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Shelter from the storm

Posted on 21 January 2024 by rpg

There’s another storm blowing in, the milder weather pushed before it melting the ice that has gripped Gravesend for the last 4 or 5 days. Rhea has joined the new girls inside the coop for the night, but Arty and Iris are braving the high perch in the wider enclosure.

There was an inordinate amount of bokking this morning, and when I checked, Iris had laid a massive, pure white egg.

Eggs

That had to hurt

This is her first egg since the middle of November. Nike has been keeping the show on the road pretty much by herself this winter, her brown offerings a constant through the shortest days.

Iris

Who’s a clever girl?

We’ll batten down the hatches tonight and wait out the storm. Sleep tight, ladies.

Posted in 15MinutePost, eggs, hens, personal, weather | Comments Off on Shelter from the storm

Perfect love casts out bitterness

Posted on 17 January 2024 by Erika Cule

18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.

That escalated quickly.

How was morning prayer?

James asks me, less than a week later. James asked me on Monday if I wanted to lead Morning Prayer on Wednesday, so I did. I prayed with one of the Curates; James was not there. As I was leaving Church, I spotted something that needed dropping into the Church office. I take it over and stick it through the letterbox. James opens the door, and asks how it went.

Oh!…thrilling…

I say dryly, and shake my head laughing apologetically

I’m sorry.

There were more emotions packed into those twenty prayerful minutes than can be unpacked on the Church office doorstep. Humour as defence. I am still processing.

I feel as if I have to keep explaining myself. It happened the day before, too, first thing. One of the Curates asked how 2024 had been going for me. I replied nonchalantly

intense.

When I failed to get the job at King’s last year, the feedback I was given included that in the interview I went too deep too quickly. They expressed concern I would not cope with small talk in the Chaplaincy. Indignant in various ways at the time, I am starting to wonder if they might have had a point. Church life seems to involve a lot of conversations about the weather which read as purposefully benign.

I explain, then, something about humour and my professional background. Comedy among statisticians is particular. Statistician humour blends intellectual prowess, technical expertise and rapier wit. It is a form of in-group bonding, within-group jousting. Starting a story in the middle of it, a pattern of speech I am prone to, fell in well with this. It asks, can you fill in the blanks? Can you keep up?

Statisticians care little for the priors of those emotive biologists. No wonder when I had designs on starting a consultancy, I dreamt of calling it

Nihilism and Graphs.

If you can’t keep up with me, you can’t do anything at all.

Statistical humour is great, if you get it. It can be truly funny. Statisticians joke with plenty of innuendo (lots of references to posteriors), and a surrealist philosophical bent. Reductio ad absurdum a specialty. The joking a form of release, because statistical consulting is relational work and emotionally draining. But the pattern of joking – and more meaningfully, the motivations underlying it – do not translate to the Church.

Competitive banter can become compulsive, even habitual. The consulting statistician has to be careful always and considerate. If you say to a scientist client, deadpan, that to carry out a useful experiment they are going to need samples in the unfeasible millions, and they are used to you jesting, they might feel as if you are mocking both them and the hard work they are putting in. When to you, that is just what the data say.

But statistician-to-statistician, crossed with corporate cut and thrust, the whole thing can become cruel, fast. I am not what you might call a statistician’s statistician. My heritage is biology, not math, and I was not allowed to forget this. My PhD is technical enough but my spirit is applied. So when my boss described me as

not a statistician, but from the point of view of a biologist functionally equivalent to one

she was right, and as a true statistician I ought to get the joke. However if you look closely this is a joke that is doubly hurtful, yet the expectation is that I laugh. Perhaps in the long run it is for the best that corporate life gave up on me.

Churchlife

Being in discernment makes Church life weird. Every opportunity feels as if I am being tested, a sentiment both true and a hangover from corporate days. I feel as if I am always on show. When discerning-me puts on a front, she echos back to my corporate life, and, especially under stress, gets quippy.

The first time I met James in person, I was stressed and going a bit quickly. I had just had a garbled conversation with one of the Curates, and when James asked over post-Sunday-service-coffee, how I was doing, I confessed

I think I might have scared Freya

When he tried friendly reassurance

She’s very unflappable

I deadpanned unthinkingly

There’s a challenge.

James looked more shocked than I have seen him before or since. But to the statisticians I worked with that shock factor is the victory.

Perfect love is not very trendy

One of the people I have supporting me lives outside of my parish entirely. During one of our early email exchanges, they explained

Overall I think one key issue is that Christianity itself is kind of naff. Like, being too genuine and too innocent—that’s always kind of embarrassing, isn’t it?

I disagreed in my reply, but a year on, I can see how naïve I used to be. They are right. Back then, I did not know enough of His love, yet. I had grasped not the depth, height, width, vastness. Paradoxically, I fear that I still have not.

I am trying to draw out the contrast between corporate comedy as thinly veiled combative tussle, and the self-deprecating, forever gentle laughs that land well in Church settings. I pray, sometimes, for faster formation, because I feel as if I keep putting my foot in it.

Because one thing Christianity isn’t is a club. It is not an in-group for those in the know. You do not have to make the room laugh and admire you to garner a seat at the Lord’s table. Throughout the gospels, and on the cross, Christ’s arms are wide open for everyone. Whether through prejudice, or physical barriers, or misunderstanding, or fear, or, as in my case, with the witticisms which I know to be ego and my own terror, we must not hurt, we must not mock.

We can joke, but only in love.

A favourite Christianity-related joke.

Posted in careers, Faith, getting the hang of this now, Humour, science | Comments Off on Perfect love casts out bitterness

Don’t let me be misunderstood

Posted on 14 January 2024 by rpg

Watling Street services, just off the A2, is my local petrol station. You might stop there as you head east from the M25 towards the North Kent coast. It’s cheaper than any of the places further out, and has a reasonable Spar attached. Strange to think of such a local facility being a place of succour for visitors from further afield, just passing through.

We have several bird feeders in the garden. It’s Joshua’s job to keep them filled up, and we have a lot of locals who frequent what we whimsically call Gravesend services. There’s a variety of fuel, or food, on offer, plus fresh water and a friendly welcome. The occasional cat or fox is scared off by the proprietors.

It was a bit quieter than normal today, as we had a visitor. I’m sure he just wanted to chat, but the locals were having none of it. Our hens wanted to tell me all about it.

Shite hawk

Um, can I get a falafel burger and some fruit juice, please?

 

They all came back when he’d gone, though.

Posted in 15MinutePost, birds | Comments Off on Don’t let me be misunderstood

New Year, New You

Posted on 14 January 2024 by Athene Donald

We all know New Year’s resolutions tend to last no longer than the first week or two, but it does no harm to reflect at this time of year what might improve body and soul as well as output and all the other drivers of an academic’s life. I am conscious, as full-time (formal) retirement beckons at the end of this academic year when I step down as Master of Churchill College, that I need to be sure I stay fit and active. One of the consequences of the pandemic from my perspective, is the loss of casual exercise in the form of cycling between meetings. Far fewer meetings, held outside the College but within the University, at least of the ones I still attend, are now held in person. This means the need for me to cycle in and out of the city centre once or twice a day is much lessened. Likewise, many of the meetings I used to attend in person in London are now hybrid, if not totally via Zoom/Teams and so I cycle across Cambridge to the railway station comparatively rarely. I never used to think anything about my cycling habits, but reflection tells me I no longer get anything like as much casual but necessary cycling exercise as I used to. This cannot be good for me. In the summer, an evening walk simply for the sake of it may be pleasant; much less so when evenings are dark, cold and – of late – so often simply wet and uninviting.

So, I need to take much more care to exercise deliberately in some shape or form or I will find, when I finally have time on my hands, I don’t have the energy or strength to get out and about. Later life is tedious in this respect (and anyone can check on Wikipedia how many years I have now accumulated in my life), as things one took for granted no longer seem quite so straightforward. One of these days I shall squat down to lock my bicycle to the rack at ground level and find I need the help of a passing stranger to get me back on my feet, which would be embarrassing. So, exercises to ensure my leg muscles are as strong as possible are part of my new year’s resolutions, and something I hope I will have the motivation to keep up with.

However, more generally, I think I just have to concentrate on getting away from the screen. One good thing about going to London is that it provides an excuse not only to cycle to the station, but also – time permitting – to walk across London. Typically, my meetings are at the Royal Society, so that facilitates a good 45-50 minute walk from Kings Cross, healthy if one ignores the pollution levels on most of the streets I need to go along. It must be better than being squeezed into an underground train, particularly with the high levels of respiratory infections present currently, Covid, ‘flu and more (and yes, I do still wear a mask on the tube, and have been shouted at for so doing). However, there is no doubt that on some of the recent days, attempting to do this walk would only mean I ended up looking drowned and less professional than I might like upon arrival.

I attended a London meeting this week at which one of the attendees, slim and accused always of eating, admitted he walked ten miles a day. That is an aspiration few of us probably have in mind, but it clearly worked for him. Most of us in academia are probably fixedly starting at a screen, or a test-tube or an equation for far too much of our days, and equally too much for our well-being. It is hard to make sufficient allowance for our health. Personally, I am no believer in gyms, because I prefer to exercise in private. Back in the days when I would run/jog regularly, before my Achilles tendon forced me to give up, I never chose company for my runs. The pleasure – particularly back when I was a postdoc in Ithaca and the scenery was delightful even if the climate less so – came from being able to watch the changing seasons and just take it all in.

The pandemic meant every local walk was walked to excess. The opening up of the new site at Eddington (North West Cambridge, as it was initially and unimaginatively known) during my tenure at the College did provide new routes, some of which are pleasantly, if only relatively, ‘rural’, offering rabbits, foxes, kestrels etc to admire from time to time. By now, however, I’ve been that way far too often. Just as moving into the College in 2014 gave me a new viewpoint and routes, with the prospect of returning to my own house in the autumn I will have different opportunities, including along the Cam, for a gentle afternoon’s walk, even if they’re the same ones that used to be so familiar. If I can keep up my New Year’s resolutions, maybe I’ll even be up for longer walks and I should certainly have more time in which to undertake them.

It is a strange feeling to be considering full retirement, not something I’m looking forward to. Everyone assures me that ‘something will turn up’, Micawber style, to keep me busy, but equally I am told forcefully not to take the first thing that comes along. In a year’s time, who knows what I’ll be doing or where my centre of gravity will be, but I hope I will still be working hard at not letting old age overtake me and my muscles.

Posted in Churchill College, exercise, muscles, Science Culture | Comments Off on New Year, New You

Waiting for the miracle

Posted on 9 January 2024 by rpg
Are you chitting me

Are you chitting me

The thermometer has been stuck between 1ºC and 4ºC for about three days. The hens are huddling together in the coop, rather than sleep alfresco on their favourite perch. Only one of them has been laying since the solstice, and even she’s had a day off today. The sparrows and great tits and blue tits are ravaging the feeders, and Joshua might have to refill them before the weekend.

But I nipped out to the garden centre on Sunday and came back with some seed potatoes. As usual Jenny has used our excess egg boxes as chitting trays, and in just a couple weeks I’ll be forking some chicken shit into the soil and planting the spudlets, and then, after another cold snap, it’ll get warmer and sunnier, and life begins again.

Snowdrop

These guys are always early

 

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Milestones and Morning Prayer

Posted on 4 January 2024 by Erika Cule

2023

Morning Prayer is said each weekday at St Mary’s. Last year I took to going semi-regularly, on Tuesdays.

Because it gets me out of the house,

I explain.

I go to the gym on Tuesdays, in the morning,

I add.

I joined the gym near the church,

I continue.

Double virtue,

I joke, unable to admit to myself that I am starting to need the church more than I need the gym. Then one Tuesday, James raises an eyebrow at me after morning prayer and comments

See you tomorrow

I have been holding back and I know this. Don’t want to hassle the clergy. Surely, that service is for them? I am trying, at this point, to keep a low profile at St Mary’s. This seems not to be working. I keep getting added to rotas. Weeks start to go by where, what with the gym, morning prayer, job hunting, Sunday worship, bellringing practice and sundry excuses, I end up in one church or another for seven days straight.

There are a handful of us in the congregation who attend Morning Prayer semi-regularly, like me. Some days, it is just me and one of the clergy. From this I infer that there are days when it is just one of them, praying, alone-together with God. Other days, five or six of us cluster. Strangers, visitors and friends, and lively discussions about what we read into the readings and psalms.

One day early last August, two of us laity sat, app in hand. I am yet to master the analogue version. The clock approaching the appointed time, we discuss how to proceed absent clergy. We might just have to crack on ourselves. But the curates tumble through the door just in time. My friend remarks that we were just discussing what we would have done had they not materialised. To which one curate says decisively

Erika, why don’t you lead it?

My inner monologue screams

I am not even confirmed yet.

Out loud:

Sure

Inwardly I pray frantically

Lord, be with me. Let me not cock this up.

I dole out the readings, draw us into silence, and began with the preparation:

O Lord, open our lips.
And our mouth shall proclaim your praise.

I seem to remember we were partway through the psalms, but it might have been during the readings (ah! I can relax a bit!) when it dawned on me that I would have to lead the intercessions for the day, on the fly. I offered more silent prayers.

Lord, let me not forget anyone. The world, and Your church, and this place and its people, and the sick, and the dead, and the nearly dead…

The overall experience left me a little teary. But when Freya and Josh explained to a visitor who arrived after we got started but whom they knew from theological training,

That was Erika’s first time leading.

he replied generously that he couldn’t tell.

2024

This year begins. I give in.

I need to start swimming a little, I reason, on alternate days when I am not in the gym. I have a trip booked when I will have the opportunity to SCUBA dive and I am not at all swim-fit. And I can’t land a job, a whole other saga. It’ll do me good to get out of the house in the morning. Might as well pray more, the solution to most things.

Church was closed on Monday, New Year’s Day. I was there Tuesday as usual, then the gym. I wonder if James sensed what had shifted because after Morning Prayer Wednesday, before the swim, he mentioned that all the clergy would be off today, Thursday.

I can do it,

I found myself offering,

if someone can open the church up.

I continued,

I’ve done it once before.

So here I am, praying alone-together with God. No-one else came. Just me, and Psalm 89, and Ruth (Chapter 3, cliffhanger), and Paul (Colossians 3:12-4:1). This time I did cry, during the intercessions, as I tried not to forget anyone, the world and His church and the sick and the dead and the nearly dead. I am overwhelmed by the brokenness of the world and the calling in front of me.

It’s fine

I lie to people,

It’s fine. It’s just a lot to take in. That’s all.

And,

I add hurriedly, furiously, as if I can imagine ever desiring anything else,

anyway, it might not be that.

Posted in Faith, Life, Milestones, Prayer | Comments Off on Milestones and Morning Prayer

One piece at a time

Posted on 3 January 2024 by rpg

While we’re on the subject of failure, there were a lot of bits of broken tree around the neighbourhood today. And Jenny was greeted by this somewhat alarming sight on the school run this morning.

Fence fail

Yes buddy, that’s my fence

No, not the still-small-but-rapidly-growing boy, but the 8-foot panel laying in the middle of the pavement.

I believe we could say that Storm Henk pushed it beyond its design tolerance, but actually the posts are pretty rotted through and it would be more accurate to declare “It was just a matter of time”. Fortunately the panel (and the back it took with it) fell outwards and not onto Henlay-on-Thames below.

It was the work of 5 minutes with my DeWalt cordless and some 6-inch screws to fasten it back in place, at least more or less and temporarily, and Jenny has been organizing the local trade to quote to replace the entire section.

In the meantime, perhaps I should put up a sign warning people not to go out if it’s windy?

 

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Being Exceptional

Posted on 3 January 2024 by Athene Donald

One of the books I read over Christmas was the 2023 book by Kate Zernike, The Exceptions. It is a story about that committed band of sixteen female scientists at MIT, led by Nancy Hopkins, who built up the evidence base to show just how real – and substantial – the discrimination against women scientists in their institution was. It is a sobering read. I was very familiar with the outcome of their investigations, which were reported in 1999, but the stories of disadvantage spanning many years prior to the report were new to me. Gripping and dispiriting reading. I am almost exactly 10 years younger than Hopkins, and fared considerably better than she did, but nevertheless much of what is related in this book feels very familiar.

The report itself was one of those seminal moments in the (gradual) path towards equity for women in science, rather like – in the UK – Sally Davies’ intervention in 2011, requiring Medical Schools that wanted to obtain funding as Biomedical Research Centre to get an Athena Swan Silver Award. Whatever readers may feel about the Athena Swan awards now, Sally’s actions focussed minds, and not just in the Clinical sector but across higher education in the UK. Likewise, if rather earlier, the MIT report showed up just how much scientific research in universities was not meritocratic in the way most people wanted to believe (including Hopkins). It forced many departments to look at their own processes: around appointments, promotions and all the behaviours that constituted their culture, and take note that women almost invariably faced disadvantage of one sort or another. It might be a lower salary, not being invited to sit on key committees, not being allocated funding for students, being denied the opportunity to apply for funding, lack of space, results being attributed to someone else and, of course, direct harassment of different sorts. Sadly, too much of this will still be familiar to women in the field now, however much things have shifted in the right direction.

When I read the report, back in 1999, it was just after I was elected to the Royal Society, so I was myself already a senior scientist in Cambridge. Yet as I read it – drawn to my attention by a male scientist at MIT who I knew from my time in the US – it felt depressingly familiar, even though I hadn’t previously recognized what was described. It is so easy to attribute lack of progress or success to one’s own failings. Often that may be the right attribution but, particularly if you are a minority scientist, not necessarily always. That feeling that your voice doesn’t carry the same weight as your white male colleagues in committee meetings may well be correct. The suspicion that conversations are going on about pulling together a large grant behind closed doors in meetings you are not invited to attend, may be entirely accurate. Promotions may go to male colleagues whose CV isn’t actually any better than your own. These were events that were described in 1999, with evidence, to many people’s surprise back then. Now, there is less surprise about such incidents, but that doesn’t mean such things don’t continue to happen.

Meritocracy is such an attractive concept, but none of us are necessarily that good at ensuring it happens. Bias comes in a multitude of ways; perhaps we are still discovering just in how many ways. It used to be simply described – as in The Exceptions – for the case of women. Then people recognized that ethnic background also should be taken into account as a situation where bias might creep in. In the UK, increasingly people note that accent may matter, as indicating your class and background. A researcher’s ‘pedigree’, i.e. which department or PhD supervisor they had, may get unreasonably factored in. I suspect everyone does this to some extent, there is no point pretending any of us is completely free of bias of one kind or another, but it can still lead to a golden boy (usually) getting a job because they’ve come up some smooth ladder, unlike their competitors who have struggled against disadvantage. We have to keep trying harder.

The world Hopkins grew up in, indeed the world in which I grew up, had very different attitudes to both the idea of educating women to higher degrees and encouraging them to have careers. Radcliffe, where Hopkins attended, had in its 1964 yearbook (as I learned from Zernicke’s book) the memorable quote

‘The young women of today are a race of culturally induced schizophrenics, They are reared and trained to be the equals of men…Yet these women are also fed the Great American myth of house and home…’

Hopkins absolutely felt that tension.  I recall a woman, perhaps 30 years older than me, who told me how much easier it had been for her, since making that decision just wasn’t an option. She followed her husband, let nature take its course about children, and only returned to the academic fold as a College teaching fellow in later life. She felt that my generation, who had to make explicit choices, had it harder. I’m not sure I agreed with her at the time, liking the fact that I could try to muddle through having both children and a career (and for many years that was something of a muddle).

Women still face that choice, and may still face significant disadvantage if they are surrounded by colleagues who feel having children means a woman can’t be serious about her science, something I’ve never heard said of a man who has children. Undoubtedly the world has moved on since Hopkins entered academia. If you are in any doubt, read The Exceptions. But is simply hasn’t moved on far enough despite so many of the issues being out in the open. The pressure for further change to support all minorities, not just women, needs to be maintained.

 

Posted in Kate Zernike, MIT, Nancy Hopkins, Science Culture, Women in science | Comments Off on Being Exceptional

English Trees

Posted on 1 January 2024 by rpg
failing trees

The trees need to re-assess the contribution they are making to this venture

It was a lovely morning, for 1 January. The sun made a valiant effort to warm our faces, or at least blind us as we turned up Bean Lane, and we parked our new, Green (and green) Mini in the usual layby.

I wondered, though, how trees could be said to ‘fail’. Do they have end-of-year reviews with 360 feedback from other forest denizens?

Birch: “I find Oak to be a solid companion. He should stop being so stiff and start holding onto his leaves a little longer.”

Robin: “Oak has a lot to learn from Birch. I know he’s only been here for fifty years, but he could try being more welcoming to newbies like my family and me.”

bobbin

Pinning Robin down for his EOY feedback is a challenge

This is the place, while lovely, that displays the Parish’s nannying fussbucketry not only with warnings of the ‘Deep Water’ (by a sizable pond), but also signs that say ‘Shallow Water’. With a picture of someone trying to paddle, I guess?

shallow water

I wonder who thought to themselves that what this scene needed was a garish yellow sign.

Regardless, we had a lovely time wandering through the mud and the shoofy leaves, and steadfastly failed to recognize a single failed tree.

berries

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Books of 2023

Posted on 1 January 2024 by Stephen

A combination of life’s distractions, ill discipline and slow reading mean that I have only managed to finish 11 books this year. I am almost embarrassed to admit to such a paltry tally. There are people who can rip through that many titles in less than a month. I envy them their capacity. But it is what it is. Eleven.

As is now my habit, there is a tweet thread of brief reviews of each book – summarised in the image below.

Multi-panel image of the tweet thread of reviews of the 11 books I read in 2023.

Tweeted reviews of the books read in 2023.

My favourites would have to be the first two books that I read this year: Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels and Kenan Malik’s Not so Black and White.

I had previously enjoyed Wulf’s biography of Alexander von Humboldt (The Invention of Nature) and he reappears here, albeit as a minor character, in her stupendous and rollicking tale of the writers, philosophers and thinkers who coalesced around the polymath Goethe in the small university town of Jena in the last decade of the 18th Century.

Not so Black and White is a more sober tome but no less vital for an understanding of the history of racism and the ways that identity politics, while seeking to enact the higher aspirations of the Enlightenment, have led to a fracturing of social solidarity. Malik is another author I’ve read before – his The Quest for a Moral Compass is a magisterial exploration of the development of moral philosophy – and I was once again impressed by the depth and clarity of his analysis.

Most of the other non-fiction titles I got through this year were also important and compelling reads, especially Sarah Churchwell’s The Wrath to Come, an exploration of the persistent legacy of slavery and white supremacy in the USA; Angela Saini’s deconstruction of the presumption of male power in The Patriarchs; Matthew Cobb’s The Genetic Age, a thoroughly researched account of the societal implications of gene and genome engineering; Gaia Vince’s terrific and terrifying analysis in Nomad Century of the likely impact of climate change on human migration; and Peter Frankopan’s massive and massively impressive The Earth Transformed – world history as you have never read it before.

I reserve special mention for Why don’t things fall up?, my friend Alom Shaha’s brilliantly lucid account for non-specialists of how science helps us to understand the world.

Sadly, the two novels that I read this year – Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See – were both disappointments, neither conjuring for me the feeling of the worlds they sought to convey. Better luck next year on that front, I hope.

Posted in book review | Comments Off on Books of 2023