Tributes poured in following the death of Jane Goodall, with stories of her remarkable life and doings, the way she set out new paths in research and lived a different kind of life. The quoted remark of hers that most struck me was
“It doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.”,
although there has subsequently been a debunking of the attribution. Nevertheless, I suspect that it is in the spirit of things she might have said, given interviews of her I have seen.
For me, that first sentence certainly rings true. Although few men of my acquaintance would admit to the fact they like women to know their place quietly in the background, I nevertheless think somehow that’s what many men around the world expect. It is just one aspect of that pernicious habit we all have of stereotyping. The trad wife may be having something of a revival, at least on the other side of the Atlantic, but will be little seen in academia: you’re not going to survive long in the cut-and-thrust world of research if you choose to fade into the background and merely bring in the cakes for celebratory teas. But there may still be an expected element of ‘yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir’ said to the head of a team (who is statistically likely to be male), still, in almost all scientific disciplines.
There are a number of other notable women who have made this same point about being difficult in different spheres, probably far more than I know of and covering centuries. Let me just give a few not-so-distant examples. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a Harvard Professor of early American history, who used the phrase ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’ in an article she wrote, back in 1976. The phrase took on a life of its own, according to her, and she subsequently expanded on it in her book of the same title. In 2019 she reflected on this in a fascinating essay, casting the sentiment back to a poem published by Anne Bradstreet in 1650 (published in London, although she was a colonialist New England poet). Bradstreet wrote:
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits, …..
In other words, get back to your sewing, woman.
Moving forward to a period I lived through, let me highlight another woman, like Jane Goodall, sadly missed, Lisa Jardine. I only met her a couple of times, but she was another force of nature who, when she became the first female fellow at Jesus College in Cambridge in 1976, created badges which said ‘behave badly’. These she would give out to colleagues, such as Jane Tillier, the first woman Lay Chaplain to be appointed at the College in 1984, exhorting them not to go about their business quietly.
Of course, in our current political world, there is the example of Jess Phillips, famously pugnacious, who says of herself
‘I’m tough in most situations and I’m not afraid to speak back at people if they’re having a pop at me.’
And lots of people do have a pop at her. As she puts this in a chilling comparison with domestic abuse ‘
What happens is there’s a slow and steady buildup to control a woman – you have to be very negative about them, bring them down, groom them to a position of weakness, isolate them from people by threatening to embarrass them at work. You close them in, and then when all those bits of control are done, you escalate to violence.’
No, women just want to be allowed to speak up without fear – but with good sense. Whether in science or anywhere else, our voices need to be heard and listened to, not treated as if we are out of line for daring to open our mouths. Too often women are spoken over, ignored or slapped down. Still. That this is ongoing was apparent from my conversations with younger women at the recent WISE conference, who were all too familiar with the sensation of men around them who weren’t necessarily willing to listen. Who might additionally mark a woman down for speaking up. I fear, if the ructions in the USA spread over here, those sensations may only grow.
Apart from the potential of damaging one’s career, speaking up in the face of negativity or worse, can be extremely tiring. There are times when any fighter, in any situation, may prefer to go and hide in a corner and nurse their wounds. It takes energy from the day job, such as research or teaching. It takes time away from the actions that might lead to progression, be it writing papers or attending conferences. By fighting one’s corner there are many ways in which one’s career may be jeopardised, or at the very least hindered. But if we don’t speak up, then nothing will change. I know I have the luxury of no longer having a career to worry about, but Lisa Jardine did not when she was first elected as a junior research fellow all those years ago. By encouraging others, as well as herself, to ‘behave badly’, she paved the way for all the women research fellows who came later to have a voice and a status.
Many of us will be marked down as ‘difficult’, or indeed as feisty, not a shrinking violet, unpredictable, outspoken – at this point you should insert your own particular bête noire phrase, because most readers will know what gets under their skin if they speak up. This, of course, can happen to men too, but somehow the vocabulary is usually different, with words like feisty rarely applied to a man. It may not inherently be pejorative but, when tossed in my direction, I have always felt that was the message conveyed. However, being difficult is, too often, the only way for change to happen. The parsing of ‘women are aggressive while men are assertive’ may linger under so much of this, but that’s not a reason to stop putting one’s case without fear.
When I set off for University, I wasn’t surprised to find there weren’t many women on my course: there were only three Cambridge colleges that admitted women back then (i.e. no coeducational colleges at all), so of course I would be in a tiny minority. That recognition that I was the only woman in the room – for instance in an undergraduate practical class – was only to be expected. However, at the WISE Conference I attended this week, it was dismal to hear that for some women that still seemed to be their experience at work. Unlike many of the talks I have given on the subject of women in STEM, the audience here were largely engineers in industry, but their experiences seem disappointingly similar.
One panel discussion opened up this topic: how do you cope with that sense of difference in the room? The answers seemed to align with my own strategy of using it as a superpower (albeit that’s not a phrase I’ve ever personally used), by stressing that people will remember you over the bunch of identikit men, so you should use that difference to your advantage. I’ve written previously about how I’ve given up worrying about my dress causing me to stick out, but, instead, likewise use it to my advantage. Typically, this has led me – consciously or otherwise – to choose something red, although not on this occasion, when I was in a much more sober hue.
But using difference as a superpower still costs personal energy, and sometimes the cost is too great. Watching others in your organisation flourish while your own career stagnates for reasons that look suspiciously like bias, can be painful. Being expected to do the legwork, yet not get the credit or benefit from the resulting positive outcomes can lead to any worker wondering why they are sticking around. On the first panel discussion it was clear all three women (Lucy Davies, Lily Davies-Dobbs and Mamta Singhal) had thought about leaving a position because, basically, they’d had enough. Possibly if you had a panel of three men discussing their lot in life you might get the same result, but possibly not for the same reasons: of being passed over, ignored and not treated seriously.
To me, at my stage in life (viz: retired), it is depressing to realise that things may have moved on, but not nearly far enough. There are so many ways that women can feel excluded and overlooked for reasons that don’t seem legitimate. I was once given the advice, by an extremely supportive colleague, to get voice-coaching lessons to drop my voice. It may have worked for Maggie Thatcher – or at least she thought it would – but I deplore an attitude that suggests nonsense spoken in a low, gravelly voice is worth more than sense uttered in a typical female voice. Of course, I’m assuming I do talk sense when I make that rebuttal, but the fact remains the timbre of one’s voice should have nothing to do with whether or not one is listened to. I’m sure those who speak with a regional or foreign accent may feel a similar sense of disadvantage (see the reports of how class amongst undergraduate students rears its ugly head due to the ‘wrong’ sort of accent, in this case creating an apparently toxic atmosphere at the University of Durham).
But, to feel that one has to leave an organisation because its culture is toxic is such a waste, but may be necessary for one’s wellbeing. When I found Cambridge becoming toxic to me, I thought hard about leaving. My friends encouraged me to seek pastures new because it was getting painful and sapping my energy. But – and I remember writing a letter to this effect to one of these friends very clearly – I felt if I left, I would be letting the next generations of women down. Here I was, a professor and an FRS, what message would I be giving the early career women by quitting? So I stayed, in due course in 2010 (although in an almost accidental way) I became the University’s Gender Equality Champion and so was able to have some influence on the culture. In my case I’m certainly glad I stuck it out, but everyone has to make their own decisions.
One key message I personally took away from the WISE event, was not to be apologetic (although I’m ‘sorry’ to say, I can’t remember which of the three panellists I mention above offered this particular piece of advice). How often I – and I’m sure many of my readers – have started a conversation or an email with an apology. I’m sorry to disturb you, I’m sorry if I’ve misunderstood you, I’m sorry this email is a slow response….there are so many variants of the apology. Sheryl Sandberg may have started ‘ban bossy’, but I think a movement to stop unnecessary apologies would also be helpful for women in STEM. The need to reject bossy from the (male) lexicon of our world, of course, must remain a goal too.
It was heartening to see so many women come together to share experiences, both good and bad, and to reinforce their determination to continue to fight the good fight in the world of women in STEM.
When I first moved to London in 1997, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Long hours in the lab would spill into the evening streets and underground tunnels of a city so large that you could never experience it all. When I think back to those evenings this time of year, it’s all wet leaves slicked against grey pavements, streetlights bleeding colours, the smell of fireworks exploding in the chilly air.
My companions were fellow postdocs, and this whole period in my life is tangled up in how I thought about being a scientist, inexperienced and trying to work it all out. High highs and low lows, too young to have worked out the balance of things – the memories saturated with blue. Blue but beautiful, and the thought of not being in that place was incomprehensible, even when it hurt.
Of course, it was never going to feel that way forever. After Joshua was born, the compact two-bed flat in Canada Water was too small to contain us. And at that stage of life, a few decades on, it was possible to imagine a different kind of life. It almost broke my heart leaving the canals, docks and woodlands of the Rotherhithe area I’d grown to love, but the first time we’d stepped into the back garden of the Kentish house we now call home, our fate was sealed. It was vast, green, full of trees and potential – about as far away as you could get from the postage-stamp-sized council flat plot where we’d carved as many vegetables beds as was humanly possible out of the the rough grass – much to the bemusement of our indifferent neighbours.
I’d always dreamt about keeping chickens and bees, and a garden full as many of edibles as possible. Today, I fulfilled the long-standing ambition of making Torrone Sardo (an Italian nut-filled soft nougat) with only our own ingredients. Hazelnuts are an acceptable traditional substitute for almonds, and this year the cobnuts and filberts we’d planted ages ago were finally mature enough to give a decent crop.
Filberts and Kentish cobnuts from the back garden hedge
So today, we shucked two large bowls of nuts from their frilly casings, then experimented as a family with the best way to crush the shells in a high-throughput manner (the grape mangler was a bust, but a large brick against the paving stones worked wonders).
A failed experiment: crushing hazelnuts with the grape wrangler
I separated the whites from three pretty green eggs laid by Luna, our new Cheshire Blue, whipped them to peaks and folded them into a pound of melted honey from last summer’s harvest. It needed stirring continuously on a bain marie for 45 minutes, then 30 minutes more after adding the nuts I’d roasted for 15 minutes in a 180 degree oven. It was relaxing just to sit there on a stool by the stove, writing and stirring, and now the mixture is setting in a cool room between sheets of parchment.
Torrone Sardo, which I first tried on a trip to Sardinia at the turn of the century
There were other garden chores: Richard has been harvesting grapes for wine, collecting medlar fruit to “blet” into over-ripeness, and gathering the last of the apples and pears. It’s been a great year for fruit, thanks to the extended heat wave. But I’ve been happy to welcome the autumn, with its stormy rains, cold mornings and brilliant blue skies. Soon we’ll be picking the last of the tomatoes and cucumbers, and harvesting pumpkins and parsnips.
The right tool for the job
London is miraculous, and I still love working there. But country life is all I’d hoped, with space to breathe, grow and work the land. I can go for hours without thinking about science, or the anxieties that tinge my campus existence. I never stop remembering how lucky I am – not just for the quality of my life now, but for the colourful journey that brought me here.
I’m essentially a year into retirement and, being the age I am, it is not surprising that I get invited to attend other people’s retirement celebrations. Of course, not all academics want such an event in their honour, and for some it is hard to know when retirement actually happens, now few universities in this country still have a formal retiring age: some professors may want just to work more flexibly or part-time, rather than hang up their boots completely.
Last week it was the turn of Sir Richard Friend to be the subject of such an event, although he is most certainly not stopping doing his research. Under Cambridge’s then rules, he had to give up holding the Cavendish Chair (the senior chair in my department, the Cavendish Laboratory) in 2020, but he continues to hold grants and supervise students as a Director of Research. Richard and I are exact contemporaries, meeting for the first time just before our undergraduate lectures began and subsequently (after we each spent a few years abroad) long-term colleagues and sometimes collaborators. We co-authored a handful of papers together, although none recently.
A day long symposium was held in his honour. It was extremely well attended, with ex-group members coming from around the world. He has trained up many PhD students who have gone on to have fantastic careers in Europe and the USA in particular, as well as in this country.
But how do you give a talk to honour a man of such stature? At my own retirement conference, much was said about impostor syndrome, which Richard (if I recall correctly) admitted to suffering from himself when he spoke there. The topic did not arise at this recent event. The talks ranged from the purely scientific, with just a nod towards how Richard had influenced or supported them, to much more personal talks. There were frequent references, at least shown photographically, about the winter schools his group went on in places where skiing fitted into the agenda too. So, we had multiple photos of Richard looking suitably tanned, relaxed and begoggled, with snow in the background.
Of course, much was also said about the science underlying generations of the novel materials – their chemistry and their microstructure – of devices and potential devices developed in the group. No doubt Richard, like every other scientist, might have wanted more papers, more citations and more funding. Perhaps in his case he would also have preferred to have more patents and more companies to his name – surprisingly little was said about the companies he set up during the symposium. For many years he was a rare example, certainly in the Cavendish, of a scientist who was also entrepreneurial and set up spin-outs from his work which thrived for many years before being bought up by industrial giants, or the technology licensed to such companies. He was proof that you could do cutting-edge science and get stuck in what at the time (early 1990’s) was still being seen as the dirty world of patents and entrepreneurship. He was publicly lauded, although I’m sure many of my colleagues continued to wonder secretly about the legitimacy of doing this as an academic physicist.
I recall, before his first company CDT became a reality, how he quietly mentioned to me over a cup of tea in the Cavendish canteen, that he and Jeremy Burroughes had seen photoluminescence in a test tube from a solution of one of the new conducting polymers they were studying. He had to say this very quietly, and swear me to secrecy, because this would have been before the first patent was filed in 1989. But the lighting up of the test-tube was obviously matched by the lighting up of his eyes as he grasped the significance of this observation. Jeremy went on to become CDTs Chief Technology Officer, a role he has held for many years.
Richard’s science has been massively significant – and quantifiable. He knows how many prizes and other honours he has received. So, I wonder if actually he got more pleasure on the day, because less usually voiced, from the plaudits describing his humanity: his mentoring and nurturing of generations of students and postdocs (as an example see the text in this photo, alongside generations of Cavendish professors).
Five Cavendish Professors: a younger Richard (top left, 1995-2020), probably at his election to the Chair, standing alongside Sir Sam Edwards (1984-1995); sitting, Sir Nevill Mott (1954-71) and Sir Brian Pippard ((1971-84). The painting behind is of the first Cavendish Professor, James Clerk Maxwell and his wife, although the reflection makes it hard to see them.
Every researcher is impacted by those around them for good or ill. Sadly, it is too often for ill, when a student meets a bully or an unsupportive supervisor who never encourages their first faltering steps. Too often in that case, those steps may also be the last academic steps that that researcher takes. However, multiple times during the day speakers highlighted the help they had received in order to progress, and the kindness and generosity they had benefitted from. It isn’t that Richard couldn’t lose his temper, and he certainly had feuds with senior scientists who he felt had got the wrong end of the stick or who had otherwise stepped out of line, but there is a difference in tearing a strip off a research student and your peers. The latter should be able to defend themselves, the former much less so, as I have frequently voiced here.
The tributes to Richard were many and heartfelt, and I heard more stories in the margins of the meetings to add to those formally expressed. In the past, during my time championing women in the sciences in the university, I heard similar stories from women comparing their time working in the Cavendish’s Optoelectronics group spearheaded by Richard, with other places they had gone on to work. In one case they found this comparison with their then department (where they held a fellowship) in another university, so upsetting they burst into tears.
We need leaders who are humane, as well as brilliant and entrepreneurial, and Richard has shone on all fronts. I hope he enjoyed this symposium in his honour.
William Boyd Stars and Bars A rare mis-step by a usually reliable author who ventures into slapstick comedy of the uptight-Englishman-in-America variety. If it’s satire about America you’re after, Dickens did it first (and better) in Martin Chuzzlewit, which — perhaps worryingly — reads as incisively today as it presumably did way back when.
Shirley Jackson The Haunting of Hill House I am told that this is something of an American literary classic. A student of the paranormal selects a few guests to inhabit and study a notoriously haunted house. There is very little actual haunting of the ghosties-and-ghoulies variety. It is, though, a disturbing psychological study of the descent of one of the protagonists into madness.
Stephen King Pet Sematary I hadn’t read a Stephen King since Needful Things. That was many years ago, and at the time I thought it over-rated… though something about it has remained with me ever since, in the sense of an itch in the back of my mind I can’t quite scratch. As for Pet Sematary, King has said himself that it is the most disturbing of his novels. The plot is easily summarised. A young family moves into a house in Maine next to a highway that has claimed the lives of many pets and not a few small children. The children (the live ones) bury the pets in the Pet Sematary of the title (the mis-spelling is deliberate) but there is another burying ground, deeper in the woods, founded by the indigenous Micmac, where things that are interred don’t stay buried for very long, and you can guess the rest. King manages to sustain an over-long tale (as someone said of Wagner, he has wonderful moments and dreadful quarters-of-an-hour) solely by his skill as a writer, and, believe me, the boy will go far. In the same way that Bach (to invoke another shade of classical music) invented the rules of fugue and then systematically broke all of them, thereby creating something transcendent, King breaks – nay, obliterates — all the rules of creative writing and succeeds in their despite. I’m not putting him up there with Bach, or even Wagner (though there is an unpleasant taint of antisemitism in Pet Sematary that might have struck a chord with Baron Bomburst of Bayreuth), but in many places he tells rather than shows (so making the set-pieces where he shows all the more arresting). There is probably far too much exposition (done so well that it only enhances one’s sympathy for the characters). And there’s the error known as ‘Squid-on-the-Mantelpiece’. The Turkey City Lexicon (a primer for intending writers of SF) says of this trap for the unwary that
It’s hard to properly dramatize, say, the domestic effects of Dad’s bank overdraft when a giant writhing kraken is levelling the city.
Suffice it to say that Pet Sematary has an aquarium of squid on several period features, probably by Adam. But there was one big, big problem. If you live next to a busy highway that claims the lives of pets and small children, why don’t you build a decent fence?
Adam Kay A Particularly Nasty Case You’ll remember Adam Kay from the darkly hilarious memoirs of a doctor This Is Going To Hurt and The Nightshift Before Christmas if not for his post-healthcare memoir Undoctored, which is just dark. A Particularly Nasty Case is a whodunit featuring Jewish, bipolar and promiscuously gay Eitan Rose (rule 1: write what you know) trying to work out who’s popping off colleagues at the decrepit London hospital in which he works. But hey, I’m telling you the plot. How we laughed on the way to the Emergency Room.
Malcolm Bradbury Doctor Criminale Cast your mind back to that heady time at the end of the 1980s when the Berlin Wall was falling, politics was changing almost by the hour, anything seemed possible, and serious people were declaring that history was at an end. Bradbury evokes that era in this satire about fame, fortune, and the merry-go-round of academic conferences. Francis Jay is a literary critic who makes a fool of himself at the Booker Prize ceremony and wakes up to find that the Sunday newspaper he works for has folded. He is hired by a TV production company as a researcher for a programme about Bazslo Criminale, philosopher of the Zeitgeist, who seems to be everywhere but is frustratingly hard to pin down. Is he for real or just a front? And what exactly is his philosophy? Bradbury sure can write, but it could be that for many readers unschooled in the controversies over Derrida and so on (I include myself here) the jokes rather go over one’s head. And what with history picking up with a vengeance since the Twin Towers the age of glasnost seems so very long ago now.
Alastair Reynolds Eversion Imagine my joy on discovering something by SF author Reynolds I hadn’t already read. This is a stand-alone piece, unrelated to his sprawling ‘Revelation Space’ universe or any of his other series, and in tone is more like the playful metafiction of the faux-noir Century Rain. Eversion starts with Dr Silas Coade, surgeon on the sloop Demeter, nudging its early nineteenth-century way along the coast of northern Norway in search of a mysterious and gigantic structure at the end of an unexplored fjord. It’s all very Boy’s-Own-adventure and reads — perhaps deliberately — like something by Rider Haggard (note: ‘metafiction’). But it all ends rather suddenly to be replaced by a similar tale only with a steamship… and then a 1930s-style exploration by an airship to a hole in Antarctica that leads to a gigantic cavern inside the Earth. That part is wonderfully steampunk (note: airships). There are other pastiches, including one short version that reads exactly like a SF story from a Golden-Age pulp. Gradually the real situation dawns. Or does it? But hey, I’m telling you the plot. Hugely enjoyable.
Steven Strogatz The Joy of x I love maths. My ardour is, however, unrequited. Hence my joy at coming across books about maths by mathematicians who actually know how to explain things in plain English, for they are few in number (I am so familiar with Ian Stewart, Brian Clegg and John Gribbin that I know them personally, and I have heard good things about Hannah Fry). The Joy of x (he must have thought of the title first, right? Like the late Tom Lehrer’s fictional maths bestseller Tropic of Calculus) is an all-too-brief tour of maths from simple counting all the way past calculus (differential, integral and vector) to group theory and linear algebra, topology and some statistics, ending up with a suite at the Hilbert Hotel. But it was all too whistle-stop for me. I’d have liked to have had a more leisurely exploration of some of the topics to ensure I had a really good grasp before moving on. I had a similar sensation after reading Tom Chivers’ book Everything is Predictable (reviewed here) on Bayesian statistics — I could appreciate why it was important, and useful, but still couldn’t quite grasp it. Perhaps what I need is a maths textbook written in the same friendly way but which goes into more depth and detail. Maybe such things exist. If they do, well, answers on a postcard please…
This autumn, I celebrate. It is now twenty years since I moved to London. That is about half of my life. The halls of residence I moved into that first year are no more. The building has been knocked down and replaced. My PhD will soon be a teenager. Imperial’s newest cohort of students were not born when I got here.
The city seems so still
When you’re looking down from Highgate Hill
I have loved London far longer than I have lived here. I wrote a blog post about that, back in the summer of 2012.
The Games are mentioned, in the post, in passing. The games themselves passed me by, too, at the time. I was in a rush. Racing to finish my PhD thesis and flee academia for a corporate job.
Come ye, come ye, to soulless corporate circus tops
I took a break from the thesis to watch the opening ceremony, with J, because the opening ceremony had been much hyped, and because we both like Danny Boyle.
So ring that victory bell
Bradley Wiggins with a big bell.
The London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony officially begins when Bradley Wiggins rings a big bell. I remember at the time thinking that this big bell was cool. I looked it up, read more and more about bells and decided that one day I would like to have a go at ringing some. A bucket list thought: I will do this someday. I would like to. Once I have finished my thesis. Perhaps.
Forgive me, someone, for I have sinned
A decade later: 2022. After several years spent running away from God and His call on my life, aided and abetted by COVID-19 closing all the churches, it was time to take All Of This seriously. But there was a problem. I have, my whole life, always felt safe in churches, but now having been out of them for a long time whilst my beliefs had been changing I felt terrified to return to the building.
I’ll meet you on the corner of
Upper Street and the City Road
Of course, at this point, an email arrived: New Bellringers needed! A national campaign had been launched: Ring for the King. This initiative aimed to recruit bellringers and train them ready to ring for the coronation of Charles taking place the following spring. The St Mary’sringing room was having an open day. Beginners welcome.
So it was with the help of bellringing that I made it back to church.
It takes about eight weeks of weekly lessons to learn how to handle a bell safely, and a lifetime to master the craft. Once a learner is safe to ring independently, and able to control the bell well enough to ring with others, they are rapidly recruited for practice nights and to ring for Sunday services. Later on once further skills have been mastered the ringer gets invited to join a band to enter a striking competition and to ring for weddings, the latter paid cash in hand. Prolonged ringing performances – quarter peals and peals – are to be attempted. Before all this, from the earliest, one is introduced to the regular bellringing pastime of going to the pub.
The Ring for the King motif turned out to be a misnomer. We were not being recruited for a one-time gig; we were being recruited to become the next generation of bellringers. By the time we reached May 2023 and the coronation, it was clear that we recent learners were in this for life.
I traveled 40,000 miles last year
A competent bellringer can go places. Towers all over the country welcome visiting ringers to join their practice nights. In this capacity I have rung this year in Canterbury and Kettering. Last July, I visited a tower in Hampshire: All Saints East Meon.
To begin the other half of this story, you have to go back a few minutes further in 2012, to the scene just before Bradley struck that bell.
A bloke with a guitar standing on a grassy knoll sang a few songs with his backing band. I thought he was a bit good. I looked the guy up and started listening to his music. I talked about him with my friends and my siblings and learned that I was late to the party. Everyone else had been into Frank Turner for years.
And the nights, a thousand nights I’ve played
I started going to Frank Turner gigs. The first one, I went to with friends and siblings but these days I just rock up. I never feel alone. Frank tours incessantly. This year he played his three thousandth show up the road at Alexandra Palace. An effect I have noticed of all Frank’s touring is that there are a lot of opportunities to catch a live show, so most of his fans have, several times. A Frank Turner gig feels like returning to a weird club where everyone half-knows each other. We’ve all been here before. We know the overpriced lager and the queue for the merch stand; we recognise the T-shirts from past album launches; we know the words, the call-and-response, the dance moves and the bits. The question to friends you’ve just met is not
is this your first time seeing Frank
because it so rarely is. Instead you can talk about which gigs you went to and which was your favourite. You always have such a great time at a Frankie T show.
There’s something about hometowns that you never can escape
In the spring of this year, Frank announced he was playing a benefit gig near where he grew up. The beneficiary was to be the roof of his mum’s church. Church plus Frankie T – how could I not go? I worked out that if I made a weekend of it, I could even go and visit the church the funds were being raised for.
I’ve never set foot inside a tent
The venue for the gig is next to a campsite. I already have the camping gear and the know-how, but only because I started going to Greenbelt, a loosely Christian music, arts and justice festival. Incidentally, Frank has played Greenbelt, but that was before my time.
The bellringers from London found out I was headed out to Hampshire. They pointed out that I simply must ring. Turns out there is a ring of ten bells at All Saints East Meon. On Friday, once I’d put up my tent and cooked myself dinner on my camping stove, I walked across the fields from the campsite to the church, to join the practice.
if ever I stray from the path I follow
I got lost on the way and was picked up by a passing car. When I told the driver I was headed to the church, to join the bellringers, he told me
the whole village listens for the sound of the bells. It’s how we know it’s the start of the weekend.
No pressure then, on this visiting ringer.
The Friday night practice at All Saints East Meon went great. After, in true bellringing fashion, we retired to the pub where I learned local church gossip. To save me getting lost in the fields again, someone gave me a lift back to the campsite.
old friends of the stars
I spent the weekend making friends with my campsite neighbour. We played Frank Turner tunes on her Bluetooth speaker, discovered other bands we both liked, and, in a surreal chain of events, managed to orchestrate the sale of her spare ticket to a friend of a friend of my sister.
My campsite neighbour asked what I do, when I am not ringing the bells or going to Frank Turner gigs. I told her I work in a church. She told me she isn’t a churchgoer, but her nan is; something about being not sure about the belief part but her nan likes the social side.
When it emerges in conversation that I work in a church, I get told this a lot.
it’s going to be biblical
I returned to All Saints East Meon on Sunday morning to ring the bells and then go to the Sunday service. The gig was that Sunday night so I wore a Frank Turner T-shirt in readiness. After the service, Frank’s mum and sister came to talk to me. We made some small talk. Frank’s mum asked me about bellringing twice. She could tell from the direction from which I had come through the church to take my place in the pews.
Was that you?
she asks.
Was that you ringing the bells?
Sunday nights are slow surrender
I went back to the campsite and told my campsite neighbour I had met Frank’s mum. Late afternoon, the gig began. Between warm-upacts, I headed to the bar.
get another round in
A guy approached me – I guess he recognised the T-shirt?
Were you at church this morning? Did you really ask Frank’s mum for a selfie?
I say yes, and yes, and, still blown away by her comments about the bellringing, I ramble about that.
That was you?
He asks, meaning me ringing the bells. He starts doing the bit about he does not go to church. But his wife does. They are staying in the village. The bells woke them up that morning so because of the fundraiser they decided to go to church.
Huh.
He repeats,
I don’t go to church
then in hushed tones, as if this was some kind of embarrassing secret
but I have the impression you are, I mean, you do
I say
Yes, I’m a Christian, yes
I have a sense that I know where this is going, but the next detail does surprise me:
I’ve told about eight people here, I think there’s a Frank Turner fan who is also a Christian. She was at church this morning and she asked Frank’s mum for a selfie. So I’ve gotta ask,
he continues
how do you square being a Christian with Frank’s track Glory Hallelujah.
Glory Hallelujah is an atheist gospel song complete with an anthemic organ opening sequence. A gospel choir proclaim There is no God over and again in the refrain.
At one point the lyrics mention bells. Okay, a bell.
Among the answers I gave, I said I was sure I was not the only Frank Turner fan who was also a Christian. For starters, most of the congregation of All Saints East Meon had turned up to help out at the gig. After the show, on the way back to my tent, I got chatting to the woman who had led the intercessions.
I talked somewhat about the role of creativity in Christian belief, and said I thought it took a fairly bitter reading to interpret Frank’s work as an atheistic rant. I have listened to his tracks quite a bit this summer – I also caught him at Kendal Calling – and the conclusion I have come to is that much of what he has to say summarises Jesus’s teachings considerably better than a number of Contemporary Christian Worship songs.
The bloke I met on the way to the bar seemed satisfied or even moved by all the answers I gave. Or maybe he was just humouring me.
The preachers and the scientists got soaked just the same
I cannot point to a moment when I knew I was called to serve God like this. The image is more like a watercolour, built up in layers, or a viewfinder, coming into focus; a puzzle in pieces; waymarks on a map. But that night, after the gig, and the conversations, and some form of witnessing the Gospel to a friend I had just made in a field in Hampshire. What got to me in that moment was the way the whole conversation had cost me nothing and required no compromise and no disassembly. What I said came easy. My words were sincere.
Just doing my job.
I went back to my tent and knew, not for the first time, that something is happening. I burst into tears.
We’ll have all the best stories to tell
The story that began back in the thesis-ridden summer of 2012 and spans more than a decade does not end that evening in a field in Hampshire either. I came home to London. I texted my siblings to tell them I had met Frank’s mum and sister and thanked my fellow bellringers for recommending that I ring the bells in East Hampshire.
Frank’s mum likes my bellringing
is one of my better anecdotes, I told everyone. I didn’t mention the tears.
Take a Polaroid picture
Winning story on Instagram.
Right on cue, a music photographer called Casey Ryan who I follow on Instagram, posted a giveaway: tell me your coolest Frank Turner story and win a signed photo. I entered my Frank’s mum likes my bellringing tale in the comments – and won! I am now a proud owner of a signed FT photo plus a gorgeous print of Frank with his band and some Casey merch as well.
There is a message somewhere in this rambling, looping tale that ties Bradley Wiggins striking a bell to a bloke with a guitar, my campsite neighbour to a friend of a friend of my sister and me to a new future. But I have not teased out quite what it is. I have a feeling that the sermon deserves more nuance than
follow Jesus – and win a signed photo!
Maybe it is more to do with the way God uses all things, all that shit that you have been through and the passions you carry and everything that you love. Becoming a Christian has opened new doors. I have taken up bellringing, and made many friends. I have not felt called to stop going to gigs.
all you ever do with your life
I have entered into the Church of England’s formal discernment process now. The discernment process is how the church determines whether a person is called to become a priest. This stage of the process involves paperwork to fill out with intrusive questions, and a series of meetings to schedule and then dread as each one approaches. I keep trying to construct a concise and palatable story out of the past two decades.
The latest form asks for a chronology of events that have shaped me and my faith and calling. My Vicar was helping me with how to approach this task. I said to her:
Ironically, in the week when my co-authors and I are publishing a paper proposing framework to tackle the reluctance of researchers to publish negative results, one of the most important null results of recent times – the lack of any credible link between paracetamol and autism – is makingheadlines around the world.
Strictly it’s the unscientific counterclaim that the painkiller causes autism by President Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his Secretary of Health and Human Services that is making the headlines. But in doing so, they have drawn attention in more responsible outlets to the abundant evidence that paracetamol has no such effect.
The scientific misinformation billowing like black smoke from the Trump White House and from other centres of populist politics – on issues like autism, vaccines, Covid, and climate change, to name but a few – is choking discourse on matters that are critical to the lives of so many people. These poisonous emanations serve as a reminder of the importance of the scholarly value of critical enquiry, central to which is a commitment to tell the whole story.
Though science is our most potent tool for figuring out the whole story about how the world works, the academic research record’s neglect of negative results is long-standing. When I described this ‘publication bias’ ten years ago, the problem was not new:
“The scientific literature has long been skewed by a preponderance of positiveresults, largely because journals are keen to nurture their reputations for publishing significant, exciting research – new discoveries that change the way we think about the world. They have tended to look askance at manuscripts reporting beautiful hypotheses undone by the ugly fact of experimental failure. Scientific reporting inverts the traditional values of news media: good news sells. This tendency is reinforced within academic culture because our reward mechanisms are so strongly geared to publication in the most prestigious journals. In the worst cases it can foster fraudulent or sloppy practices by scientists and journals.”
Though publication bias is well-documented, efforts to address the issue have been fragmentary and have failed to make a dent in bias in the research literature arising from the lack of papers reporting negative results. A report from July of this year noted that although almost all scientists acknowledge the value of sharing null results (findings that do not confirm a chosen hypothesis), they struggle to publish them.
So what is new about our paper, which originated in May 2024 at an international workshop at the NIH National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) that brought together scholars, funders, publishers and senior university figures to discuss the problem?
Recognising that the problem is deeply systemic, our article proposes bold, concrete measures that major stakeholders can take to create and incentivise new pathways for publishing negative findings. Key among these would be new requirements from funders for grant awardees to report on all outcomes from the work packages in their research proposals (and to facilitate streamlined options for doing so) and for research institutions and publishers to place more emphasis on methodological rigour, irrespective of experimental outcomes, when assessing research and researchers.
For the background and context of these proposals, please consult the paper, which is free to read and was deliberately kept short and snappy. We hope will re-invigorate moves to end publication bias. We recognise that solutions will not come easily, that they will likely vary by discipline and geography, and will require hard work to implement effectively. We are looking for some courageous major funders and institutions now to take the lead and show the way.
The auspices for progress on publication bias are not great. In the year or more since we gathered in the US for our workshop, the Trump regime has been installed in Washington and set about dismantling much of the country’s research ecosystem and reconfiguring policy not on evidence, but on what the President feels to be true. In all probability, many scientists in the US will feel they have much bigger problems to tackle first.
But as anti-science populists grab power in America and elsewhere, it is more important than ever for scientists and scholars to demonstrate our capacity for self-reflection and our commitment to tell the whole story as truthfully as we can. Only with our own house in order can we hope to blow down houses built from straws of misinformation.
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While we wait for the Schools White Paper and the report of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, other bodies have been busy, reporting specifically on the state of science education in (predominantly) English schools. Over the last few months, both the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the Institute of Physics (IOP) have produced significant reports looking at the, not entirely happy, state of the teaching profession. The annual report from the Royal Society of Chemistry, brought together responses from nearly 2000 science teachers in their Science Teaching Survey. The Institute of Physics report, The Physics teacher shortage and addressing it through the 3R’s: retention, recruitment and retraining (England), focussed on the need for more specialist physicist teachers and ways to counter the loss of so many teachers during the first five years on the job. Their recommendations, although directed at Physics, will apply across the sciences more generally.
The shortage of Physics teachers is of long-standing and is certainly not improving. What this means is that the subject is often taught by non-specialists, certainly up to GCSE. Science teachers are frequently just that: in terms of how a school uses them, they are often seen as interchangeable between disciplines, something that is convenient not least for timetabling purposes. When the RSC refers to science teachers, they are not distinguishing between those with different specialisms. When it comes to teaching Combined Science, a school does not even have to record this as non-specialist teaching. Yet the IOP’s report shows clear evidence that the fewer specialist Physics teachers (naturally, their area of focus) a school has, the lower the progression rate to A Level Physics. Whether this applies to Chemistry and Biology hasn’t been studied in the same way, but with (according to the IOP) around half of science teachers being biology specialists, this may be less of a problem, for that subject at least.
The IOP go on to highlight that science teachers end up with a very heavy teaching load. As one recently qualified teacher with a Physics background, working in a severely disadvantaged area, put it to me:
I have to prepare lessons each week covering all three subjects for each year group whereas other subjects (e.g. computer science) only prepare a single lesson for each year group each week.
This person was not best pleased to have to teach GCSE biology because they felt they themselves were weak in the subject. Furthermore, they pointed out that some of the people they had trained with were ‘scared’ of physics (coming from chemistry or biology backgrounds) and might well be passing that fear on to their students.
As the IOP points out, significantly more early career Physics teachers leave the profession within the first five years of qualification than the overall average rate, and this requirement to prepare so many lessons, many of which will lie outside their area of expertise, will be a key factor. (Salary may be another, as Physics graduates are often much in demand in highly-paid sectors.) The IOP recommend a different approach to the utilisation of teachers, in which early career teachers teach simply within their specialism, while they get to grips with all the other demands a teaching career places on them. Furthermore, in order to make best use of the Physics specialists they do have, they want to see the sciences treated explicitly as three separate sciences, taught by specialists, at KS4 (i.e the two years up to GCSE). Their report has many other (costed) recommendations, demonstrating that if more Physics teachers could be supported to stay in the profession, over ten years the long running deficit of Physics teachers could be wiped out at a very moderate cost.
Another aspect of science teachers’ heavy workload is highlighted in the RSC report, namely the shortage of technicians to assist with practical work, as well as insufficient funding to buy the necessary equipment and consumables to make practical work feasible, alongside the more general shortage of cash across any given school. This under-resourcing of laboratory work means little opportunity to excite young people with hands-on experience. In the most recent Science Education Tracker, published by the Royal Society, the analysis showed:
Reduced frequency of hands–on practical work was accompanied by rising levels of unmet demand for this: 68% of year 10–11 students wanted to do more practical work.
This is a real issue when it comes to inspiring students to consider future careers in STEM, since this same Royal Society report showed how practical work was considered the most motivating aspect of science lessons at school, especially for students in years 7–9 (KS3). Yet the pipeline of talent in the STEM arena is as important as ever when it comes to the Government’s growth agenda and fulfilling the aims of the Industrial Strategy.
The schools that struggle to attract good science teachers, in whatever discipline, and whose finances are likely to be most fragile (not least because their parents are less likely to be able to offer support, financial or otherwise), will inevitably be those in disadvantaged areas. These issues over teacher shortages will exacerbate all the other problems these schools and pupils face, carrying over from their early years. The statistics are depressing, as revealed in the Social Mobility Report from 2024. Their findings show that, whereas 52.4% of non-disadvantaged pupils got a grade 5 or above in both English and Maths (they don’t specifically look at science), only 25.2% of disadvantaged pupils reached the same level.
However, there is a further knock-on effect for schools which are unable to find sufficient specialist science teachers, and that is whether they offer separate science qualifications (i.e. covering all three separate sciences) or Combined Science, when the three subjects are squeezed into a double GCSE qualification. And, for those schools that offer both, who is making the decisions about which qualification a given student is entered for? As mentioned above, schools can get away with referring to a non-specialist teacher as ‘specialist’ in Combined Science. The IOP estimates a figure of somewhere around one third of science lessons in Combined Science are taught by actual specialists, as opposed to the figures the Government suggests of 94% when ‘science’ is regarded as a specialism in itself, without distinction between the disciplines. The consequences for the pipeline are profound: again, using IOP data, students who take Combined Science at GCSE are three times less likely to proceed to Physics A Level. This may be as much about their school as their capabilities or interests.
The Government is committed to opportunity for all, but there is clear evidence that disadvantaged pupils, particularly those in overall disadvantaged schools, continue to suffer within the school system. Teachers, particularly those early in their career and in any of the three sciences, are stretched to breaking point by being expected to teach outside their speciality. This means that students are too often taught by non-specialists, particularly in Physics where the shortfall is greatest. The net outcome is that the STEM pipeline into A Levels and beyond is directly impacted and many pupils lose out; simultaneously teachers burn out.
Anna Mackmin Devoured Oh, but this struck a chord. This is a bizarre coming-of-age-novel in which the initially unnamed protagonist — a girl on the verge of puberty – recounts her life in a commune living in a ramshackle house somewhere in Norfolk in the the early 1970s. Our girl lives with her (selectively) mute sister Star and her parents who give house room to an eclectic assortment of deluded and self-absorbed poets, new-agers, artists, ne’er do-wells, druggies and dropouts. Eventually, of course, it all falls apart. The bizarrerie is mainly about the writing style, which some will find refreshing, others annoying. Also, recipes. I thought it was a lot of fun, but perhaps because it reminded me of the people I knew back in the day during my education in a Steiner School, when, at the start of the school day, clapped-out vans and Citroen 2CVs adorned with decals saying ‘Atomkraft Nein Danke’ pulled up, disgorging black fumes and an unfeasible number of children, and the gardening was biodynamic.
Carl Zimmer Life’s Edge Age, infirmity and the casting-around for another book idea have led me to catch up with the output of my colleague and friend Zimmer, whom I’ve known since we were both cub reporters and before he started writing books, but, now that we’ve passed a lot of water, he has written quite a few. In Life’s Edge he wrestles with that je-ne-sais-quoi we call ‘life’. Most people know that life begins when the kids leave home and the dogs are dead. Apart from that, telling the difference between the quick and the dead has been a somewhat fraught business, and yet the issue informs many of the debates we have today, from abortion to end-of-life care. The problem is that we all know life when we come across it, but, like jazz or pornography, it seems impossible to achieve a definition that satisfies everyone. In his masterly book How Life Works (reviewed here) Philip Ball suggests that life is that which has meaning, but that probably wouldn’t satisfy everyone either. You can drill down and down to the level of molecules, but then, what do you have? I’ll tell you — bupkes. As ever, Zimmer recounts his travels and encounters with scientists engaged in this evanescent issue with warmth, sympathy and affection. He doesn’t succeed in finding a definition, but the journey is nothing less than thought-provoking.
Leigh Bardugo Ninth House Where do those bright young witches and wizards go after Hogwarts? To Yale, of course, many of whose Secret Societies practice magic. There are eight Senior societies, and their activities are monitored by Lethe (the Ninth House of the title) which acts as a kind of magical military police. Meet Galaxy Stern, known as Alex, child of a hippy-drippy-trippy Los Angeleno mother of Ladino Jewish heritage, and an unknown father. Alex is a feral high-school dropout, but is recruited by Lethe because she has the remarkable ability to see ghosts without first having to drink the extremely toxic elixir otherwise required. A stranger in a strange land, she finds herself at Yale on a full scholarship, mixing with students much more accomplished (and more entitled) than she, so she has to succeed on chutzpah and street smarts. A deputy (‘Dante’) in an investigative duo working for New England brahmin Daniel Arlington (‘Virgil’), her already fragile world is thrown into confusion when she starts investigating the murder of a young New-Haven woman apparently unconnected with Yale, and Arlington is sucked into a vortex that leads straight to Hell. The parallels with Hogwarts are obvious: the ill-equipped recruit from a deprived home, the exotic and antique setting drenched in ancient ritual, the cast of eccentric and occasionally dangerous characters make it so. Just add a great deal of sex, violence and violent sex, all with or without a copious intake of drugs and not a little gore, and you are most of the way there. But where Bardugo succeeds (Rowling, meh, not so much) is in — well, everything. Ninth House excels: the quality of the writing, the nuanced characterisation, the taut plotting and the watertight world-building shine brightly. It helps that Yale, unlike Hogwarts, really exists, and so (I have learned) do many of the locations and institutions described in the story. As a novel, it has a conventional three-act structure. And with its plots, counter-plots, reveals, false trails and twisty ending, it is perfectly poised … and with enough untied knots for a sequel. Which leads me to…
Leigh Bardugo Hell Bent sees Alex Stern and her friends, notably shy, bookish Pamela Dawes (‘Oculus’, in Lethe language), hard-bitten detective Abel Turner (‘Centurion’, Lethe’s liaison with the New Haven PD) and plucky Mercy Zhao (Alex’s Yale room-mate) try and mostly fail to pull Daniel Arlington out of Hell. They succeed, mostly, but Arlington has, unsurprisingly, changed. And all this as Yale’s faculty seem to be dropping like flies. Hell Bent has a lot of Alex’s and Arlington’s back story, as well as those of the various ghosts and faculty we met in Ninth House. It’s a satisfying entertainment but not quite as good as Ninth House, which, perhaps, set an impossibly high standard. There are still a few loose ends — who was Alex’s father, for instance? I learn that a further instalment is in prospect.
Carl Zimmer Planet of Viruses Originally written as a means of public education for the National Institutes of Health, Planet of Viruses is now in its third edition, and so covers Covid. Written in plain and simple language, this primer on what viruses are and what they do should be on everyone’s bookshelf. Essential.
Leigh Bardugo The Familiar Searching for more by Leigh Bardugo but avoiding her Young Adult fantasy, Offspring#1 suggested I try this. Set in Spain some time between the failure of the Spanish Amanda Armada and the death of Queen Elizabeth I (so, between 1588 and 1603), it concerns the life of Lucia, a cloddish scullion in a Madrid household at the lower end of the upper class, in a society absolutely obsessed with ancestry and status. Every nuance matters, and the slightest mistake could mean ostracism, exile, torture, even death. Spain’s Jews had been either expelled or converted a century earlier, but ‘Secret Jews’ could still be punished by the Inquisition, and Lucia’s family is of Jewish heritage. She is unwittingly thrown into the spotlight when it’s revealed she can perform magic (‘little miracles’) and finds herself in a tourney of magicians that will be set before the King, seeking a Vengeance Weapon against the heretical English. As with Alex Stern in Ninth House, the heroine is of Jewish heritage; of humble beginnings; can perform magic; and is thrown into a milieu she can barely understand and in which she can succeed only by her own ingenuity. The unfamiliar setting was a little off-putting — all those Spanish names made it sometimes hard for me to distinguish who was who in a large cast of characters — but it was as well-wrought as I now have come to expect. Despite the setting, the atmosphere in which people can be ‘cancelled’, their lives ruined by a chance remark that reaches the wrong ears, might be horribly familiar to those who fall foul of the self-righteous and sanctimonious guardians of public morality today. Should be subtitled Everyone Expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Shirley Jackson We Have Always Lived In The Castle I seem to have settled into a groove by reading novels in which the protagonists are young, female and a bit odd. In this novel she’s Mary-Katherine Blackwood — ‘Merrikat’ — who is 18 and lives with her elder sister Constance and her Uncle Julian in a rambling old pile just outside an unnamed village in the United States, sometime in the mid-twentieth century (there are cars and telephones). Six years earlier the rest of the family had been killed in a mass poisoning for which Constance was blamed but later acquitted. The event has alienated the Blackwoods from the increasingly hostile villagers, and had catastrophic consequences for the surviving Blackwoods. It left Uncle Julian disabled and increasingly senile and Constance an obsessive agoraphobic. Only Merrikat goes out to run errands in the village. We see the world through her eyes, and as a narrator she is extremely particular, and peculiar: it’s clear that she has what we’d now call autism and learning disabilities. I don’t want to spoil it by revealing what happens next. After listening to this on Audible I discovered that the novel was written in 1962 and has become a minor classic. Jackson wrote several novels and stories, mainly mysteries and tales of horror. We Have Always Lived In The Castle was a late work and is now seen as a masterly study of otherness and alienation, and even a metaphor for the antisemitism that Jackson and her (Jewish) husband reportedly experienced in their own lives, with its themes of ostracism, persecution and social isolation from the outside world, and the obsessive maintenance of ritual despite (and because of) increasingly desperate straits. Jackson’s best known work is The Haunting of Hill House and I think I’ll try that next.
Kaliane Bradley: The Ministry of Time The British government has acquired a device to transport people from past centuries to the present day. The people concerned are recorded as missing or dead, so the course of history should not be changed. At this end, Ministry employees have to give house room for the ‘immigrants’. Our protagonist, a young twenty-first century woman of mixed British-Cambodian parentage, is put in charge of an officer from the doomed Franklin Expedition to the North-West Passage. Cue many misunderstandings concerning the role of women, people of various ethnic heritages, and so on. This is not a comedy, however, and there’s more – it appears that the device to bring people to the present day is a gift from the future, and there are all sorts of other shenanigans going on. I enjoyed this mainly for the interesting use of metaphor. The protagonist describes the taste of Guinness, for example, as ‘angry Marmite’. Which was fun.
Laura Spinney: Proto Your Starter for Ten – what connects Slovakian and Sinhala? Phrygian and French? Hittite and Norwegian? The answer is that all are Indo-European languages, connected by historical and linguistic roots so deep that the similarities can be hard to trace. Yet it was the deep similarities of grammar and vocabulary between the languages now spoken more widely than any other on the planet that led to our modern understanding of language change in general, and new work on archaeology and ancient DNA has enriched and sometimes complicated the picture. Laura Spinney traces the tortuous history and geography back to the steppes of southern Russia, the plains of Anatolia and the high deserts of the Silk Road. I listened rather than read this – as an audiobook – and I am glad I have a decent knowledge of geography, as having a map in front of me would have been helpful. Perhaps the dead-tree version has suitable visual aids. I was fascinated to learn about Tocharian, a lost branch of Indo-European, and the deep connections between, say, English and Sanskrit. Spinney takes an interesting and controversial view on the preservation of languages that otherwise might have died out. Languages change all the time (and that’s rather the whole point), borrowing words from other languages. The Celtic languages spoken today, for example, are much corrupted by loans from English, so the Irish, Welsh and Gaelic that people work so strenuously to preserve are hardly authentic. Languages also change much faster than one would imagine, as people move from place to place. Not many young, working-class people in London today speak the cockney that they might have done a couple of generations ago. Instead they speak a dialect called Multicultural London English, what the politically incorrect might call Jafaican. I could find only two irritants in this absorbing book. Shakespeare wrote in early Modern English, not Middle English. And why is the country Turkey rendered Türkiye? We don’t refer to Greece as Hellas, or Germany as Deutschland.
Paul Hayes: Dr Who: Pull To Open Regular reader of these annals will note that I recently delved into the literature concerning the BBC’s long-running SF series Dr Who, notwithstanding inasmuch as which Exterminate, Regenerate by John Higgs (review here). Whereas that was a complete history of the show, Pull To Open is a account of its genesis, up to and including its very first airing in November 1963, so goes into much more granular detail about the circumstances, and looks at contemporary world events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Profumo affair. Hayes makes the case that BBC Head of Serials Donald Wilson deserves as much credit as Sidney Newman for the invention of the show. Absorbing, but probably for diehard fans only.
Taylor Jenkins Reid: Atmosphere I first came across Reid as the author of Daisy Jones and the Six, a rockumentary about a seventies soft-rock band with uncanny similarities to Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac, and found the televisual emission much better than the book. I believe there is a movie adaptation in the works for this, too, though the book is good in itself. It follows the career of Joan Goodwin: astronomer and wannabe astronaut. Goodwin is all work, work, work and is sexually repressed, living her personal life somewhat vicariously through her appalling and selfish sister Barbara. Her sexual awakening comes through meeting Vanessa Ford, another astronaut candidate, and the trials they face keeping their passionate relationship hidden from any overt sign of ‘sexual deviancy’ that would get them kicked off the program. The sex scenes are poignant and passionate without being explicit, and the space scenes are (as far as I can tell) authentic. The story is bookended as Goodwin, the Cap Com at Mission Control, helps Ford land a damaged space shuttle. Gripping until the end.
