entire space is dishevelled, as it always is this time of year: … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Research, The profession of science, Work/life balance
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In which we fall
Fireworks crackle in the darkness: yesterday’s Bonfire Night stretching to fill the entire weekend. The torrential rains have given way to an almost full moon, glowing cold-silver in the eastern sky. November is always a positive month, with the cosiness … Continue reading
In which I see the light
I’m happy, and I don’t know why. Usually I dread this time of year, the period between demobbing the Christmas tree and the daffodil-studded benevolence of mid-March. It stretches on endlessly, the dreary coldness, the frosts interspersed with rain that … Continue reading
Posted in Domestic bliss, Gardening, Nostalgia, Work/life balance
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In which pandemic storm clouds gather – again
A number of months have slipped past since I last wrote here, two seasons under the bridge as my ramped-up academic life has consumed most of my free time. Then, it was the height of optimistic summer; now, the year … Continue reading
In which we near end-game
January and February are always my least favorite months, but I can’t remember a winter when I longed for spring as desperately as this one. It’s the pandemic, of course, which has sucked the world dry of what little joy … Continue reading
Posted in Domestic bliss, Epidemics, Gardening, Joshua, Work/life balance
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In which winter sets in
Although winter has not yet formally begun, this is the time of year when the darkness stretches ahead into infinity. In the face of this, the prospect of brighter days, of snowdrops and crocuses pushing up from the bare earth, … Continue reading
Posted in Domestic bliss, Epidemics, Gardening
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In which we face the rain
How quickly strangeness becomes familiarity. As autumn hunkers down, and the COVID infection rates continue to rise (nearly 13,000 cases reported yesterday in the UK), I see things around me that I never could have imagined before 2020. A trip … Continue reading
Posted in Domestic bliss, Gardening, Research, Scientific thinking, The profession of science, Work/life balance
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In which business is not quite as usual: the post-first-wave lab resumes
Business as usual is the sort of mentality that’s probably only certain in retrospect. At the moment, the jury is still very much out. My lab reopened its doors a few weeks ago. This is, of course, a wonderful thing. … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Careers, Domestic bliss, Epidemics, Gardening, Joshua, Staring into the abyss, The profession of science, Work/life balance
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In which we venture out
We are poised on the edge. As the world teeters between spring and summer, cloaked in lush green and bursting into flower, there is a sense that our pandemic lockdown is coming to an end. Not all at once, of … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Domestic bliss, Joshua, Teaching, Work/life balance
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