Category Archives: Domestic bliss

In which I age backwards

Posted on November 21, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

I don’t know if it’s just me, but for the last few years, I’ve forgotten how old I am. Because I spend so much of the year pessimistically rounding up, I’m rendered unsure by the present state of affairs. When … Continue reading →

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In which the wheel turns

Posted on October 8, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

Time is a wheel, speeding me along in ever quicker circuits. As individual moments rush towards me, flare into immediacy and then blur past, most are soon forgotten save for those captured as digital images, or in some dashed lines … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Careers, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Joshua, Research, The ageing process | Comments Off on In which the wheel turns

In which I capture the present, but forget why

Posted on March 19, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

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 | 3 Comments

In which my lab is a garden

Posted on January 29, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

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 →

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In which we fall

Posted on November 6, 2022 by Jennifer Rohn

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 →

Posted in Academia, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Joshua, Research, Staring into the abyss, Students, Teaching, The profession of science, Work/life balance | 2 Comments

In which I see the light

Posted on February 14, 2022 by Jennifer Rohn

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 →

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In which pandemic storm clouds gather – again

Posted on December 12, 2021 by Jennifer Rohn

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 →

Posted in Academia, Domestic bliss, Epidemics, Teaching, The profession of science, Work/life balance | 1 Comment

In which we near end-game

Posted on February 23, 2021 by Jennifer Rohn

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 →

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In which winter sets in

Posted on November 29, 2020 by Jennifer Rohn

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 | 7 Comments

In which we face the rain

Posted on October 4, 2020 by Jennifer Rohn

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 →

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