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The separation of life and death

Posted on 15 April 2023 by Stephen

Dad on the beach - Sept 2014

Who is that stranger in my father’s bed?
Those sunken eyes
The concave cheeks
Salted with stubble
The thinned grey hair
Plastered to a narrow skull.
I have lost the man I loved.

In truth it had been a long journey
To this resting place.
A slow stepping backwards
As memory stuttered and stalled
And confusion dampened
The flares of the anger
That made strangers of us both.

You used to fill a room with smiles
(Or suck the air out of it).
How did we become so
Disconnected?
Before the question is fully formed
The answer blurts out:
This is not death
It is life.

 

(My father died in February and I am still coming to terms with the loss. I don’t know what to make of it. Ours was at times an uneasy relationship; we were close and not close. I don’t want to dishonour his memory, but neither do I want to gloss over. I suspect I am not yet ready to look at it – or my own feelings – too closely.)

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A choral coda

Posted on 10 April 2023 by Frank Norman

I have been singing with Crouch End Festival Chorus (CEFC) since late 1994 but I have now retired from the choir. The Rachmaninov Vespers on 31 March was my last concert with CEFC as a member. It will be quite a wrench after 28 years singing with CEFC but my voice is telling me it’s time to quit. This will be the first time in my adult life that I have not had a regular choir practice to attend each week.

I’m not giving up singing altogether: I will continue singing in my local church choir most Sundays, and I’ll still sing semi-regularly with a couple of other church choirs. These all entail turning up on a Sunday, rehearsing and then singing the service, so there’s no midweek rehearsal. I will also remain on CEFC books as a guest singer so I will receive invitations to sing with them on some occasions, but I won’t be a committed member.

Looking back

I didn’t do much choral singing as a child but in my later school years we had an enthusiastic head of music (Father Thomas Carroll) and I sang Handel’s Messiah, Haydn’s Nelson Mass and Mozart’s Coronation Mass when I was in the sixth form. This sparked my interest in choirs.

A quick trawl though my memory suggests that in the past 47 years since leaving school I have sung regularly with sixteen different choirs, plus quite a few more that I sang with briefly or sporadically, or joined for one-off performances. Sometimes I sang with two or three different choirs at a time so I had multiple rehearsals to attend every week.

Here are a few highlights of my choral career including music that was special and performance places that were special, choirs and chorus masters that made a significant impact on me, and some treasured experiences.

My first adult choir – Woking

After leaving school I worked for a year, living at home.  I joined a local choir – Woking Choral Society, conducted by Nicholas Steinitz.  He was the son of Paul Steinitz so had a good musical pedigree. This was my first experience of music making in an adult group. I was only there for a year but I treasure my first introduction to Bach’s St Matthew Passion (glorious) and I remember a luscious concert in Guildford Cathedral where we sang Faure’s Requiem and Rachmaninov’s The Bells. Everything I sang was new and exciting back then.

Getting into church music – Bristol

At Bristol University I sang in the big University choir and we performed Tippett’s A Child of our Time.  The music professor who conducted the choir had a correspondence by postcard with Michael Tippett and he read these out at rehearsals to encourage and inspire us. Then we were amazed when Tippett actually turned up at one of our final rehearsals. My parents came to the concert and found it very moving.

My most formative experience at Bristol though was singing church music. Soon after arriving in Bristol I went along to a service at Clifton Cathedral. It opened in 1973 and I loved the modern concrete architecture. After the service I introduced myself, saying how much I’d enjoyed the choir’s singing. I somehow found I was then invited to sing with the choir.

Clifton cathedral spire

Clifton Cathedral

Clifton is an RC cathedral but we sang music from Catholic and Anglican choral traditions. The high throughput of music of different styles, from Renaissance to 20th century, was a challenge, especially as it was all new to me. I’m not sure I was much use to the choir at first.  I recall Chris saying later that he barely heard me make any sound for the first year I was there! By the end of three years I could sight read pretty well and I had sung a huge amount of music.  As well as regular weekly services on a Sunday we sang occasional liturgical performances of some bigger works: Dvorak Mass in D, Durufle Requiem, Monteverdi Vespers, Rachmaninov Vespers (in Chris’s own English translation). I also remember a parish pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. A chartered train took everyone from Bristol direct to Canterbury and we celebrated Mass in the Cathedral, with the Clifton choir singing. Canterbury Cathedral is a marvellous building, beautiful and full of history.  I remember staring up and marvelling at the beauty of the incredibly blue stained glass windows.

I left Bristol with a chemistry degree and some confidence in my singing ability.

More church music – Newcastle

I moved to the other end of the country and studied for a year in Newcastle, to get a PG Diploma in Librarianship. I joined the choir of St John’s, Grainger Street under Geoff Watson’s direction.  This is an Anglican church in the Anglo-catholic tradition so it didn’t seem such a big step away from the RC services I was familiar with. There was plenty of familiar music and many unfamiliar hymns. At St John’s I had my first experience of Evensong and of the peculiar magic of singing psalms to Anglican psalm chants.

Another strong memory of St John’s is the friendship I found there.  Joining a choir is a shortcut to gaining great friends.  After leaving Newcastle I met up with the St John’s people a few more times when they went away to sing the services in a cathedral for a week. We had great times and music in Lichfield, Southwell, Worcester and Chester.

A symphony chorus – London

I moved to London to start working as a Librarian.  One day I saw an advert recruiting for the BBC Symphony Chorus (BBC SC) and on impulse I applied and went for an audition. I didn’t really expect to get in but I did.  The BBC Chorus was a large symphonic choir, all amateur singers but with the resources of the BBC behind it.  The BBC SC was the resident choir for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Now I was singing with a fully professional orchestra and with leading conductors.

At my first BBC rehearsal, in Feb 1981, I was thrown in at the deep end.  We started work on Berlioz’ Romeo and Juliet, in French of course with the choir divided in 16 parts. The second piece we rehearsed was Bartok’s Cantata Profana – in Hungarian and also in up to 16 parts. The Bartok piece includes a ferociously hard fugal section with the subject announced by the tenors on their own. Terrifying! I came to love this piece once I got to know it. Later that same year the Chorus travelled to Frankfurt to sing Britten’s War Requiem in a festival to mark the re-opening of the old Frankfurt Opera House, freshly refurbished as a concert hall. The symbolism of this (British choir, German orchestra, building partly destroyed in the war) was very moving. We were conducted by Eliahu Inbal, an Israeli conductor. He spent some time on rehearsing the chorus to sing incredibly quietly at the magic moments that Britten creates at the beginning and the end of the piece.

Royal Albert Hall

Royal Albert Hall

In my years with the BBC SC I sang plenty of choral repertoire, both the standard repertoire and much unusual music. We sang 10-12 concerts a year.   The BBC was dedicated to new music and I was happy about this. Working with Krzysztof Penderecki on his St Luke Passion was an extraordinary experience. At first I didn’t know what to make of the score but gradually he explained what we had to do and the powerful music came together. We also joined the BBC Singers in a performance of the very challenging Ligeti Requiem.  The BBC Singers often joined our concerts to sing any semi-chorus sections or just to strengthen the sound. They were brilliant. They sang most of the Ligeti on their own but the Chorus sang in a couple of movements. Another highlight was singing in the first UK performance of Tippett’s The Mask of Time at the Proms. This was a long and complex work that took a lot of rehearsal. The BBC SC  took part in several of the Prom concerts each year in the lovely Royal Albert Hall, including the Last Night of the Proms which was always a great occasion, like an end of term party.

Back then I must have been full of energy.  Not content with all the rehearsals for the BBC concerts I also joined a church choir. I was living a few miles from Greenwich and paid a visit to look around.  I saw an LP in a shop window, a recording that St Alfege church choir in Greenwich had made.  It looked good – the kind of church music that I’d sung at Clifton and in Newcastle – so I went along to a service the next Sunday. I was impressed – the choir sang Messiaen’s short piece O Sacrum Convivium beautifully. I figured if the choir could cope with Messiaen then it was a choir I’d enjoy being with. So I introduced myself and joined up. It was quite a wild ride – loads of great music and great friends and much jollity (i.e. beer). The musical life in Greenwich was lively, much of it linked to St Alfege church and the choir directors Philip Simms and Steve Dagg. I had the chance to join in various one-off concerts conducted by them. I remember singing in the London premiere of a sacred piece by John Tavener, as part of the Greenwich Festival. Tavener attended our rehearsal on the day of the concert and vividly demonstrated the ecstatic quality of singing that he wanted from the choir.  He came over as slightly crazy but very inspirational.

Desert songs – Riyadh

In 1986 I went to work in Saudi, leaving all this marvellous music-making behind. It was not long before I discovered that there was a choral society in Riyadh.  It was a bit underground, for expatriates only, and it rehearsed in the basement of a hotel where all the guests were expats. Once more the choir was a good route to friendships in a place that was quite alien in many ways.  Musically the Riyadh Choral Society was a world away from the BBC but I sang my first Carmina Burana there – in a large gymnasium accompanied by two pianos, brass and timpani. I also sang the lead male role (Frederick) in the Pirates of Penzance, a rare step for me into the theatrical limelight.

Choirs on tour

I returned to the UK in 1989 and moved to Muswell Hill in north London. I rejoined the BBC SC for a few years but then they switched rehearsal venue from Broadcasting House in central London out to Maida Vale.  Coupled with an increase in the number of rehearsals I decided this was too much for me and I left.

During the next year or three I did several one-off concerts with different choirs.  Once you were known as a reasonably reliable and competent singer your name got onto choir fixers’ lists and I had the chance to sing in several interesting places. I sang Beethoven 9 in Bremen, in Ghent and at the Edinburgh Festival. After the Edinburgh concert I went along to three different Fringe shows and followed up with a couple of pints in the Festival Club in the early hours. I travelled with the Tallis Chamber Choir to Ireland to sing Patrick Cassidy’s Children of Lir at the Kiltimagh Festival.  Kiltimagh is a (very) small town in County Mayo and this was their first festival.  We all felt like celebrities walking about the place. It was a small place where everyone knew each other so of course they spotted that we must be some of the festival performers and greeted us like we were stars. I sang Mendelssohn’s Elijah in the Leipzig Gewandhaus with the Nederlandse Vereniging (Dutch Handel Society). Mendelssohn had a strong connection with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra so this performance had a special resonance. I had sung with this Dutch choir a few times previously, including a memorable tour with them to Poland in 1985 to sing Handel’s Theodora. I sang in the premiere of John Tavener’s grand work Apocalypse at the Proms, and later in the Megaron concert hall in Athens – that was one of the best overseas singing trips I made. Apocalypse had some wonderful moments but at three hours was a bit too long. Finally, I sang with Pro Musica two years running: Berlioz Requiem in Le Chatelet in Paris, and Beethoven Missa Solemnis in the Barcelona’s Palau de Musica – a truly beautiful concert hall.

A local choir with ambition

The chorus master for Pro Musica was a certain David Temple. One Friday evening a year or so after the Barcelona concert I was in my local pub when a whole lot of people came in at once, including David Temple.  We recognised each other and I learnt that Crouch End Festival Chorus (CEFC) had recently moved their rehearsal venue from Crouch End to a school just round the corner from my flat. I had seen posters for CEFC concerts and they seemed to sing interesting programmes.  Now they had started rehearsing almost on my doorstep it would have been rude not to join up.  I went to a rehearsal and David auditioned me.  I had not prepared anything to sing so he told me to sing Happy Birthday! I passed the audition and became a member of CEFC for the next 28 and a bit years.

For a while I had been a fan of so-called minimalist music but had not sung any of it. My first CEFC concert included Michael Nyman’s Out of the Ruins, a moving and mournful piece written in memory of the victims of the Armenian earthquake. A bit later we sang various pieces by Philip Glass – I especially loved Vessels from his mesmerising film score Koyaanisqatsi. David Bedford’s Twelve Hours of Sunset was also a special piece, finishing in a blaze of glory. Arvo Part’s Credo was a highlight and the choruses from John Adams’ opera Death of Klinghoffer were dramatic and captivating.

Alexandra Palace

Alexandra Palace

The choir also sang in external engagements for concert promoters like Raymond Gubbay and was booked for recording sessions, often of film music. This proved a lucrative activity for the choir and helped it to grow and to perform in more prestigious venues. As CEFC’s reputation grew so the engagements to more interesting. We sang a few times for Ennio Morricone in concerts of his own music that he conducted. More recently we’ve taken part in film screenings with live orchestra and choir.  The Lord of the Rings was a memorable one – not least because we sang it five times in one weekend! We’ve also performed Hans Zimmer’s music a few times, with him and his amazing entourage. The technical side of his  performances is very impressive.

CEFC used to perform mostly in churches, then used the Barbican quite often but it now has a new home in the theatre at Alexandra Palace.  This is ideal as it is local to the area, not too large, and the theatre has an excellent acoustic.

Rock stars

In 2007 CEFC was invited to sing with Ray Davies at the BBC Electric Proms in the Roundhouse, and this started CEFC’s choral rock adventures. The following year we sang again at the Electric Proms, this time with Noel and Liam Gallagher and Oasis. We sang a few more times with Ray and his band, mainly old Kinks songs plus a few newer songs. In June 2010 we went down to Glastonbury and sang with them on the Pyramid stage.  That was galactic. Just a few weeks later we were in the Royal Albert Hall on the first night of the Proms to sing Mahler’s 8th Symphony. That combination of two highly contrasting concerts and venues, just a few weeks apart, is uniquely CEFC and was a high point for me.

We sang several times with Noel and his post-Oasis High Flying Birds group on their UK tours.  For these gigs with amplified rock bands we had to learn a new way to sing. We each had headphones and were individually miked up. The key thing was to produce a good sound, not to try and compete with the band on volume.  For the sound test before every performance we each had to sing a phrase on our own. I recall the terror of singing into the vastness of an empty Manchester Arena and hearing my amplified voice filling the space!

In 2011 we sang with Basement Jaxx and the Metropole Orkest. I’d not encountered this music before but came to love it. The show was very flamboyant – we were all dressed in white shirts and white trousers, with black sunglasses. Some of the soloists had very extravagant and colourful costumes.

The end

Thanks to all the choirmasters I’ve sung for and all the other choir members I’ve sung with. I’ve learnt so much from all of them. I’ve enjoyed all the singing and have many great memories of ravishing music and fun times socialising after the music was over.

Posted in Biographical, Music | Comments Off on A choral coda

What I Read In March

Posted on 1 April 2023 by Henry Gee

Screenshot 2023-04-01 at 11.43.36David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks The only other novel of Mitchell’s I’ve read is Cloud Atlas, and, like that, The Bone Clocks consists of six novellas loosely tied together, though in conventional sequence rather than nested like layers of an onion, as in Cloud Atlas. Without giving too much away, each novella eavesdrops on a decade in the life of Holly Sykes, a seemingly very ordinary English woman, from teenage runaway to dying septuagenarian, though only the first and last parts are from her point of view. The Bone Clocks is a portmanteau of everything – literary satire to contemporary reportage, near-future dystopia to out-and-out fantasy. It’s never less than ambitious – some might say indulgent – but it is held up from collapse by the sheer quality of writing. I can’t remember the last time I read a novel this satisfying since 2014. That was when I first read Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus: a very different book in many ways, but parallels The Bone Clocks in its evocation of how the fantastic may lurk even at the edges of everyday lives.

Screenshot 2023-04-01 at 11.46.38Gabriel Bergmoser: The Hunted There’s something about the harsh red centre of Australia that brings out the worst in people, worse even than Crocodile Dundee. So much is clear from this taut, exceptionally violent thriller about what happens when a young woman, caked in mud and blood, rocks up at a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere. Edge-of-your-seat stuff, this, but not for the squeamish.

 

 

 

 

Screenshot 2023-04-01 at 11.48.41Lewis Dartnell: Being Human A spirited canter through the ways our biology has inescapably affected world history in ways large and small. Learn how cognitive biases led to the disaster of the Charge of the Light Brigade and why we call chilis ‘peppers’; how inbreeding and genetic diseases led to war; how a mosquito was ultimately responsible the union of England and Scotland; and many more nuggets that’ll open your eyes and stretch your mind. DISCLAIMER: I was sent a pre-publication copy for endorsement.

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Diversity and Inclusion in STEM: What Will it Take?

Posted on 30 March 2023 by Athene Donald

Last week the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee produced its report into Diversity and Inclusion in STEM. It states in no uncertain terms that ‘Action must be taken that truly moves the dial’, recognizing that the issue of diversity is a problem of long-standing, yet evidence and recommendations from previous studies and analyses have not transformed the landscape. It has to be hoped that this is the report that finally does shift things, so that STEM is a genuinely inclusive environment whatever one’s gender, skin colour or familial background.

I wrote previously about the evidence Katherine Birbalsingh gave to this committee, in which she claimed girls didn’t like hard maths and that this was the reason so many chose not to study Physics at A Level. Her remarks at the time were not well received (see e.g. this write up) and do not get significant coverage in the final committee report, which states guardedly in the summary that

‘The evidence our inquiry received offered no consensus as to the reasons for this difference—male dominated-environments, and pre-existing societal expectations being suggested causes.’

Nothing about girls not liking hard maths there.

The original call for evidence was broad, but the bulk of the report focusses on school years rather than what happens in universities and thereafter. My own (written) evidence covered both stages in an individual’s life, but only the former was raised at the in-person evidence session I presented at last May.  It is very clear that the Committee perceives significant limitations in the current school system when it comes to encouraging anyone and everyone to see themselves as a potential future scientist. As it puts it

‘In our view, it is important that all children are able to see themselves in what they learn from an early age. A diverse national curriculum—that contains female scientists, for example—is one low-cost way of ensuring this. Similarly, the careers advice and support pupils receive from the earliest years should promote diverse and inclusive role models.’

I would like to think this report will get attention and traction, but it isn’t clear to me that that is usually the fate of such Select Committee reports. However, it is high time the lack of diversity in STEM gets sorted, to resolve all the downstream impacts on innovation for our economy, good decision-making by scientifically-trained policy-makers, not to mention a healthy education system and fairness and opportunity for all.

Not just for the boys

I discuss many of the same issues (albeit with a specific focus on the issues women face rather than the challenges for other minorities) in my upcoming book Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more Women in Science, which is due out from OUP in May (August in the USA). I am certainly hoping this book is read, not just by those who are in the midst of traversing the tricky career ladder of science, but parents, teachers and policy-makers. As Birbalsingh demonstrated in her remarks to the committee, many a (head)teacher seems unaware of the assumptions they make, assumptions that the social science literature simply does not support. The IOP has spent many years trying to make clear just how much the ethos of the school impacts on choices children – boys and girls, around different disciplines – make. But still far too many schools persist in treating boys and girls differently, with the result we see few female engineers and few men entering English degrees.

I believe the problems start right from the time a child is born, with societal expectations imposed on them in the toys they play with (read Let Toys be Toys various studies and blogs to exemplify this), or the clothes they wear. The explicit message that ‘I’m too pretty to do math’, once emblazoned on a T shirt for sale, I think has been eradicated, but implicitly that message remains and is heard by many a girl. Of course not all schools or families pursue such gender stereotyping, but far too many do and, it would seem, including Birbalsingh’s own school (Michaela, in North London).

And, as numerous posts on this blog have pointed out over the past decade and more, the experiences of women as they move up the academic ladder pile on to these early years’ experiences to make many a woman question what they are doing in science, and whether they belong. The boring familiarity of attending a conference or meeting where the men are introduced with their proper academic titles and the women reduced to a plain Mary Smith may be trivial in one sense, but it is demeaning and highlights that women aren’t fully recognized in the groves of academe. It is equally likely to occur when experts are lined up in the media, when somehow the expertise of the woman is frequently downplayed while all the honorifics of the man are enumerated.

The Commons Select Committee report highlights many of these issues at school and in the scientific professions. Diversity requires we, collectively as a society, do better. I hope that the report receives the attention it deserves and stimulates action. As I anxiously wait to get my hands on a hard copy of my own book, and to see how it fares in the public eye, I have to hope my own contribution in this space will also help to ‘move the dial’. Society needs many more people to become aware of the systemic problems still facing women and other minorities in STEM fields. This is not only or necessarily to take blame upon themselves for being misogynist. The situation is more nuanced than that in general, because it is the whole culture we bring our children up in that is at fault, damaging both boys’ and girls’ life chances in working out what they really want to do, and what their talents are best suited for. Only when we resolve these challenges will society derive the maximum benefit from all its members in solving the numerous huge problems that the world faces.

 

Posted in Commons Select Committe, education, exclusione, Katherine Birbalsingh, Science Culture, Systemic Change, Women in science | Comments Off on Diversity and Inclusion in STEM: What Will it Take?

In which I capture the present, but forget why

Posted on 19 March 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

Ancient history (1997): does anyone map plasmids anymore?

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 illegible scrawl, then adding the bound notebook carefully to the stack of hundreds of others fading in cupboards in my study – decades of events, sucked irrevocably into the past and largely forgotten.

This habit suited me well over the three decades that I worked at the lab bench, writing down every last experimental detail alongside taped photographs, x-ray films, plasmid maps, nucleotide sequence outputs. I captured not just the process, but analyses, conclusions, next steps – even a few unscientific expressions of joy or misery. These entries contain smudges of chemicals, coffee stains, and even what I suspect were tears. For all I know, some of the pages might even be faintly radioactive.

In more recent years, I have felt a strong compulsion to chronicle my home life beyond just what I write in my journals. It was actually Richard’s idea to start a family almanac when we moved to our ‘forever home’ back in 2015. Near the end of our fifth volume now, we both record weather observations, gardening activities, adventures in home-brewing and produce preservation, and any other domestic event that might be worth remembering: pandemic lowlights, comets and meteor showers, hen memorabilia (acquisition, laying habits and deaths), significant illnesses. After a few years we started to see patterns, certain events happening very close to the same time each year: the flight of ant queens, the first appearance of particular butterflies, the flowering of the first snowdrops, crocuses, ornamental cherries, daffodils, tulips, the onset of powdery mildew infection in our courgette patch.

Around the same time, we started a cookbook too – just an A4 notebook where we scribbled down our favourite food experiments or taped in printouts from online recipes or cuttings from magazines. These two volumes are encrusted in batters, grease, fruit stains and God knows what else. I like to think that a thousand years from now, scientists might be able to bring back some extinct forms of life with it.

In the past year, I’ve developed an urge to re-discover some of the more creative areas of my life that I haven’t fed in many years. I’ve started playing the piano again regularly, which I haven’t done since I all but abandoned the instrument at about Grade 8 proficiency when I went off to university. And following a bout of severe laryngitis that largely obliterated my singing voice in 2018, I recently decided to start taking weekly lessons to see if I could rehabilitate my vocal cords. A few months in and I am not only nearly back to where I used to be, but I am learning techniques that should make me sing even better, with a larger range.

Colored pencil sketches of flowers

Last weekend’s entry (Clockwise from top left: Magnolia, hyacinth, circus, evening primrose, wild garlic)

But the most exciting development has been resuming regular sketching. I’ve always loved to draw, especially botanical subjects, but do it only rarely. Inspired in part by Emma Mitchell’s flower sketches on Twitter, and Katherine May’s excellent book “Wintering”, I decided to start a botanical journal, capturing emerging flowers and plants in our garden every Sunday, not only practicing my technique but also documenting the changing of the seasons. After I spent quite a bit of money on a 72-piece set of Lyra coloured pencils and a hardbound book of fine vellum from Strathmore, I was worried that I might abandon it after the first entry. But the project has taken on a life of its own, and it’s satisfying to watch the pages fill up week after week, blossoming like a garden in springtime.

Last weekend, however, I did have a little wobble, wondering why I am so compelled to get all of this stuff down on paper. In the past, when my life stretched out forever, I assumed that the chronicles would come in handy, a reference to consult whoever I wanted to remember a forgotten aspect of my journey on this planet. But now I’m not so sure. Why go to all the trouble? Who is it for? I can’t imagine anyone being interested, even my own family tree once I am gone; unlike a laboratory notebook, it’s not even useful: nobody will need to see how I did it, or reproduce the result. All these hours, days, years of active chronicling, sometimes at a considerable cost (for it takes time and energy that I sometimes feel I cannot spare): what is the point? The experience of doing it, living through it more intensely by recording it? But no – if it was only for the process, I wouldn’t save anything: I’d discharge my heart and soul onto the pages and then throw them away. It seems the saving is part of it, but I no longer know why.

It’s a sobering feeling: in the past, there was only the evangelical certainty that I must gather and accumulate this diverse evidence. Now the stacks of dusty journals seem to look at me and say, “Well?”

Posted in academia, art, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Music, Nostalgia, The ageing process, work-life balance, Writing | Comments Off on In which I capture the present, but forget why

What’s the easiest way to become a less lazy photographer?

Posted on 18 March 2023 by Stephen

I’m thinking of becoming a less lazy photography. Can you help?

Reflections of Brussel's Grand Place in the window of a baroque building

Brussels window.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I enjoy a bit of photography from time to time, since I have an annual tradition of posting my favourite photographs at the end of each year. Photography is something I’ve enjoyed since childhood. I was probably only seven or eight when I got my first camera. As a teenager I set up camp on weekends in my dentist father’s darkroom to make my own black-and-white prints. I was happy to make the switch to digital, and happier still as the iPhone camera developed into a credible substitute for a compact digital camera, though I enjoy the versatility that comes with a camera that has interchangeable lens. Long a fan of Canon digital SLRs, I made the switch a few years ago to the smaller, lighter and mirrorless Olympus OMD E-M5 MkIII. Recently, I’ve rather greedily treated myself to a high-quality compact camera, the Ricoh GR IIIx, convincing myself it would be a great travel supplement to my iPhone and that I wanted to develop my street photography.

But even with all that gear, I’m a lazy photographer. All my photos are taken as jpegs and imported straight into Apple Photos, which comes free on every Mac. There they can be lightly edited, sorted and archived. I pay for iCloud storage so that I have access to all my photos on my computer, iPad and iPhone.

I like to think that I have a good eye for colour and composition, and a reasonable understanding of how to play with or control light and shade; so I confine myself to fairly minimal editing in Photos – straightening a wonky horizon, cropping, tweaking the highlights, shadows and saturation, and maybe adding a bit of sharpening. And then I’m done.

Lately, I’ve been wondering about doing more. I know that if I were to shoot in RAW, I would have a lot more control over the edit. I would have even more control if I invested in a better editing programme, such as Adobe’s Lightroom. But so far I’ve been put off by the hassle and perhaps kidding myself that my composition doesn’t need the extra help.

A blogpost by David Bradley, who is a very fine photographer, particularly of wildlife revealed to me just how much improvement can be gained from using good digital tools. The post explains his workflow for getting a sharp shot of a bird in flight, which involves shooting in RAW, and processing the image in DxO’s PureRaw2 programme to remove noise, before importing into Lightroom for further sharpening and adjustments to the exposure. He also recommends using Topaz’s Sharpen AI tool in some cases, which can deal with motion and other forms of blurring. The result is impressive.

I think I’m nearly ready to jump, not least because Mrs C and I will be going on safari in Kenya in the summer and, while I’m not expecting to return with photographs that would be worthy of National Geographic, I would like to feel that I had done my best with the opportunity. First, though, I would like to hear more about other people’s workflows. There are so many tools out there that it can be a bit bewildering and, as I think I’ve mentioned already, I’m a lazy photographer.

Posted in science | Comments Off on What’s the easiest way to become a less lazy photographer?

Renaissance Man?

Posted on 5 March 2023 by Athene Donald

This week the sad news of the death of physicist and erstwhile colleague Tom McLeish was announced, a soft matter theorist and committed interdisciplinarian – as well as a committed Christian. He is particularly associated with developing theories for the flow of polymer melts, theories he would illustrate with interesting demonstrations (often involving his arm and a sleeve to show how polymer chains of different shapes would move, if I recall correctly) and a fruity vocabulary. Not, I should say, improper language, but involving raspberries, for instance, to describe the associating polymeric structures that formed in certain melts, impacting on their flow; I am sure there were several other foody descriptions that now escape me.

What follows are personal recollections, and they may well be blurred by the passage of time. For instance, when did I I first meet him? Was he still a PhD student or had he progressed to being a postdoc? He spent time working on the flow of polymers at Courtaulds, looking at instabilities in spinning fibres. I wrote a couple of papers with him, the second some time after he had left Cambridge, looking at the motion of polymer chains in the glassy polymers I studied experimentally. I also remember introducing him to my collaborator of the time at the late lamented blue chip company, ICI. Tom subsequently built up a long term and highly successful collaboration of his own with the company, which led to much improved computer visualisation of flows in the complex geometries of a polymer processing factory, work he did as part of a large consortium which he led.

Tom moved from Cambridge first to Sheffield as a lecturer and, when still very early in his career (or as we said at the time, at a young age) moved to Leeds to take up the chair recently vacated by Ian Ward. Ian had been a key early mover in the mechanical properties of solid polymers (and wrote a book of that name; my own copy of this is well-thumbed) but was very much an experimentalist. Tom’s arrival in Leeds necessarily involved something of a reorientation of the work there in the Physics Department, including as part of the IRC (Interdisciplinary Research Centre) in polymers, set up in 1989 before Tom came and which was joint with Durham and Bradford. I think it must have been daunting for Tom to take on such a leadership role when only in his early 30’s, but I don’t think I ever heard him fret about it, although he did talk to me before he formally accepted the job.

Tom spent many successful years in Leeds before he moved to Durham to take up the role of PVC in Research there. Whilst there his enormous range of interests became much clearer. I know how much he enjoyed having an ‘excuse’ to visit departments far removed from his background and to interact with a huge range of colleagues, without ever ceasing to be a physicist. But he took enormous interest in the medieval Bishop Grosseteste (Bishop of Lincoln, who died in 1253) and his theories of light and, when he moved to his final position at the University of York, once his stint as PVC was over, his title was explicitly not that of your average 21st century physicist, instead taking the (historic) title of Professor of Natural Philosophy, but holding it in the Physics of Life Research Group (like me, over the years his interests had moved from synthetic polymers to those of living origin).

Looking at the York website, though, it is clear how diverse his interests had become, including being a Member of Management group for the Centre for Medieval Studies and a Member of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. His Christian faith became ever more visible too, including in the 2014 book he wrote using the biblical Book of Job as its basis, Faith and Wisdom in Science. His last book, published in 2019, Poetry and Music in Science, has a wide sweep, as suggested by its subtitle: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art. He, like me, did not believe in a ‘two cultures’ approach to life. He served on the REF2021 Physics sub-panel, and was very exercised by how interdisciplinary research was being treated: he chased me to make sure that I was paying due attention to it in my role as Chair of the Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel for the exercise.

I am sure that his faith was hugely important to him in the months leading up to his death, once pancreatic cancer had been diagnosed last summer. I last saw him at a conference in the spring, when he still seemed to be in fine form. He kept on tweeting during the months after his diagnosis (which he publicly disclosed over Twitter), and it was obvious how much solace he derived from music – he played the French Horn – with frequent comments on the BBC Radio 3 offering. Indeed, my last exchange with him was about something on Radio 3.

He was only 60, cruelly young to die. From the comments I have already seen (for instance over Twitter) it is clear how many people he helped, mentored and developed scientifically. His range of collaborators, within the UK and far beyond, was extensive. At the Royal Society, where he had succeeded me as Chair of their Education Committee, his passion for science, education and outreach was remarked upon to me this week as we all mourned his loss.

RIP Tom. You will be missed by so many.

 

Posted in ICI, interdisciplinary, Interdisciplinary Science, polymer melts, Research, Tom McLeish | Comments Off on Renaissance Man?

John Jackson OBE (1934 – 2023)

Posted on 5 March 2023 by Erika Cule

It is good to read about a life well-lived, I think. Especially if you struggle with your own existential dread. (Following Covid, isn’t that all of us, to a degree?)

My mother’s Uncle, John, to us “Uncle John” even though he was actually Great Uncle John, died last month. The funeral will take place next week. It’s a sobering moment for us as a family, because John represents the last living blood relative of my grandparents’ generation on both sides. John leaves behind his second wife, Pat, his two sons and my mother’s two cousins Alistair and Andrew and their families, an enormous number of lives touched, and, well, us. Me.

John Jackson RIP

I cribbed this picture from the Burton Albion FC website. I hope they don’t mind.

I got to know John a little in his retirement, my adulthood. Before that he was someone we went to a football match with one time and a face in family photographs from a time before I have memories. But following the death of my grandfather George, John’s brother, J and I would stop by John and his wife Margaret’s place in the midlands on the way to or from the Lake District. After George and my other remaining grandparents died in rapid succession within a matter of months in the early 2010s, my whole immediate family gravitated towards our parents’ and grandparents’ siblings, as if putting out tendrils, desperate to connect to what remains of each other here on Earth. Redoubling our efforts with more obscure branches of our family trees.

Family photo from 1988

Family photo circa 1988

I knew little of John’s life before he retired, I only read about it just now in two articles in the local press.

I had known that John was active with Burnley Albion FC, his local football club, and instrumental in its work in the community. I hadn’t known, although it doesn’t surprise me to learn, that through his previous role with Burton Albion Community Trust he had been instrumental in enabling the Pirelli Stadium to become a vaccination centre during the pandemic. Our whole family is quite “light under a bushel”, I am perhaps less this way inclined personally but in general it is in our family culture to be understated.

I knew John for his warm hospitality, his unlikely fandom for Russell Brand, the sincerity with which he welcomed us as a newly married couple and with which he talked with me over the years as we grappled as a family with our history and with our future. I remember how he took his own tragedy and worked with his son to make a BBC Documentary on a systematic problem in UK Hospitals, always with care and love and never with self-pity. His late wife Margaret was an astonishing character, and following her death John never wallowed but carried on, welcoming J and I, holding my hand when the marriage failed, building relationships and being at the centre of his community.

I know John’s death isn’t about me, but he won’t mind being part of something bigger – that was him in life for sure. I want to note somehow how different birth and death look once one believes. When John was dying, I felt calm and steady; I prayed because that’s what I do now, and I listened to others grieving and grappling. Coincidentally seeing as it’s John’s funeral this week I held a newborn for the first time in several years too, the much-longed-for son of a friend; I gazed into its unseeing eyes, my heart unable to hold onto this miracle. Babies are have been Simply Marvellous, but Everything Is Different Now.

Lots of love to John and his family, and blessings aplenty to my new friend’s new life, also, as it happens, a “J”.

Posted in Burton Albion FC, Faith, in loving memory, John Jackson, Life, obituary, unlikely fandom | Comments Off on John Jackson OBE (1934 – 2023)

What I Read In February

Posted on 28 February 2023 by Henry Gee

UntitledDale E. Greenwalt: Remnants of Ancient Life There is more to fossils than bones and stones. Very rarely. soft tissue is preserved too, and Dale Greenwalt reviews what we can and cannot know about ancient life from the occasional scrap of chitin, cellulose, protein or DNA that niggardly posterity chances to leave behind. DISCLAIMER: I read a proof copy sent to me by a publication for whom I am writing a longer review.

 

 

 

 

 

Screenshot 2023-02-13 at 05.56.02Tim Marshall: The Future of Geography The High Frontier is a lawless place. But as Tim Marshall explains in this very readable guide to the latest in space exploration, the absence of rules makes space a dangerous place — for everyone on Planet Earth. The space programs of all the major and minor players are set out, as are the various dangers as they scramble for territory above our heads. It then goes all fizzy and futuristic at the end, and inexplicably misses out the most likely habitat for humans in space – hollowed-out asteroids, planetary surfaces being too difficult and expensive. DISCLAIMER: I was sent an advance copy by the publisher.

 

 

 

Screenshot 2023-02-22 at 06.47.56Robin Dennell: From Arabia To The Pacific: How Our Species Colonised Asia Our species began as a hunter of open savannah in Africa. When it left Africa into Asia, it had to contend with environments as harsh and as different as arctic tundra and tropical rainforest – which it conquered as no other species has done, simultaneously driving all other hominids to extinction. In this engaging book, archaeologist Robin Dennell explains how and why our species became so uniquely invasive. It’s an academic text, but don’t let that put you off, as it’s never less than completely readable. It is, though, printed on that shiny paper academic publishers seem to love, you know, the grade that makes even slim volumes like this weigh a ton. DISCLAIMER: I was sent a copy by the author.

 

UntitledArthur C. Clarke: The Deep Range I seem to have lost my reading mojo, so, frustrated by a deeply cerebral novel I could barely start, let alone finish ( I might succeed one day) I turned to this good old-fashioned SF from the good old-fashioned Arthur C. Clarke, an undemanding adventure in which a washed-up astronaut conquers his fears of space by mastering the secrets of the deep. It was written in 1957, and it shows, but I’ll make no apology for having enjoyed every minute.

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Contrasting fates of Cambridge and Burnley

Posted on 21 February 2023 by Athene Donald

It is depressing to learn that the Treasury is essentially constraining any capital spending from the Department of Housing, Levelling Up and Communities. Whereas when Michael Gove was appointed Secretary of State there might have been some optimism that he ‘got’ the need for investment in left-behind regions, the way the Department’s budget has so far been spent has suggested that there is not such a strong will overall across Government, and notably within the short-term financially-focussed Treasury. As Jack Shaw for the IPPR put it

‘Contrast the culture of innovation supported by EU funding with the Shared Prosperity Fund’s culture of bean-counting.’

The loss of these EU Structural Funds is a real blow for many areas, since these were allocated inversely according to the local level of economic development, as measured by GDP per person. Regions which were classified as less developed received proportionally more funding. The same relationship does not exist in allocations from the replacement Shared Prosperity Fund, as many commentators have noted. The more deprived areas are losing out to better-heeled regions in ways that are hard not to see as driven by political imperatives more than the need to level up. Furthermore, again to quote Jack Shaw,

‘the methodology underpinning the Shared Prosperity Fund bears limited relation with its stated policy objectives.’

An interesting recent report from the Centre of Cities, which contains a wealth of data to digest, highlights the inequalities across the regions, or more specifically across cities up and down the land. I live in Cambridge, a superficially wealthy city, though a previous report from the same organisation has identified it as the most unequal city of all. It has a great number of citizens with high levels of education, but it also has high levels of pollution together with exorbitant house prices which are second only to London. My city is not particularly typical. It seems to sit near the top or bottom of just about every figure of merit this report analyses. It sits at the very top of cities when it comes to rate of growth of the population over the decade to 2021, with an increase of 17.9%, closely followed in second place by Peterborough at 17.2%. The area is booming (which of course drives the prices of houses ever upwards), with the highest number of ‘new economy’ firms. However, our roads are choking us, public transport is still woeful into the city centre – although the council wishes to introduce a congestion charge along with improved transportation links – but cycling is available to anyone fit enough, including students, who happens to have the luxury of living close enough to their place of work to make that feasible (but beware that pollution).

Skills and education are taken seriously in Cambridge. At 3.4% of the population, it has one of the lowest rates in the country of workers with no formal qualifications. In my College we take apprentices seriously in teams like maintenance and catering, so even those who join us not having thrived at school can hope to gain useful qualifications, whether or not they choose to stay employed here. At the other end of the scale, Cambridge has one of the highest levels of the population with Level 4 or above qualifications at 63.5%, beaten only by Edinburgh and Oxford.

That high level of skills in the Cambridge population is of course immediately relevant to the city’s success. At the other end of the scale, Burnley has more than 5 times as high a percentage of people with no qualifications coupled with less than half as many as Cambridge with Level 4 or above education. Burnley, like many another northern de-industrialised city, has fallen into a low skills, low wage equilibrium. For families where the breadwinner lost their job in the mines or mills a generation or more ago, there may be a feeling of helplessness, a belief that a decent job is not there for them, with little concomitant motivation to stay on in education to gain qualifications that may take them nowhere, or to upskill later in life. The Centre for Cities report has a lot to say about these people who are demoralised to the point of not attempting to enter the workforce or to seek a new job when they lose theirs. These are people they call ‘involuntarily inactive’.

One of the problems with the Levelling Up White Paper is how little it had to say about skills. There has been a little more information published recently about the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), although how helpful that will be in practice for those involuntarily inactive in regions where skilled, even semi-skilled jobs are in short supply, remains to be seen. Who will want to take on a substantial loan in mid-life with no certainty of a well-paid job at the end, a situation made even more unpalatable if there are several family dependents? Helpful though the LLE may be for some, it is far from a universal panacea to resolving the distressed face of places like Burnley.

Along with upskilling must be the creation of relevant jobs in local industry.  All the evidence is that anchor industries play a crucial role in the economy of a city, not least because non-graduates are much less likely to move away from their home towns than those with higher qualifications. Lincoln has thrived through the combination of a new(ish) university and employers like Siemens, a vision vigorously pursued by their former VC Mary Stuart.

But sometimes there are employers seeking a skilled workforce who cannot find them. To return to my own local area, but moving a bit further from Cambridge, at a recent meeting organised by the Royal Society in Norwich, we heard from a company based in Suffolk about their employment needs. Here was a firm, with a full order book, but it couldn’t attract the skilled and semi-skilled people it needed, with local youth not seeing being a machine operative, for instance, as of interest to them. The area is not rich in alternative industries, but still they could not attract those leaving school, and local courses were not particularly geared to their needs. Further education colleges in the area, as elsewhere, are now even more hampered in development due to the government’s recent reclassification of them as public sector. This change means they are now subject to strict government lending restrictions and effectively barred from taking out commercial loans, making capital expenditure almost impossible, preventing them from expanding or changing emphasis in their courses. This particular Suffolk CEO who spoke, felt that developments at Sizewell C, not that far away, would suck up many of those who might otherwise have thought about joining their company – and additional skilled labour for the construction of the site would need to come from much further afield.

Only if we start to see joined up thinking across Government – from the Department of Education, through DHLUC to the newly created Department for Science, Innovation and Technology – will there be any hope of seeing improvements in our urban areas, ensuring a match between the skills provision and local need as well as decent funding to go along with this, thereby creating jobs and hope where currently there is little of either.

Posted in Centre for Cities, education, Equality, Further Education, Shared Prosperity Fund, skills | Comments Off on Contrasting fates of Cambridge and Burnley