Bits & Pieces of Zen

One year on

2011-09-09T16:48:00.002+01:00

So I am slowly but surely creeping up to one year on the job, which is something of a milestone. On the whole it has been very kind to me indeed, possibly excepting this last month in which I found myself quite regularly doing 14 hour days and discovering that this is not really conducive to holding all the rest of the parts of one's life together (I only discovered exactly how many other things I was committed to when my work took over and I started enumerating the number of people I was letting down!). On the other hand, the last month has also been a milestone in terms of the independence and impact that I am starting to feel I can personally make on my teams. Nothing comes so easily it seems... We are now nearing the end which means I can have a bit of a breather and write this blog :)

In terms of other commitments, perhaps the largest has been the circus, still work-related, deary me -- other than the fact that it has eaten my weekends, it has been lots of fun, very bruise-inducing, and a great challenge (largely to my upper body strength). Several months on, I feel we've gone from trapeze virgins to trapeze performers (no innuendo intended, no really!) which is not to be sneezed at... We are performing next weekend, and lots of people are coming to watch the somewhat dubious spectacle of management consultants trying to put on a circus.

There is less other excitement on the horizon now that I've only just come back from a summer family holiday in Tuscany (I've been back two weeks but it feels like two months). In the misty future somewhere there is the prospect of Singapore - Bali - Hong Kong - Singapore - Sydney over Christmas and New Year's. I've decided the main purpose of holidays is not so much the holiday itself but so that one has something to look forward to!

Silent weekend/Taking it slower

2011-07-11T21:10:00.004+01:00

This weekend was dominated by laryngitis, which I seem to get every few years in acute form. It has been particularly bad this time round and I could only manage a whisper all Saturday and Sunday -- now I can croak, but it takes quite a lot of effort and is not very intelligible. It is weird not to be able to speak -- I carried around a pen and notebook for the weekend -- and sticks you firmly with your own thoughts much of the time, which can be either frustrating or sort of peaceful, depending on how you look at it.

Loss of voice aside, it was actually a rather nice weekend. Friday night after work we went to a picnic concert at Kenwood House (on Hampstead Heath). Watched the Gipsy Kings play, along with a whole sea of other concert goers with picnic blankets and hampers. Lots of fun, if a little disappointingly cold -- most were heavily bundled up by the end of the night. I seem to have spent far too much of my life in sombre concert halls, and am only just discovering live music in outdoor, summer, casual settings. Pulp at the Wireless Festival last weekend in Hyde Park was good too, albeit in a different way -- more beer and chips, fewer picnic rugs, but kinder weather!

Saturday was relaxed. Coffee at our little caf on the railway bridge -- excellent for bacon sandwiches. Skipped trapeze class as the laryngitis has been brought on by quite a bad cold, and hanging upside down did not seem a good cure for either. Dim sum lunch at Phoenix Palace -- never fails. Then a stroll through Marylebone and Oxford Street. Second coffee at Apostrophe in St Christopher's Place, friends enjoying the sun and chattering away, only downside was that the volume of this chatter was such that one with literally no voice found it hard to converse. Then home to roast a chicken. We decided to try out the "beer can up the butt" method, which is a bit undignified for the bird, but produced some absolutely beautiful falling apart moist roast chicken. Definitely worth it.

Sunday. Decided to head to my friend's birthday picnic in Greenwich Park despite some slightly dubious weather and a continued lack of working vocal chords. Turns out to be a good decision -- excellent company, too much picnic food, weather fined up so sunny and beautiful, lack of working vocal chords (plus notebook) probably provided rest of the guests with party entertainment. Although picnic as a spectator event is a bit weird, really. Head home in very leisurely fashion, wandering through Greenwich Village and taking the Thames Clipper back to Waterloo. A really good £4.95 spent, what lovely tourist views all along the Thames, hadn't realised Tower Bridge is such a fantasy.

Monday. Took the day off as I am still coughing and spluttering everywhere, and really quite dubious as to how effective a team member I can be when I cannot speak (will find out tomorrow). First day off since I started the job 9.5 months ago, which means almost first day to myself since that time. Certainly the first day to myself in which I have been forced to not do very much for health reasons. Surprisingly wonderful. Do some work from home, catch up on errands, but fit in a little time in the sun on the Heath at lunch. Very, very peaceful with dogs everywhere, some coming to snuffle my picnic box. Back to it tomorrow -- but good to take it slow every so often.

A few of my favourite things

2011-06-16T14:43:00.004+01:00

Not really into brown paper packages tied up in string, but rather:

My new Kindle, which was a great birthday present from D. I carry it absolutely everywhere, it slots into my laptop bag a treat, and it has allowed me to indulge my escapism in fiction despite long(er) hours and a distinct lack of quiet evenings at home reading. I have sadly fallen prey to Amazon's ability to increase the amount I pay for books tenfold (having been a keen purveyor of discount bookstores in my previous life), but quite frankly it makes me happy so who cares? I've been wending my way through more of the Peter Carey ouevre, most recently with Parrot and Olivier in America, and the True History of the Kelly Gang. He has the most extraordinary ventriloquism I've ever read, an ability to inhabit the mind and voice of his protagonists that is uncanny. It is a good thing he is so prolific as I have many more of his books to read. D has claimed veto rights on the Kindle (i.e. he is allowed to take it away when I start reading at dinner or whilst walking down the street or other such childhood habits which my mother had to deal with), which is probably a good thing!

Discovering ashtanga yoga, which I mostly do at a very lovely studio called Triyoga in Primrose Hill (with a couple of branches much closer to my work too). Sadly my favourite teacher has had to stop for the summer as she is due to give birth in about a week (was still demonstrating headstands with three weeks to go!), but I can pop into any other ashtanga class too. I love that it is a bit of everything, exertion, technique, philosophy, endurance, personal space, with a neverending challenge (I know this from one week accidentally wandering into a very advanced class which I should probably not go back to for several years!). When I'm not at yoga I try to make space to dance (contemporary, jazz, ballet, whatever!) or now that it's light late I run around West Hampstead and St John's Wood gawking at the mansion blocks, then I turn left into Kilburn and wonder if I should really be running through this council estate at dusk...

The variety of my work: this week I got to read and write about two large global metals and mining companies, a luxury hotel chain, a pharmaceutical company, a diversified company that does just about everything, a great technology company, and the list goes on. As I'm settling into work as well it's great to be feeling comfortable enough to start getting involved in things around the office outside of my actual engagements too -- I'm involved in UK PhD recruiting but probably more excitingly I am learning the static trapeze! No really -- for our office challenge this year we are putting on a circus! Who knows what a circus put on by a whole load of consultants is going to be like, but I'm having great fun learning to clamber around in the air (blisters, aching shoulders and all). Bonus, they just promoted me (nothing to do with the trapeze skills as far as I know), so feeling particularly positive about the whole job thing at the moment. Give me a few weeks and I may be on a new engagement which has me working all hours, and my tone will surely change...

Spending weekends with D. I like our rituals, coffee somewhere on West End Lane, dim sum at Phoenix Palace, a Sunday evening movie, rambles through the Heath; but I also like that weekends are often very different: I head when I can to Bath's Georgian teahouses (loving the fact that I don't have to get on a Tube for two days), we've gone back up to Cambridge often to do dance performances/graduate from PhDs/see lovely friends, and London often provides with randomness when you're out of ideas (a very urban beach/sandpit on the Southbank, the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park in a few weeks, canal walks through unexplored neighbourhoods yielding finds such as establishments selling meat pies and jellied eel).

Living in London

2011-05-26T16:22:00.003+01:00

[insert usual apologies for neglecting blog here]

I have now been in London some 8 months which I suppose is long enough to feel somewhat settled. As I spent a fair amount of my early twenties agonising over whether I should really be spending quite so large a portion of my life in the rarefied atmosphere of Cambridge, and yearning for the-grass-is-greener 'Real World', it is reassuring to find that life in London is, after all, rather jolly good (although the literal grass is definitely not as manicured as Cambridge's).

How my time is spent, in order of decreasing average number of hours spent/week:

A) WORK

A taxi driver told me once that this phrase "covered all manner of sins", but I will try to cover my sheepishness at now being a "management consultant". The glaring difference in 'cool factor' between being a marine biologist and a management consultant is by no means lost on me, but I remain convinced that it was the right choice. My new profession would have me now come up with "three killer reasons" why this is so, and despite my best attempts to be contrary it is in fact three that spring to mind:

As advertised on the tin

1. This job is a fantastic way to broaden your horizons. I now know far, far more about Industries X, Y and Z than I ever thought I would, and my understanding of how this society works, and how people work, is the better for it.

2. My work now actually requires me to talk to people, probably more than my introversion would have me do naturally, which is great -- because people here (both colleagues and clients) are interesting folk by and large, hugely supportive, friendly, and come with a rather refreshing lack of academic pseudo-autism.

As not advertised on the tin (or at least advertised in smaller font)

3. For all that we get criticised for going in and telling people what they already know, in at least some of the work I've done I have felt a massive sense of service. To help people see how they can make things close to their hearts really happen, to do it with a sense that they always come first, to see my work making a difference to individuals -- this is more satisfying that I ever thought it would be.

B) SLEEP

I have been incredibly lucky such that 8 hours is not a problem to obtain; I also for the first time in my life have a real-sized bed rather than a college single; I have slept on said real-sized bed far more than the 'jetset' consultant lifestyle might have allowed (the furthest away I have worked is Birmingham!) -- all good things.

C) COMMUTING

I live in West Hampstead and am quite a fan of the Jubilee line no matter how we like to moan about it (although last week's peak hour delay due to a "loose screw" was probably cutting it fine). It takes me half an hour to the office, so I don't much mind it really. Also love the 139 bus, particularly as on the way home from late nights in Soho it deposits me about 30 metres from the door!

D) FOOD

The awesomeness of living in a big city means that there is a neverending supply of fantastic restaurants to discover, many of them neighbourhood gems rather than glitzy Michelin starred pretentiousness. Quickly becoming favourites: Tamada (Georgian, giant xiao long bao!), Saracino (best Italian meats ever), Atari-ya (great sushi, and even has a cheap and cheerful takeaway joint near Selfridges), Koya (uber bouncy tasty udon near office), Miyama (who needs Nobu for miso black cod), Toresano (taste of Spain), Japan Centre (how does the itsu next door survive), Phoenix Palace (old standby for comforting quality dim sum), the Gallery (great Sunday roasts, always good for a drink) etc. Also had the fortune of visiting lots of great cocktail places all with some kind of clever name or other which I can't really remember now -- Experimental Cocktail Club was very tasty, and had a great birthday night at B@1 recently where the staff are fantastic and they do a mean espresso martini.

Rather hungry now, perhaps I'll be back in another year to write about London Pt II? :)

In a land far, far away

2010-04-19T08:08:00.004+01:00

It has been six weeks since the viva, and I have been sadly lacking in communication. Partly this is because from Down Under the old world of manic thesis writing and worrying about fish seems exceedingly far away, and so too the usual procrastination devices of blog writing and the like. However, here I am to make amends!

Thailand

D and I spent almost a week on Ko Tao in the Gulf of Thailand for a spot of diving and some R&R. We had no idea the red shirts were massing in Bangkok as we chilled out on the beach with endless mango shakes (so good surely because they must be 20% maple syrup?!) and accompanied by numerous scruffy but lovable beach dogs, after long days of diving. It was lovely for me to be underwater again in Gulf visibility of 20-30m; although much of the reef seemed sadly degraded and not particularly hard coral spectacular, the fish life was really pretty wonderful and I had some amazing dives at Chumphon Pinnacle and White Rock absolutely mesmerised by the shoals of fusiliers and yellowtail barracuda and "ikan bilis" being hunted by trevally. There is nothing like being surrounded by a school of gleaming flashing silver fish as the sunlight filters through their backlit streamlined forms. Other highlights included a sea krait out for a good old hunt, a scorpionfish I spotted on a ledge at 28m, going on D's last open water certification dives and a very, very cute little octopus on a snorkel off Nang Yuan Island which is actually 3 islands connected by a beach (and was famously once rented out in its entirety by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers).

The apres dive action was very lively, as the island is absolutely filled with backpackery types and has bars everywhere along Sairee Beach and in the village. It was pretty good fun if you wanted to partake of it -- I am not used to being able to go diving and then having access to a Long Island Iced Tea in a tiny shack along a road heaving with partiers and scooters. Beach BBQs and Thai pancakes were very yummy eating, and the daily THB300 massages were absolute bliss! Overall a pretty good place to unwind.

Sydney

In total I think I spent about three weeks in Sydney getting to know it properly. It is, overwhelmingly, a beautiful city. Everywhere you go the harbour gleams boisterously at you and the cockatoos and lorikeets caw above your head and the bridge and opera house peek round every corner looking more photogenic by the second. A surf beach is never far away filled with tanned beautiful people baking themselves or frolicking in the sea, with a promenade lined with breakfast places serving corn fritters and scrambled eggs till noon. And all this under that famed Australian sun in a huge sky -- the light down here gorgeously gilds everything (I liked very much the Aussie light in the landscape paintings of Elioth Gruner in the NSW Art Gallery).

But being in the city for a few weeks with a local boy I think gave me a better glimpse than that of the stereotypical. Whilst we spent plenty of time on the beach and in Circular Quay staring at that famous view and in the prettykins wine bars of Surry Hills, we also had time to wander about in some of the inner city suburbs which are perhaps the most interesting parts of the city. I loved Newtown with its edgy university atmosphere and buzzing mix of vintage clothes stores for the daytime and an endless stretch of cheap Thai eats at night. We also got to visit the pretty villages of Balmain and Glebe with their cafes and bookstores, Italian Leichhardt and Five Dock where a truly excellent flat white to drink over the morning paper whilst one surreptitiously watches the Italian men talking with their hands costs only $2.50, and just five minutes away from Five Dock we stayed in Chinese Ashfield, which although bereft of good flat whites had probably the best xiao long bao in Sydney.

I loved the international nature of the city -- whilst this is of course common to any big city, I felt particularly at home with the influence of Asia and SE Asia in particular on food (hooray for laksa and sushi rolls everywhere!), and what I hope is a real tolerance that arises from being a young city subject to wave after wave of immigration. I must admit that there are things I missed from the cities of Europe that I know -- a subway system, real life in the centre of town rather than endless suburbs, grand boulevards lined with beautiful old buildings, a high street rather than shopping malls -- but then, what other city can claim beaches like Sydney's, or national parks of gum forest right in the middle of the city, or of course that endless sparkling harbour? Or, when you come to it, the kind of people who name an old fossil find the "Demon Duck of Doom" (Bullockornis planei) and then put this on a sign in the Australian Museum?

Northern New South Wales

Halfway through our stay in Sydney we took a road trip up the northern coast which turned out to be a real highlight. It is far too big a country, with us clocking up 2500km in just over a week, but there is plenty to see on the way. We first spent a couple of nights in the Hunter Valley. That we were greeted on arrival with wine, cheese, olives and port and then left to ourselves in our lovely B&B is probably a good indication of what tourism in the Hunter is like. We took a little tour of the wineries (unfortunately we did not find much spectacular -- it is perhaps more of a white wine place, although we enjoyed several of the 07 Shiraz) with plenty of kangaroo spotting in the fields along the way so I got my marsupial fix. It was pleasant enough, although I think we felt a bit like a carbon copy tourist couple!

Heading further north, we stopped in briefly in Sawtell, just south of Coffs. It is a bit of a family holiday zone, so there were yet more endless beautiful beaches and cafes to wander about, and can I be blamed for getting D to take me to see the Big Banana? Finally we headed up to Byron Bay, stopping for coffee at a very pleasant historic river town called Ullmara which with its placid river and sunny beer garden and cafe was a rather nice surprise. At Byron we had a day at the Blues and Roots Festival -- I was pretty excited as it was my first time at a music festival and best of all I got to see Buddy Guy play! He is a true blues showman, in one long set he had the audience entirely enthralled as he told us stories, sang beautifully and also played some fairly mean guitar. Other big names that day included Joe Bonamassa (fantastic guitarist, but not much of a singer...), the John Butler Trio (really enjoyable, though I don't yet understand roots music really) and Jeff Beck (bit of an aging rock god). And all this with only small downpour at the end of the night so minimal mud! After camping the night we spent the next morning eating an enormous breakfast in Byron and frolicking at the beach along with hundreds of other souls trying to avoid being taken by the enormous rip (NSW beaches are really not the wallowing type).

And then we turned back down south, driving to Dorrigo via some lovely if slightly frighteningly windy mountain roads. Dorrigo was interesting, a tiny little mountain plateau town which is an odd mixture of proper redneck country town (two pubs and an exceedingly old school RSL where they shut at 8:30pm) and a couple of rather swish cafes and B&Bs. We spent very little time in town though, as we spent our days walking in the spectacular national parks all around, and our evenings gazing out over the endless rolling views whilst the resident ponies chomped away in the field in front of the house. The walking was wonderful, particularly interesting because the area is filled with completely different microclimates and forest types -- we did one walk in subtropical rainforest, another in dry alpine gum forest, and yet another in an absolutely unexpected and wonderful Jurassic Park landscape of enormous basalt escarpments, moss-covered Antarctic beeches and cycads sprouting their fern-like fronds in any available space. Pretty wonderful and it was a good way to end the trip (discounting the mammoth drive back to Sydney).

Lizard Island Part IV
I write this from an unexpected but lovely stint on Lizard -- I did tell myself I would find some way to come back on the last day of my last field season and here I am! I am helping an old acquaintance with her PhD -- absolutely brilliant to be here without having to worry about my own project. All I do is go diving, laying transect tapes, collecting corals or the like, and when I am done I chill out on the beach with a beer and a book. Today it is a bit blustery so we have had a dry day -- I spent the afternoon getting crabs out of their home corals to weigh and measure them, and collecting their eggs to measure fertility (they go back to their corals after this and are fine). They are very cute little critters! Not a bad way to spent two weeks I think, though I am also looking forward to getting back to Cambridge and the rest of the year. I think it has taken most of the last six weeks to really relax out of the PhD and finally gain some perspective, for which I am very grateful.

Viva-ed

2010-03-05T17:52:00.003Z

Sat for 140 mins in a small room talking about my PhD. Had cup of tea and avoided biscuits in middle (neither of my examiners were eating any).

Finished!

:)

The Red Door

2010-01-31T22:28:00.002Z

I thought it was high time to push the Christmas Ham (lovely as it is) further down the page. Actually, I have been thinking this for a while now, but the small issue of trying to finish my thesis got in the way a little. I am pleased to say that I handed it in on Thursday, through the red door that is the wonderfully acronymed BoGS (Board of Graduate Studies), with as much fanfare as Cambridge musters on such occasions (i.e. little or none). I have a rather dull bit of paper to say that I've submitted it; there is after all the viva still to come.

Having walked away from the door with D. asking that pertinent question that no doubt occurs to every other person in the same situation ("what are you going to do with your life now?"), I celebrated later in the day with as much fanfare as I could personally muster later in the evening at Restaurant 22 on Chesterton Road, something I've long wanted to get round to. It lived up to all the hype. Beautifully intimate front living room surroundings and really wonderfully tasty food. D. had some amazing salmon cutlets for a starter that I must admit to tasting a bit of, the pheasant and beef mains we shared were excellent with a great barley risotto side, and my British cheese board for dessert was also very yummy, although unfortunately by this time I was so stuffed with the three courses plus the various bits and pieces you get on the side (an amuse bouche of fennel and carrot foam, homebaked breads, sorbet after the starter, etc.) that it took quite some determination to eat every last morsel (gluttony prevailed). All washed down exceedingly pleasantly with a bottle of Clare Valley Shiraz. Feasting and drinking with impeccable unobtrusive service certainly made me feel that I'd done something worth celebrating, although English weather put something of a literal dampener on it both before and after! The next evening I managed to get a large bunch of people in a pub (well, to be precise, the outside bit of the Eagle where we froze a little but laughed and chatted and drank a lot, so all fine), so all in all I feel I have rather outdone BoGS for celebration style.

I'm now back in Malaysia where I dally for a day or two eating yummy hawker food and trying to get over jetlag before we head up to Hong Kong to see family and eventually celebrate Chinese New Year. Fun ahead, although I also seem to have accumulated an exceedingly long post-submission to-do list. Ah well, at least it won't involve wrestling with Word!

The Christmas Ham

2010-01-03T14:51:00.004Z

2.2 kg of porky goodness, boiled for two hours in cider and water, then stripped of skin, scored and glazed with a thickened mix of cider, honey and mustard.

Yum!

Adding to the wall

2009-12-16T15:41:00.003Z

I have just pinned up the first page of my soon-to-be-published journal paper on our group noticeboard of publications in the corridor outside the office. This group paper wall has grown massively in the last 6 months as our group has burgeoned in size, and I am more than pleased to be able to add to it! (We are not quite up to the level of the meerkat group across the corridor whose noticeboard threatens to fall off the wall for weight of paper, but there must always be something to aspire to...)

Huzzah, science is kind at times (after 7 months of ego-bruising-rejection).

Meanwhile, post-show is also kind in the sense that it gives me time to actually do some science. Thesis writing progresses when the going is good; when the going isn't so good thesis writing stands still whilst I rewrite entire sections of chapters that I thought I'd already written at some point 3 months ago (it happens; generally the rewrite much improves things, but net progress is unfortunately 0%). Nevertheless, work of some description is happening, although slightly dented at the moment by a nasty sniffly coughy cold (it is proper winter now... possible snow, big black woollen coat and all). January will be a bit of a panic month as I try to get everything done before my legal right to study in this country expires, but meanwhile I'm just trying to get on with it before a welcome Christmas break in London, Bristol and Bath. This is the first time in 3 years I'll have a cold Christmas. Ice skating, Christmas lights and turkey! (When you can't spend Christmas day wallowing in the sea with a beer, you must make do.)

In the Senate House

2009-12-05T12:46:00.006Z

In between our two performances at the Senate House. Last few days have been a blur of Very Late Night Production Meetings in the ADC bar, endless muso-related woes, quite a lot of gaffer tape, scheduling too many people trying to do too many things in not enough hours, and the occasional realisation that I am also meant to be a dancer. Yesterday, my little company put on an absolutely unique dance/music/art performance in the University Senate House to a sold out house -- we somehow appear to have pulled it off. Who knew. This morning my body feels somewhat broken, but I am looking forward (I think ;)) to doing it again tonight! Am thankful for the brief lull this morning; it is a beautiful early winter day and I read a book over coffee, then wandered the backs watching geese and swans and bare trees against the clear blue sky; a gentle ease back into the real world.

It will be a little while before our usual array of photographs and videos come out but I will point at them on this blog when they do.

True to the tagline

2009-10-29T13:05:00.002Z

DANCE
Watching: In the midst of a slightly overenthusiastic series of Saturday trips to Sadler's Wells to make the most of their brilliant autumn season. Highlights so far include an absolutely magical new solo by Russell Maliphant with an animated light projection by Michael Hulls that spilled light organically across the floor, leading and following the dancer as he swirled, Nijinsky-like, in a beanie and sweats. Understatement gets me every time. Also saw Morphoses' new season -- despite enjoying Christopher Wheeldon's latest, in a way slightly disappointed as it did not seem to have the utter compelling genius of Fool's Paradise or Commedia. Oddly, highlight of the evening was neither of the Wheeldon ballets, but instead Lightfoot and Leon's Softly As I Leave You, wonderfully danced by Drew Jacoby and Rubinald Pronk. In true NDT style, gorgeous and technical yet with an immense emotional depth and complexity. There is no other company that does this with quite the same finesse. A few more midnight train journeys back to Cambridge to come yet -- am particularly looking forward to Rambert this year. Their "Comedy of Change" is meant to be about Darwinism and bird behaviour, scientifically advised by one of the zoology/psychology professors here in Cambridge who lectured me way back when. My science and dance worlds have absolutely collided recently and although it is a bit of a shock to the system (being used to living a somewhat double life), I am absolutely thrilled by it all.

Making: The company is now in full swing rehearsing for our December's Senate House performance, having casually swung and leapt our way across the ADC stage sometime last week with what a reviewer called "aplomb" (ha!). We've just started rehearsals for a couple of our professionally choreographed pieces and I am really enjoying the process and keen to see what will emerge over the next few weeks. It is really nice to see the art emerging from all that planning! I started rehearsals for my own short piece a little ahead of everyone else, so I've actually just finished it and am not unpleased, in a radical departure from epic aggressive jazzed up fish hierarchies it appears to be a pretty brief amalgation of all those Maliphant and Wheeldon influences, and not complex at all, but I hope it will suit the Senate House and that the audience will enjoy it. Sometimes you don't have to try to say too much (I tell myself). Production work is something of an ever-stressful nightmare, but between the three of us core admin slaves and our ever growing production team, we take it in turns to mildly panic, and that means that the whole thing drives forward continually.
http://www.cambridgecontemporarydance.co.uk/lightmatter/ for more!

BOOKS
No time to read. Am slowly working my way through Dubliners. Really enjoying most of it, it is such a pleasure after grappling with and being defeated by Ulysses.

COFFEE BREAKS
No time for this either. In my first coffee break in weeks yesterday I sat in my favourite cafe Benet's with a mug of goodness, but I was reading about the integration of cooperative breeding work and cooperation theory, so although pleasant it was not exactly chill out time.

FISH
Chugging along. I am slightly worried that the dance company is trouncing my ability to actually finish writing this thesis, but I am making inch-by-inch (word-by-word) progress, and thesis.doc actually exists now which is more than could be said the last time I blogged. The aim is still January, argh, should I put this in the public domain in case I don't make it? I think I should, as the embarrassment of overunning much longer than that will perhaps be motivation to just write the damn thing. I am just about to submit about 20,000 words to a college to see if they want to give me some money in order to enable me to pursue more fish watching in coming years, so it is nice to see that I actually have 20,000 words, although of what dubious quality, I wonder?! Words are very much my work life at the moment, and I miss the actual fish very much, but to this end I have put a large picture of a chevroned barracuda on my computer desktop, which is cheering in a rather melancholic sort of way.

Harold et al

2009-10-04T17:57:00.003+01:00

Meet Harold the Venusian slug, Kylie the slightly radioactive cat, E7_2+ the bicolor angelfish, and Jerome the Neptunian bigfoot:

Because of course I have nothing better to do with my borrowed overunning 4th year PhD time than to make FIMO animals. So much evening fun. I must admit to dropping Harold shortly after he came out of the oven to the loss of his left eye, but I've superglued him back together and he is as good as new:

Other unusual pursuits of last week involved an evening's sloe picking on the path between Coton and Hardwick (really beautiful and the sunset was something to be seen), followed by another evening of painstakingly pricking each sloe berry with a needle and dropping them into a gin bottle with sugar. Come this Christmas I should have some sloe gin to celebrate the festive season/drown my thesis sorrows.

Rehearsal madness shortly oncoming, so I am trying to make the most of this pre-term lull. Yesterday we cycled out to Anglesey Abbey and wandered amongst the glorious parkland full of Austen-esque statuary and rose gardens and sweeping vistas of chestnut tree avenues and beautiful autumnal colours. Then we came back to Cambridge and went straight to chavland (the Grafton) where I had a Crunchie milkshake (well deserved after the cycle back from the Abbey straight into the wind), watched a kiddie film, and then had dinner at Shanghai Ren Jia along with a whole restaurant full of people celebrating Mid Autumn Festival, winding up finally at The Free Press for a pint. The spice of life.

Cupcakes, culture & clotted cream

2009-09-20T21:56:00.005+01:00

Whoops, it's been an age since I last wrote. Perhaps an indication of the boring woes of being a PhD student in that interminable "finishing" stage. Nonetheless the past couple of months have certainly not been unenjoyable. On the whole it was a better summer than I think we have had for a few years, the sun shining beatifically upon this normally grey little isle for weeks on end (although it also rained with a vengeance in July, just to balance things out a bit -- had two exceedingly sodden bike rides back from the wilds of southern Cambridge). So despite being rather full speed ahead with work most of August, it was pleasant interspersing this with the occasional hour or so sitting on the Trinity backs reading and watching the punts go by.

I had a couple of crazily fantastic weekends in August. First off I flew to New York for less than 48 hours to help my second sister to choose a wedding dress! Great fun although it did mean that I spent most of Saturday and Monday afternoons feeling a bit like a grumpy bump on a log despite copious caffeination to get me through wedding dress fitting and work respectively. It was so much fun being served cupcakes whilst critiqueing white satin confections of another sort. She must have tried on 50 dresses, but I think it was worth it. As they say you only do it once. Managed to fit in some New York favourites too, lunching at Chelsea Market, having dinner in the East Village, and having a big bowl of savoury ramen for Sunday brunch at Ippudo on St Mark's. Whilst at lunch we were having a slightly confused conversation about the wine of the night before, when our water waiter interrupted to give us a gentle masterclass on the grape under discussion. Only in New York. Still haven't found a city to beat it.

The next weekend, after some truly insane days at work and on email with the dance company trying to leave things in order before a big stint away, I headed up to Edinburgh for the last weekend of the Festival. Certainly lived up to expectations, but perhaps that's because we crammed 10 shows into two days. There is such an amazing buzz about the place. Highlights were the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre (one Scotsman, a cardboard stand, two socks, lots of costumes and a falsetto voice is all you need for an hour of side splitting hilarity), Baba Brinkman's Rap Guide to Evolution, and Jason Byrne. He reminds me a bit of an Irish Catholic Jack Black, a ball of manic hilarious energy with a show variously about being brought up in Ireland, raising kids himself, misadventures with various skeletal joints, and cutting up men in cardboard boxes... Absolutely fantastic.

From Edinburgh I flew straight to Cornwall to spend three weeks in its darkest western depths choreographing Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado for performance at the Minack Theatre on the cliffs of Porthcurno. This is the society's 48th year doing this stint at the Minack, so it is a very venerable tradition and one that I'd heard lots about from my theatrical friends so I thought it was time to give it a go! The theatre is a truly remarkable thing, built right into the cliffs near Land's End, with the sea as a backdrop for the stage. In fact the entire experience is also pretty remarkable as the entire cast, production team, and orchestra all sleep on airbeds on the floor in a village hall in lovely Paul (just up the road from better known fishing village Mousehole, near Penzance) for the three weeks: two weeks of rehearsal from scratch and one week of performance. (Although I cheated and moved out to a cottage in Mousehole for the last week, so I only really had the share the floor and the single shower with 50 other people for a couple of weeks...) Despite being pretty hard work for the first week or so when we were rehearsing flat out in the hall, the church, the carpark etc. (and choreographing in between), it was a great experience to spend time with such a lovely bunch of people and also get my teeth into some good old cheesy G&S choreography, although my allergy to cheese was helped by the fact that I got to make pretty geisha dances as well as pirate ships (what else for "Yeo ho, heave ho," etc?).

Cornwall itself was absolutely beautiful, at least in the second half of the trip when the weather cleared (I arrived to find Paul quite literally in a cloud). By show week I was freed from the rehearsal room to enjoy myself and think managed to get in a good varied holiday in between endlessly watching the show. One lovely thing was the chance to experience a little of the local culture as we sang in the Paul church service one Sunday we were there (as a token of our gratitude for being allowed to noisily invade their village for three weeks!), and also experienced a grand old singalong in the pub with the members of the Mousehole Male Voice Choir. I did a little Cornish sightseeing, visiting the almost tropical gardens of St Michael's Mount at Marazion, pottering about Penzance and Mousehole, walking from Sennen Cove to Land's End where I sent the obligatory postcard. And of course there were all the endless beautiful beaches and the sea, the glorious sea. Between a matinee and an evening we all trooped down to the beach (also built into the cliff, so there is actually a cliff path straight from dressing rooms to beach -- where else?!) and leaped into the freezing sea and got well buffeted by the waves and then froze for a bit trying to soak up the last rays of sun. Ah, very English. I even managed to fit in a couple of dives at Lamorna Cove in probably the best UK diving conditions ever (15 degrees and 8 m vis!). It was pleasant to be underwater again, and the kelp beds were quite pretty, and I found a lovely little cuttlefish, plus lots of bass and wrasse and shrimp and limpets and anemones, but to be honest I did it mainly so that I could say that I had actually dived in the UK and I'm not sure if I can be persuaded to do it again ;) And of course, I consumed a glut of pasties and clotted cream. That's Cornwall done I think! A really lovely part of the country.

Back in Cambridge and wading back into the dual jobs of PhD and dance company. Thankfully I arrived with the weekend to get myself up to date with the latter, but it's back on the former tomorrow morning at work, and then it will be the usual juggling act I love to complain about but that I know makes me happy really. I've also moved back out to Burrell's Field (being a 4th year PhD student - gasp - means all my privileges have been roughly removed, perhaps as a sort of incentive to actually finish); I have yet to see if all my belongings will fit into my dinky little bedsit after several years of gradual expansion into a couple of enormous Trinity 'mansionettes'!

Last night I dreamt

2009-07-15T10:45:00.002+01:00

that I was diving somewhere in SE Asia, under a jetty in some godforsaken isolated outpost frequented only by hardcore divers.

Underwater, amongst the wooden pylons, there were schools of fusiliers and frogfish hidden amongst the fronds of soft coral. In quick succession, I saw:
- a movement out of the corner of my eye; it is a whole school of fusiliers streaking upwards to the surface. Followed by the most enormous barracuda ever, some kind of 1.5 m monster, sleek and predatory and full of big shiny teeth and silver and gorgeous. I'm not sure if barracuda in real life do herd fish to the surface, but this one did so very impressively.
- another monster of a giant moray lurking under the jetty, which upon noticing me actually came out of his hole and hovered, snake-charmer like, upright in the open, tail curled upon the ground. Now, I'm pretty sure morays don't actually ever do this, but in dreams all things pander to you..
- heading out to the blue beyond the dropoff, there was some kind of crazy baitball of who knows what, and sharks of all kinds circling in and out of them, primordial and savage and so ridiculously, gracefully beautiful. It was very Blue Planet.

I think from this dream one can tell two things:
1. Perhaps I am ultimately a fan of the Big and Impressive when diving rather than macro. Galapagos, here I come.
2. I really, really miss the sea.

Marylebone High Street

2009-07-12T18:54:00.003+01:00

A perfect middle aged Sunday. Upon waking it is miraculously sunny and beautiful and a wonderful change from an endlessly drizzly Saturday. Wander up Marylebone High Street to Le Fromagerie for my usual Sunday morning breakfast of coffee and two happy organic half boiled eggs with soldiers for an exorbitant amount of money. Miraculously am there before it opens at 10am, this has never happened to me on a Sunday morning before. So a quick stroll through the farmer's market whilst waiting, admiring the quiches and huge bunches of lavender. After walking D up to Baker St tube past the mystifyingly huge hordes of tourists waiting to see the waxworks I very directionlessly wander back down the high street, past more happy Sunday brunchers.

Daunt Books beckons with its lure of travel to exotic far flung destinations (you know, like the ones I hail from), but I stick to the fiction section and end up with a rather handsome slim volume of T.S. Eliot poetry. I always bemoan my lack of poetry reading so I am at last attempting to make some amends. I am only a few poems in so far but thoroughly enjoying them...

Farther down the street I nip back into the farmer's market for two oysters, freshly shucked, one with tabasco and lemon, one plain and tasting perfectly of the sea. Gorgeous. I share words of delight with the man next to me at the table, busy eating his half dozen. Yet farther down I veer off the the west and end up in Selfridges. It is something of a magnet, particularly its chocolate section by the food hall. I fail to resist both chocolate and a couple of cheap tops on sale, and eventually munch on a salt beef sandwich from the Brass Rail for lunch.

Head up to Angel for Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray. Really enjoy it; there is much to be said for his brand of hugely accessible dance theatre that draws enormous lay audiences. Dorian Gray appeals much more to me than his usual formula (family friendly comedy-shtick modern reworkings of big fairytale ballets) because it is Bourne for adults -- sexy, dark, dealing with all the usual themes of the novel very cleverly updated to the modern world obsessed with celebrity and fashion and that fragile outer surface. Some electrifying moments, particularly in the pas de deux between Dorian and Basil (turned into a fashion photographer). I particularly enjoyed the references to MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet -- the Sibyl in Bourne's version (typically for Bourne turned into Romeo rather than Juliet), dying of a drug overdose, struggles masochistically way across the stage and up and over the central bed in direct echo of Juliet's final death in MacMillan's ballet. Dance theatre like this I can certainly applaud and enjoy (I often struggle with the more avant-garde dance theatre which seems to abound in dance colleges). If you're going to make a piece of theatre about physical beauty, using a caste of limber sexy physically articulate dancers is certainly not a bad way to go about it. A very stimulating afternoon -- but I did miss slightly the moments of heart in mouth beauty that (I continue to believe) is the reason why we all go to the theatre. For that I am guessing Morphoses (Chris Wheeldon's company) will provide amply come their autumn season at Sadler's.

Millinery

2009-07-06T21:28:00.008+01:00

First evening to myself in what feels like forever. I'd forgotten the simple pleasures of not doing anything much, on my own time. Left work about 7pm, although with the 16 hour summer days it felt like much earlier. For the first time in maybe months I revisited my old favourite activity, sitting about in Borders reading dance magazines and the Economist over a hot drink. Then a rather pleasant evening making meatballs for a steamboat tomorrow (hurray for dinner parties Malaysian style) and cooking enough sausage casserole to feed a small African village (or just me for the rest of the week).

A bit too much intense verbiage at work recently. Writing, writing, writing -- on Sunday afternoon I was sitting there falling asleep over my laptop, thinking "must.. keep.. typing". Over 24 hours later I still haven't the foggiest whether any of those words, one in front of the other, actually make any sense. But still, I'm making progress (I hope). I suddenly feel very much back in the thick of it, after the strangeness of June which despite one's best efforts always gets lost to May week mayhem and other such diverting pleasures. But it will be nice, in a bit, to have a break from writing -- I foresee having to do a bit of statistics for the next chunk of work. Who knew that one day I would look forward to statistics! I'm trying to go full steam ahead for the next couple of months as I'll be away for much of September, choreographing G+S in Cornwall. Something to work towards!

Notables over the past 1.5 months... spent my birthday weekend in Seville, drunk on Andalusian sunshine and oranges and tapas and breathtaking flamenco and endless cheap cerveza and good coffee everywhere and chanced-upon salsa parties in the street and gorgeous Mudejar palaces. It made us feel rather self-congratulatory. Trinity May Ball, my fourth, felt a little like it was suffering from the credit crunch and various organisational hiccups, but had an absolutely fantastic time nonetheless. Highlights perhaps the silent disco (very hilarious being in one when you don't have your headphones on, watching people bop about to nothing), an enormous helter skelter, duck confit, and that old standby the 4am ceilidh. Night whizzed by and it was 6am survivors before we knew it. Theatre experiences -- my usual raft of dance shows, the standout probably Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant in Push. The piece that stood out for me was Russell's solo. A master class in choreographic minimalism. They could take you anywhere, those two. Also, a very very pleasant sunny afternoon at Glyndebourne with family and friends. Falstaff, black tie, picnicking, Pimms and bubbly, arguing over whether white blobs in next field were sheep or cows! I sat next to a very nice gentleman whom I discovered had read Classics in Cambridge back in his day, and whose grandfather sang Henry Ford in the very first English performance of Falstaff in 1896. All one could want Glyndebourne to be: surreal, English, very wonderful. Also trying to make the best of this wonderful summer, the first real one we've had for three years. Cycling down to Grantchester for evening drinks and dinner (peanut butter parfait perfection) at the Rupert Brooke; punting on a silent river at 10pm under the Bridge of Sighs experiencing a city view uniquely unchanged for centuries; listening to the punt guides tell tall stories to tourists from the banks of the Cam; long moments watching the waxing moon from Trinity bridge in the long magical summer dusk. Good for whatever soul I may have.

Busy also producing my own little bits of 'art' -- Cambridge Contemporary Dance restaged much of our Dante performance in late June. Slightly stressful working in a non-theatre venue but pulled it off in the end, we're not sure where all these Dante dance aficionados turned up from but they certainly came. Also now getting very excited about our next big project, a big evening of new work in December which will be performed in a venue no less august and unique and scary and wonderful as the university Senate House, that 280 year old neo classical edifice of imposing beauty which I walk past every day, now with an added frisson of excitement. Can we do site specific contemporary dance in it to celebrate the University's 800th Anniversary, we asked the Vice-Chancellor's office. They said yes! Who knew.

No wonder I don't seem to have achieved an awful lot of work over the past few weeks. Must embrace the verbiage (third year PhD student hat), the producing and planning (dance company co director hat), the creativity (various choreographing commitments hat), the dinners and teas and punting trips (the being-a-friend hat), the girliness and more planning (bridesmaid hat!) and the general happiness (the being-me hat).

:)

Enter cheese, pursued by statistics.

2009-05-11T00:44:00.005+01:00

Can you tell it is late and I am tired from this blog title? Quite possibly.

Out of bed at eleven. Sunny. As is traditional for my late Sunday mornings, to market -- although I reneged on my usual ostrich burger and instead had a perfect cappucino from the guy with the little cart in market. Don't know how he did it, it was magic. Thus fortified, got picnic supplies from M+S and then lolled about very, very happily on Jesus Green eating said supplies. Sadly, attempted en route visit to the Cambridge Cheese Shop in All Saints Passage failed because it was closed! Not as dire as otherwise could have been as my cheese cravings are being assauged by the magical introduction of cheese courses to BA dinners, hence last Friday being faced (after smoked salmon, guinea fowl, and chocolate brownie ice cream) with an entire huge wheel of Camembert. Bliss! Anyway, cheese diversions aside, it was a very nice -- if cheese-less -- picnic lunch. We watched mallards and dogs and small boys pushing their big brothers around in strollers, and enjoyed the sun, and thought longingly about the sea.

After this I came home and slogged away for hours at some statistics (successfully, so I am pleased, as slogging away at the same dataset all Friday with nothing to show for it was really very depressing), and then cooked a huge vat of herbal chicken soup (you know, filled with mysterious bits of root and seeds that come out of a plastic packet from Chinatown), and then slogged for another few hours at dance company administration.

Rather odd to start the day extremely chilled and then have it degenerate into very tiring computer work, as my natural inclination is to do it the other way around, but all in all I suppose must congratulate myself at somehow having been productive and completely blissed out on nothing at all in the same 24 hours.

Fish! Dance! Who could ask for anything more?

2009-04-29T23:18:00.003+01:00

My apologies for the yonks it has been.

I spent the first half of April in Indonesia, mainly diving off a gorgeous boat in Raja Ampat and then living it up (well actually still diving) in Bali. There were pretty fish, ranging from the small and cute (pygmy seahorses), to the large and majestic (manta rays) and with a very close encounter with a large and bemused great barracuda at the USAT Liberty; and also non-fish excitement in the form of a whole congregation of stingless beautiful moon jellies that we snorkelled with and an unbothered little turtle hanging out in the current. This is all it takes to keep me happy as a pig in muck. Oh, and iced coffee. And far too much good Indonesian food. And indescribable natural beauty, karst islands descending into a preternaturally dead calm sea. And the grand old fun of standing up on a surfboard (on a very very very baby wave). And wonderful company. (And an onboard masseuse.) And general cut-off-from-the-world peace.

Back in Cambridge life continues; I've been drafting more papers. My supervisor seems to think I am somehow going to be able to turn these things into a thesis. (I only hope he is right, as my thesis word count remains at zero.) Work is alright, really -- I'm getting used to the whole writing malarkey. It is painful at times but I am perhaps getting the hang of it, now I just need to keep on doggedly doing it for the next 6 to 8 months or so and try not to go insane meanwhile.

The dance company continues as usual. Last weekend we premiered three new pieces derived from Dante's Commedia. They were really interesting for the company to do as for the first time we had external choreographers. One of the pieces was set in Purgatory and I can now claim to once have danced "Sloth" (for which I lay on the floor not doing an awful lot) and to very, very almost really have been a tree on stage (there is a perennial in-joke in contemporary dance about how it is, or isn't, mainly about 'being a tree') -- I didn't get to be a tree, but I did get to be grass in the Garden of Eden. By comparison the other piece I danced in, a Paradiso piece, was conventional, although danced entirely in silence with only the dancers' breath for synchronisation -- a real test of how well the company's dancers now dance with each other. I think it's showing, all those 9am Sunday rehearsals together week after week. The final piece, which I wasn't in, was choreographed by Vanessa Fenton of the Royal Ballet. Somehow the company seems to be moving up in the world, which is fantastic.

We move on next to a development period for a performance we will put on in November for the University's 800th Anniversary. It's nice in the meantime to be able to not rehearse quite so much and take class instead. I'm making myself go back to ballet -- that technique is irreplaceable. By now I know that all I really have in ballet is ballon and not much else, but I'm resigned to that now and can just get on with working with what I have! I'm also really looking forward to getting into a good contemporary class again -- I think I will restart my Saturdays in London to this purpose.

The weather has been kind recently, to the point of actually allowing for walks along the river and lazing on the grass in weekend afternoons. (More woe to the undergraduates who have a month of exam fever ahead of them before they can join us.) When the sun goes down I continue the long process of educating myself the philistine scientist by going to poetry readings and the opera (and in a similarly experimental vein somehow signing myself up to choreograph Gilbert and Sullivan in an open air theatre set on the cliffs of Cornwall). The precious work/dance/life balance is magically holding steady!

Phew

2009-03-27T18:22:00.002Z

The paper edits continue. It's been a long week but I am in high spirits because we've finally gotten to the point where we've sent it off for some external feedback, and this weekend I leave for a boat upon which we will mooch around Irian Jaya and occasionally hop off to go diving (no clove oil or nets or stopwatches involved!) and also I am getting to said boat via Hong Kong and Bali where I am fairly keen to have a go at standing up on a surfboard. Woohoo.

Meanwhile this afternoon after a bit of frustrated searching I was inordinately and geekily pleased to find that
HPDinterval(mcmcsamp(fm1,n=10000))
does what I want it to do. Enough said about my working life I think. No wonder I'm always blogging about dance.

Rather enjoyed contemporary dance

2009-03-23T17:18:00.003Z

Looking at this, I feel I should probably start talking about science a bit more...

Yet more da---

2009-03-23T15:15:00.007Z

Had a very lovely weekend enjoying the continued run of atypical sunshine. Alas, in England whenever it is nice one lives in a sort of constant fear that this will be it for the year and that this is all the summer we will get!

As is usual for me in London I did rather a lot of dance related things. Friday evening went to see the London Contemporary Dance School postgraduate choreography presentation evening at The Place (it was free and I was at a loose end). I was perhaps more surprised than I should have been to find it really incredibly dense and of the epileptic-fit-and-bandages style of choreography. Many of the pieces were more performance art than dance. In one which I actually quite enjoyed five performers stood in a line and laughed hysterically at the audience for several minutes, then made lots of strange faces for the next ten minutes, then laughed a bit more. I am not entirely sure why we train dancers for years only in order to completely throw all technique out the window. Much as I feel that art is not solely for entertainment, that it does have some role to move our cultural understanding forward, to challenge the audience into rethinking humanity, society, life, it still has to do so in an accessible way. What is the point if it is so dense and arcane that 95% of the public will feel it is so unfathomable that they cannot even try to get to whatever message the choreographer has in mind? And even then, I don't believe we always need a message. Graham Swift said it so wonderfully in Ever After when he argued that much as we like nowadays to snobbishly rave about art that makes some kind of incisive social commentary, and much as it is unfashionable to simply love it for its beauty, beauty is often what great art is about to many people. It is why we come back to it again and again from our harried daytime lives. Transcendence is the word I always think of... at its best, it is transcendent. Why is so much modern art so preoccupied with running full pelt in the other direction?

Anyway, rant done: the next evening I went to the Royal Opera House for a somewhat needed more conventional dose of dance. The mixed bill of Isadora and Dances at at Gathering was a good chance to see rather a lot of principal dancers all at once (and at six pounds for a standing ticket a steal). Isadora, a recreated staging of an old MacMillan work, was disappointing. Tamara Rojo did her heroic best to save it with some lovely dancing and acting, but why on earth did the RB decide to bring this back into the repertoire when in comparison to the MacMillan masterpieces that are for many the highlight of the company's work it pales in comparison? It is just a sort of collage of some nice bits of dancing and some entertaining but fluffy bits of film. It never gets beyond entertaining, it never even gets close to transcendence. Whereas Dances at a Gathering certainly does. A Jerome Robbins gem, it is lyrical and beautiful and subtle and it doesn't need to make any sort of statement beyond that (and is probably the better for it). Yuhui Choe, dancing Alina's role, was striking not only for her resemblance (in the head, the carriage of the arms) to Alina but for some incredibly controlled and articulate dancing. Very definitely a rising star -- the more I see of her (and she is on stage a lot these days) the more I like her. I also rather enjoyed Sergei Polunin's incredible jumps, that boy simply defies gravity.

When not watching dance I made it to a couple of classes at Danceworks. It was nice to be in a contemporary class again after simply too long away, I'd almost forgotten how calming and enjoyable I find the beautiful shapes and awareness of all the possible movement in the back that is Cunningham technique.

In a bid to improve my cultural awareness beyond my narrow world of contemporary dance I went to the Picasso exhibition on at the National Gallery (and got some street theatre in Trafalgar Square on the way). It was really very enjoyable -- I never used to like Picasso at all but recent encounters with him in the Fitzwilliam and elsewhere gave me an inkling that may have changed. His work is incredibly immediate. You can't just sort of stand back from it and appreciate it objectively -- it is vibrant and loud and often humorous and amazingly sensual and left me very aware that there was a human artist behind every painting. I found myself smiling at the humour of some paintings, enthralled by the lyricism of others. After coming out of the exhibition, being in the National Gallery, I simply had to head across to the 1700-1900 galleries to gaze reverentially upon Whistlejacket, that life size phenomenal racehorse painting by George Stubbs. Along the way I waved at the Constables and Turners and Gainsboroughs that I also love. It is such a wonderful place!

And in between I enjoyed the culinary delights of the big city. Takeaway sushi (I have a rather limited choice of this given the general fish ban but still enjoyed it) eaten in Embankment gardens where I bemusedly watched a large group of American teenagers accosting a bobby for photographs (he was very tolerant). Noodles, teh tarik and cendol at C&R post-ballet (hurray for Chinatowns and Asian food and late nights). Eggs laid by very happy organic hens and a huge frothy cappucino at Le Fromagerie, the perfect lazy Sunday breakfast place. And a trek to Canary Wharf hugely well rewarded as my friend cooked an exceedingly tasty lamb roast for Sunday lunch!

Oh yes and somewhere between dance, art and food I managed to get my hair cut. I have a bob! It hasn't been this short for over a decade; I'm rather pleased to have a new look.

Collops (of life)

2009-03-18T12:12:00.006Z

Recent notables:

1. College Commemoration Feast last Friday. Having missed it for the past two years due to being in Australia (one can't have it all, it seems), it was so lovely to be able to go again, possibly for the last time! I had a very genial and stress-free time of it as for the first time I was sitting with the 'commoners' rather than the glitz and glamour of high table. We were served collops of beef ("larger than a slice but smaller than a dollop", the fellow I was with drolly explained) and 1977 port amongst other delicacies. It all went down very well indeed and the choir sang a glorious Amazing Grace arrangement by Eriks Esenvalds in addition to their usual. After three hours of feasting the students proceeded to the College Bar for the Dean's Party (where we were provided with "entertainment appropriate to our status" -- the fellows and guests proceeded to the senior common room for the same; I rather think theirs probably involved a bit more cheese and port), where I ended up chatting very amiably about climate change, modern art, and Pink Floyd. Ah, university life.

2. Going to a performance by the small but very slick and innnovative company Ballet Black at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. To my slightly starstruck surprise we were sitting next to the choreographer of one of the pieces, Martin Lawrance. (I recognised him from doing a workshop with the company he's worked with for decades, the Richard Alston Dance Company). I managed to squeak a hello and a "enjoyed your work" and was momentarily extremely confused as he seemed to think he knew me -- turned out he thought I was somebody else! Still, a confused conversation with a rising choreographic star in the UK contemporary dance scene is still something :)

3. The weather. I pick and choose my extent of Britishness, but this weather really does need to be mentioned. It is gorgeous! Sunny and blue for days and the narcissi are basking in it all on the backs. I should take myself to Jesus Lock to see if the daffodils have come out yet.

4. Sylvie Guillem, Russell Maliphant and Robert LePage's Eonnagata at Sadler's Wells was something rather undefinable and full of the most gorgeous images. It was not really dance but rather stagecraft. But what stagecraft! Sylvie silhouetted in shadow play inside the drapes of a silken gown; Russell in a mesmerising and gracious fan dance; some absolutely stupendous lighting design by Michael Hulls bringing to life everything from a martial arts arena to a symbolic joining of man and woman; and best of all, a long sequence towards the end involving a mirrored table and the most mind-bogglingly beautiful confusion between one performer, another, and each other's reflections. It is a work in progress, and not as consistent as it should have been, but I don't really mind, because the moments that worked were quite simply breathtaking.

5. A couple of friends from my second field season on Lizard visiting for the weekend. We had a very relaxed and Cambridgey time of it, lunching in the Copper Kettle and getting coffee at Indigo's, wandering down to Grantchester along the backs and the river for tea and scones at the Orchard, going for curry and a cheesy 'bop' in the Clare Cellars, nosing around market on a blindingly bright sunny Sunday, visiting King's Chapel and yet again staring up in awe at that sublime fan vault, reading the newspaper over yet more coffee in Bene'ts, making pancakes and caramel sauce in a nod to our Lizard Island day-off traditions, and heading to the theatre... oh, but it's a good town, it is.

6. Zoology Seminar Day on Friday afternoon filled with really interesting talks from group leaders from all over zoology. It really is a crazily diverse department, there were talks on climate change and red deer, cuckoo chicks, Drosophila gut movements, Y RNA, Ichthyostega, Francis Crick (by Peter Lawrence), the energetic cost of rods (the photoreceptor kind), etc. Fascinating. It was really good because group leaders being who they are, they were almost all excellent speakers and knew exactly how to pitch a talk to a scientific but unspecialised audience. The Y RNA talk was possibly the first ever molecular talk I have ever understood and enjoyed in my life.

7. And still working on that paper...

Aggression and Light

2009-03-11T17:53:00.002Z

So, yesterday morning I had a meeting with my supervisor, and we worked out a sort of way for me to phrase this short "summary" paper I am writing: about 1000 words taking in most of my PhD, I kid you not. I spent all afternoon writing this. Late afternoon, having just finished a first complete draft, I had another impromptu meeting where we talked through a completely different better way for me to phrase this. I have spent all of today writing this.

Now my brain is pretty much mush from in two days producing 2000 carefully considered words talking mainly about how and why some fish beat up other fish.

In the evenings yesterday and today I was/will be at the Queens' Contemporary Dance performance Sprung! performing a slow, sustained, elegant, beautiful, transcendant, choral-music, mostly-balancing-on-one-leg piece of dance called Lux Aeterna (Eternal Light).

I often feel like my life is full of the strangest disconnects, but at least it keeps things interesting!

:) pt II

2009-03-11T11:43:00.002Z

At the end of a paper I've just read in Proceedings of the Royal Society London (B), about assumptions in reproductive skew models:

"The author thanks C---, H---, M---- and S---- for valuable comments and suggestions, and J--- for the teddy bear. Funding was provided..."

I feel more enthusiastic about science already!

Perhaps Perfect

2009-03-06T10:52:00.003Z

Is life at the moment. Only perhaps, because if one could somehow magically combine life here with a tropical coral reef teeming with life and powder white beaches then it would be a (very odd sort of) paradise indeed.

Work proceeds in as smooth a manner as can be expected given that it is a PhD and I am queen of procrastination. I've finally started to write (a paper rather than the thesis, but I tell myself it is stringing words together of any sort that counts), which is actually rather nice, although as painful and slow as I anticipated. It is always good to have an end product and although there is precious little space for stylistic joy in a scientific text, there is still satisfaction to be derived from gradually organising over two years' worth of confused thinking about blue and yellow fish into something more coherent. I am aware of course that the novelty of writing is going to pale very quickly. But I shall enjoy it while I can!

Dancing is at a very happy level too at the moment. Unlike the true insanity of October and November last year when I did not have time to eat or sleep or even pretend to do my PhD, I'm now rehearsing about twice a week with the company which leaves enough time and energy to go for class (the ritual and concentration and effort of class is a kind of homecoming) and simply enjoy rehearsal. We are in preparation for a very casual show next week in Queens' College, and also an exciting collaborative experimental performance project based on Dante's Commedia in Robinson's in April. Working with the company makes such a huge difference as we have masses of repertoire in easy reach, we all have some kind of creative shorthand with each other now, and putting work together is efficient and creative all at once, which is pretty amazing. We now seem to casually make small pieces of dance in about 4 hours flat and then just wander on stage and perform them. It's buckets of fun! Outside of the studio I am starting gearing up with administration work for projects later in the year (we are doing a big evening in November for the 800th Anniversary, and I've just cooked up an idea to repeat our Trinity cloisters performance in May Week). It is a massive labour of love but I do honestly think it is worth every email I send.

The other nice thing about not being in rehearsal every waking moment is that I have had plenty of time to expand my social and cultural horizons, as sickening as that sounds. In the past few weeks I've been to the ADC to see the Footlights, the Medics Revue, and in a failed attempt to see the RAG stand up comedy night we simply ended up in the bar chatting instead. Last night, an a capella gig by a group called Over the Bridge in Trinity's OCR, simply wonderful entertainment (hurrah for the Beatles) and another reminder that I am very lucky to be living in a town where everybody is young and ridiculously talented and full of creative energy. Dinner and drinks at various wonderful places in Cambridge ranging from extremely tasty and cheap Chinese to restaurants more reminiscent of what I think of as Cambridge's 'Maryleboneisation' (no really, we're getting all the same shops -- Cambridge is already gentrified, so this is a step above); from good old English pubs to pretty-people cocktail bars to a cheesy club or so. A long-delayed afternoon in the Fitzwilliam museum where I fell in love with a Rodin cast. In London, an amazing piece of theatre (very physical and very movement based, which of course I loved) called On The Waterfront, high tea at the Lanesborough, a trip to the Natural History Museum, and (upcoming) various highly anticipated trips to Sadler's Wells and the Coliseum and maybe the Opera House to be inspired by the likes of Sylvie Guillem.

Do I sound rather ridiculously pleased with life? Well, better than grumbling my way through it, I think. Only a few more weeks of this happy work/dance/life balance and then I go DIVING in INDONESIA. There's a blue blue sky outside and sunshine pouring in through the windows. Pretty perfect.

A ramble

2009-02-16T21:15:00.003Z

What do I do with an entire evening in? After a hectic week running about meeting up with friends, and before that two months at a research station where we all lived on top of each other in a big convivial marine biologist mess, it feels rather odd to be reading quietly in my room for a couple of hours. But as the rest of the week looks jam packed with events I am telling myself to savour it while it lasts.

The weekend was chilled out (by recent standards -- all relative) and really rather lovely. I got a dose of creativity in rehearsal for a new piece and in putting soft pencil to paper again for the first time in years, helped prop up the economy by buying new boots (woo, shoes, I am such a girl sometimes -- and they're not even heels), saw a film and had lovely meals with good friends, helped celebrate my sister's birthday in London where the food was tasty and the company wonderful fun, and even -- very surprising this one -- did some work. A pretty wonderful two days. It is all about appreciating life as it comes, I think. I'm glad to remember how lovely life here can be as well, it assuages the pain of no longer being on our beach with the boats bobbing out front and the blue sky melting into bluer sea and.. oh, I mustn't think of it too much!

But --

The beauty of Lizard is ridiculous, a piercingly bright compelling paradise almost-unreal kick-yourself beauty that I never really got used to despite 10 months of living there. Being out in the environment day in and day out makes you appreciate it that much more -- the island has its moods, from gently overcast grey over a glassy sea to proper tropical storms and 2 metres swell to the tropical paradise of the photographs and postcards. Best appreciated either on the 10-20 minute daily "commute" on the boat out to the study site, the world quiet except for your outboard and you; or on a day off, on a late afternoon wander down our beach to the rocks at the end, where at low tide you can get round to this great big expanse of flat rock where you can lie down and feel the day's warmth coming back up from the rock to your back, and it feels like there's no one between you and the end of the world. If it is possible to fall in love with an island I lost my heart to Lizard a while ago.

I shall have to somehow someday engineer Lizard Island Pt IV -- some loves have to be pursued apparently (particularly when they are made largely of granite and calcium carbonate).

What an odd entry! I shall post now and hope not to regret later. :)

Weather tours

2009-02-13T18:08:00.002Z

The human body just isn't really adapted to experience, in the space of seven days or so:

1. A beautiful tropical island paradise on the Great Barrier Reef, where one spends an average of 4-5 hours a day actually under water, and much of the rest of it on a boat speeding over glassy calm seas (meep, I miss this so much already). However, said paradise is occasionally threatened by tropical cyclones, sometimes to the extent where we tie all the boats to the trees and hide in the library. A storm in January swept half our beach, the incinerator bins and the entire barbecue away; then three days later it was back to paradise.

2. High dry heat of close to 40 degrees in Melbourne's wide planned grid system. Gorgeous really although I think without a healthy Lizard tan walking around for a couple of days in this would have been quite dangerous! Shady laneways and big trees in the botanic gardens offered very welcome relief.

3. Endless drizzle for 36 hours in Townsville. I swear it must have rained for 90% of my time there. Sunny Townsville not really being built for this, I visited the museum of tropical queensland and the perc tucker art gallery, and in doing so I think exhausted Townsville's rainy day potential in about 3 hours flat.

4. Rather nice weather in Brisbane really!

5. I'm not sure what the weather was actually like in Singapore as it was evening, and I spent most of it in that amazing underground warren that is the junction of Orchard and Scotts Road linking the MRT station and three or four different shopping malls, so that you never really have to emerge into the 95% humidity... not a bad thing given the weather, but malls make me feel a bit claustrophobic sometimes -- one could be anywhere on the planet when in one, what is the point? More a lack of weather than extreme weather of any kind.

6. Freezing cold and snow back in Cambridge. I do sort of feel the snow makes up for it, we got a good 1-2 inches yesterday afternoon and it was lovely to see Great Court in the white. A bit bizarre as I still have a bikini tan and my body isn't used to the weight of all these clothes, but I'm enjoying having a bit of a winter for the first time since 2007.

Cold aside it is nice being back; I've conquered jetlag at last and am stuck into analysis at work, and it's lovely catching up with everybody over various dinners and happy hours and suchlike. Also getting back into the 'extracurricular' life with hot yoga yesterday and a documentary film screening on the evolution vs intelligent design debate tonight that is part of the Darwin celebrations. There's simply too much to do in this town -- if not for the film I could have gone to (1)more yoga (2)a contemporary dance class (3)BA dinner (4)Death of a Salesman at the ADC (would've if it hadn't sold out!) or (5)Iolanthe at the Arts, etc. etc. It's a far cry from research station life, I do love them both but at times the adjustment can be a bit of a shock to the system!

Transit Joy

2009-02-08T15:15:00.002Z

The best way to spend 5 hours in transit in Singapore EVER:
- breeze out through the airport, somehow manage to re check-in a 29kg bag without the check in dude even batting an eyelid. In the 9 planes I have been in over the past week I have managed by hook or by crook to avoid excess baggage charges. A minor miracle.
- catch the MRT to Orchard where I relive my secondary school days grabbing a cheap bowl of very yummy noodles and tako pachi at Takashimaya food court
- very spontaneously go to a friend's wedding at the Shangri-La and wander around the swanky ballroom in my travel clothes saying hi to everyone I know. Get fed yummy Indian food. The hotel is just behind my old secondary school too so I get off at my old bus stop and walk past the campus. The nostalgia! Our pagan statue of Athena still stands proud at the side gate.
- get back to the airport to find that my flight has been delayed by half an hour. This is perfect as it allows me to shower (for three quid!), feel very human again, and then check my email for free.

Time to go. Some good movies should further my denial of the arrival back in the UK and The Onset Of Cold.

Diving the Poor Knights

2009-01-04T07:57:00.002Z

Or, nudibranchs and swimthroughs make me very happy even in 18 degree water! :)

Southern Hemisphere Shindigs

2009-01-03T09:16:00.004Z

Christmas on Lizard

Was the best ever. My very first hot Western Christmas had me utterly sold on the whole idea of Santa under the antipodean sun. The day started with breakfast on the beach, then Secret Santa presents which showcased exactly how resourceful and ingenious marine field biologists really can be (top artistic marks for a huge driftwood fish sculpture which would probably sell pretty well in an art gallery, and humour marks for a flintstones snorkel set consisting of bamboo snorkel, coconut husk mask, brick weights on a rope weightbelt and plywood fins). After this all 42 people at the station (researchers and some of their families) retired to the houses to cook far too much food, with each research group bringing about enough food for 42 people, which if you do the maths all adds to rather too much food. Nevertheless excess is what Christmas is all about, and we all dug in with gusto at the beach hut. Personal highlights of this feast were a huge 3 kilo ham that someone in our house cooked up, and (our very own) enormous bowls of chocolate mousse. Whilst making this chocolate mousse (20 eggs, about 2.4 litres of cream, 9 bars of dark chocolate, and who knows how much sugar) I was not sure I would ever be able to face chocolate again, but it was so good it was entirely worth it. Post lunch everyone stumbled down to the sea and bobbed about complete with large amounts of alcohol, water guns for the kids, and Santa hats all round (this pleasant activity is very technically known in Lizard Island lingo as 'wallowing'). Wallowing lasted for a very, very long time -- till sunset in fact, which was in true Lizard style absolutely gorgeous. Just one of the best days I've had in a long time.

New Zealand
In general has been ridiculously beautiful. Highlights include:

Marine Mammals at Kaikoura

A little coastal town on the east side of the South Island. It is a novel feeling to be in the sea with views of the gorgeously craggy snow capped South Island mountains. We spent a long day swimming first with New Zealand fur seals, then with dusky dolphins. I had never met either before and they were both absolutely wonderful. You feel ridiculously lucky and excited when you are surrounded by these gorgeous creatures streaking through the water all around you (unlike the manatees, they are both extremely fast and leave you feeling very very ungraceful underwater!). The seals like to really look at you -- eye contact with one of these guys is pretty special. And the dolphins like to swim round and round you in very fast small circles which leaves you breathless trying to keep up with them whilst simultaneously singing songs through your snorkel which is apparently what they like (we were told that we are there to entertain the dolphins rather than the other way round).

Marlborough Wineries

Great wine and food are definitely a defining feature of New Zealand if you can tear your eyes away from the scenery. New Year's Eve dinner at a winery called Herzog was excellent. The food was incredibly tasty and beautifully presented and helped along by paired wines with every course (about six). Full marks especially for a fantastic main of Angus beef. All washed down with some lovely champagne. So after these 5 or 6 glasses of wine, the next day, for some unknown reason, we had booked a full day's winery tour. I must admit I started this a little bit tired(!!). But perked up quite rapidly. Tasted so much Sauvignon Blanc ('Savs'!) it all sort of blurred a bit, although a gin tasting halfway through the day seemed to wake most of us up. Found some favourites -- 2008 Sauvignon Blanc from Highfield Estate, where we also had a really excellent lunch with views of the vineyards and the hills in the distance; also Pinot Gris from a fantastic tiny little winery called Bladen where they do the tastings essentially out the back of their house; and general all round excellence from Cloudy Bay. It is really interesting to visit these wineries and really figure out what you like or don't like -- makes the whole experience of a glass of wine with your dinner much more meaningful. It wasn't poncy at all -- just full of casual people really passionate about wine, and you felt that you were free to like or not like whatever you wanted, which is the way it should be with all things really. We also did a cruise and mussel farm tour on the Pelorus Sound -- unfortunately it was rather rainy and grey (we had been very lucky with South Island sunshine otherwise), but it was really interesting to have some mussels freshly opened and served to us raw (fantastic with a few drops of Tabasco). Plus of course washed down with yet another glass of Sav!

Wellington in 4.5 hours

I actually had just over 24 hours in Wellington, but we spent the first half day wandering about on a food tour. It was really interesting, particularly a great tour through the national museum Te Papa with a focus on Maori foods from native NZ plants and fish, and we had some amazing cheese and chocolate tastings. However my favourite thing to do in a new city is to grab a map and walk it all, which I only got round to today when I was left to my own devices as my family have now headed homewards. Thankfully Wellington lends itself very well to this kind of exploration. I started with a wonderful cup of coffee at Floriditas on Cuba St (I have learned to order a 'flat white'), then headed north along the quays, visiting a Leonardo da Vinci machine exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts, catching the cable car up to the Botanic Gardens, wandering (very rapidly) through them and back down to Parliament (not quite the same as Westminster), and serendipitously jumping on a bus back down to Te Papa where I did a whirlwind tour of the permanent exhibitions on Pacific and Western immigration to New Zealand and the art gallery. Sadly, I didn't have time to look at the colossal squid (which I am told was not quite colossal, but merely very big, something which is a small consolation). Wellington packs a huge amount of stuff to do into a very small space, which I like very much -- it was a happy 4.5 hours. Good coffee, great museum exhibitions, and a poster for Sylvie Guillem, Russell Maliphant and the Royal New Zealand Ballet -- it is probably somewhere I could live very happily!

Half a day later and I am in a youth hostel in Whangarei having arrived on a little propeller plane which took only 25 minutes to get here from Auckland. Life is suddenly pretty different from the tasting menus and winery tours of Blenheim. Nevertheless, I'm pretty excited about diving the Poor Knights Islands tomorrow -- here's hoping I don't completely freeze and that I see, er, lots of fish...

Lizard Island Pt III

2008-12-12T01:01:00.002Z

My supervisor has spoken about fieldwork addiction and I very much see what he means. Less than a week into field season three and I am (i) absolutely LOVING it (ii) already sad it is my last field season! The weather is wonderful. The fish are cute and I am now better at outwitting their tricky little blighter manouevres when trying to catch them. The social life at the station is easy and relaxed and so much fun. The island and the reefs and even trusty "Study Site E" is breathtakingly beautiful. Life is very, very good indeed. (I'm trying to enjoy it whilst waiting for the inevitable field season disaster to kick in!)

Here is a picture of a fat nudibranch that I snapped in between learning to recognise one tricky little blighter from another (I think my field assistant who is back with me after helping me out on my very first season 1.5 years ago is amazed at how much I have mellowed and how much less of a stressed slavedriver I am now!)

Cambridge seems very far away but since I have not blogged for ages I've completely missed out writing about New Works. It went very, very well (I think we even broke even, which for a pure contemporary dance show is probably an achievement in itself). It was the most rewarding show I have ever produced -- the company are full of the most amazing dedicated talented wonderful people and over the months and months of almost daily rehearsals and tiredness and laughing and being kicked out of one rehearsal space after another we really became each other's family. It is such a joy to be working with a team where everyone simply piles in and makes things happen because they care. Plus I think we made some rather nice dance -- can't wait to see the video (hopefully we'll put some on YouTube in due course) but meanwhile there are many, many pictures from our usual wonderful photographers here:

http://www.grisby.org/Photos/520/index.html
http://www.grisby.org/Photos/519/index.html
http://claude.cantabphotos.com/081202025104/

Rehearsal addiction

2008-11-01T22:44:00.003Z

What a lovely Saturday. I spent 8 hours of it in rehearsal but feel completely energised as it was all very civilised and spread out such that I actually had time for proper breakfast, lunch and dinner (which I even managed to cook, something I've really missed doing). The weather was not the kindest so it was probably better to spend it indoors anyway.

Musical rehearsal was great fun, we managed to run a very passable Act One and it is fantastic to see it coming together, as someone said there are moments when it really does make the hairs on the back of your neck stand (it is a very dramatic serious musical with a fantastic score, combining everything I love about music and theatre). Cannot wait to see it all on stage with a full band. The cast have been incredibly game about learning all this crazy 'contemporary' dance I'm throwing at them. It must be completely out of left field for them but I think many of them have really enjoyed finding out that dance does not have to be the stereotyped step-ball-change-jazz-hands. A story of this calibre deserves much more than 'moves' done simply to fill stage space or to impress, which is much the same way I feel about dance in general, so it all works out rather well. Here's the website for anyone who's interested.

Sandwiching that were two rehearsals for the dance company's show. It's in a month now, which I'm sure would send me into a bit of a panic if I weren't so caught up with the musical (which is in 1.5 weeks!), but nevertheless I think we will get there, even if by the skin of our teeth. I really love some of the pieces I'm dancing in and am trying to forge on with my own, which is this really rather scarily long piece vaguely based on my PhD (no less!). I definitely seem to have moved into the choreography side of things more and more as we are also fielding two short works which I've made over the past year or so -- so while I'm not on stage quite as much, what creative vision my brain can conjure up definitely is! It's just so much fun being in rehearsal day in and day out with a small group (there are only really about 7 core dancers) who know each other and get along really well. It's small enough to be very focussed and highly quality controlled, but at the same time we spend quite a lot of time in rehearsal laughing fit to bust. We definitely have a fixed programme now and it is just a matter of finishing off making the material (the show is after all called "New Works") and polishing it to a standard we're happy with. Phew!

Life is good, if on occasion a bit overwhelming. This weekend is a wonderful respite because I'm simply rehearsing, which I never fail to enjoy. The PhD analysis work is a little depressing at the moment and occasionally I wonder how on earth I'm going to plan a third field season at the same time as all this other stuff (I'm trying not to simply show up on Lizard without having decided what I'm going to do for my last two months of data collection, but I fear this may happen to some extent). Still, I've decided that the good thing about doing four different things at once (dance, musical, work, supervising) means at least the likelihood of them all going wrong at the same time is hopefully low so there will always be something to cheer me up!

Surely I Should Mention Fish

2008-10-24T15:48:00.003+01:00

I should be preparing next week's supervision. So much for having escaped the clutches of procrastination.

This week is going well. I get up, I try to work in the office (in reality spending 50% of my time writing paper outlines and the other 50% choreographing in my head at the desk whilst hoping my supervisor doesn't suddenly come in -- desk choreography is very similar to 'train choreography' i.e. in your head on the train whilst plugged into your iPod; the other passengers very Britishly ignore the crazy person muttering "and one and two and turn arms up" while making strange gestures in her seat), I get to my first rehearsal with the dance company at 6pm, I rush to my second rehearsal with the musical at about 8 or 9pm, I get home at 11, I shower, eat, collapse. And then I get up and do it all over again. It is exhausting, but so much fun!

Too many dance reviews to write. This is the pithy version.
Merce Cunningham: Really interesting stuff. A completely different approach to what I am used to, viz. he makes some steps then he adds some music, some rather unforgiving leotards, and some great backdrops. None of each aspect actually has to be related to any of the other aspects. Fascinating outcome, especially with 'Split Sides' where he played this up to the maximum by having the order of two pieces of music, two sets, two lighting programmes, and two different costumes determined by the throw of four dice just before the start of the performance. How the dancers manage to keep their bearings and keep on doing the same dance with a completely different aural and visual environment I don't quite know, but it all worked perfectly. It was all a little bit "highbrow" and hardly crowd pleasing but I enjoyed it very much. I am clearly getting better at the appreciating weird modern dance thing.

Richard Alston 40/60: Much what I expected. Some really beautiful shapes and I always enjoy watching the beauty of these incredibly controlled dancers -- technically wonderful. A couple of absolute gems in "The Men In My Life" which was a collection of bits of choreography for men he has made over the last 40 years. Pierre Tappon the standout dancer (now that Jonathan Goddard has left!) -- small, lithe, physically powerful, a pleasure to watch. Somebody however commented that Alston's choreography can be a little bit soulless and in a way I agree. It was a pleasant evening, but not hugely inspiring nor thought-provoking, much less so than their June performance at The Place earlier this year (which was only 1/3 Alston choreography).

Australian Ballet with Bangarra Dance Theatre: The first Rite of Spring I've ever seen. Fantastic movement, greatly theatrical with sets and costumes galore (at the end they even came out completely whited out as is I think traditional in Aboriginal dance). The Bangarra dancers were remarkable in their grace, it is such a completely different kind of grace to that of ballet trained dancers, but no less beautiful and powerful. Thoroughly enjoyable. The Massine piece that they did before the interval was very clearly dated, but interesting in a very "oh look, they'd already started to use angular arms in the 40s, how advanced of them" kind of way.

Batsheva: LOVED them. Endless, endless inventiveness with pattern and structure, it was like a choreography masterclass. Some incredible performance skills -- all the dancers maintained this crazy intensity for a full hour of performance -- combined with vigorous athleticism and the occasional choreographic reminder of their vulnerable humanity (also helped by the pedestrian costumes) made for a thoroughly fascinating evening. It was a reminder of the fact that if you have enough choreographic material and powerful enough performers you can take it right back to the basics, you do not need lighting gels or swirly costumes or even dramatic music, and yet you can make the audience completely yours. Inspired and awed!

Meep

2008-10-20T16:17:00.002+01:00

Spent Sunday afternoon in the deathly silent office trying to get my head around parent-offspring conflict and honest signalling, both fascinating huge topics in behavioural ecology which did my head in as a student, and, as it turns out, still do my head in. It was useful though because I think I actually had an interesting discussion today with my supervision students on it. Huzzah, at least that was worth it.

This week I have an overwhelming timetable that on several nights involves rehearsals for both the dance show and the musical in quick succession (so something like 6-11pm), I am not sure dinner is ever going to come into play here, instead there may be quite a lot of cycling up and down Cambridge very rapidly while I try to switch my head round from interesting and quirky contemporary dance with some of Cambridge's best dancers to getting non-dancers to coordinate their hands and feet whilst bringing a dramatic story about anti-Semitism in America's deep South across. Er.

And right now rather than writing this very haphazard entry (rather reflects my state of mind at the moment) I am supposed to be calculating group territory sizes in order to see what sort of spatial effect my removal experiments had on my fish.

My brain cannot seem to turn off and doesn't quite know what to focus on at any one time. Part of me just wants to go 'meep', crawl into a corner and seek escapism in Terry Pratchett and coffee while the rest of the world gets on with all this being productive business. The other part is just masochistic.

Urk

2008-10-02T10:49:00.004+01:00

A throat I rather want to rip out, the beginnings of a drippy nose, general muscly yuckiness and a feeling that I just want to fall asleep at my desk -- oh no, can it be early onset fresher's flu? I have not had a cold of any sort since early 2006 post Princeton interview fluiness; put it down to my healthy scuba diving lifestyle training up the immune system of an ox, but alas, all good things must come to an end. Maybe it was simply that I tend to run away from the UK in winter, a season which this week at least is very palpably in the air.

I must not succumb properly because it is most inconvenient to do so this week. The beginnings of the throat came on over a two and a half hour meeting on Tuesday evening in which I spoke loudly and nonstop about Act One of this musical I'm choreographing -- so I thought at first it was merely laryngitis, something that I do get on occasion, usually after too much talking, drinking, or a combination thereof. The beginnings of the drippy nose came on during yesterday's rehearsal for a piece I am making in which I just ignored my throat and shouted out my usual "yes! no! maybe? can you stick your leg up and spin around three times from that position?". Probably this will all just develop slowly over the next 5 rehearsals and 3 meetings I have scheduled over the next 4 days. Not forgetting the supposed 9-5 thinking about fish (ha!). Nor a trip to London somewhere in the middle of it where I will have to control my sniffles as the Merce Cunningham company carve out their beauteous shapes on the Barbican's stage.

Hah! Perhaps my body has gone into pre-emptive strike. More fool it, it should know that it takes more than that to stop me foolishly trying to push my multitasking capacity. Hurrah, ill and rehearsing for two shows at once, this is more like life as I used to know it.

Morphoses

2008-09-27T00:49:00.003+01:00

Went to see Chris Wheeldon's company Morphoses tonight in their second season at Sadler's Wells. This is a new 'transatlantic' ballet company which takes some of the best dancers in top UK and US companies and makes them work over the summer to produce some of the best stuff ever. In tonight's programme was a new work by Emily Molnar, followed by two by Wheeldon: Commedia (a premiere) and Fool's Paradise (which they premiered last year). The Molnar was a bit of a disappointment. With dancers like those of Morphoses it is hard not to appreciate every movement they make on stage, but by 10 minutes into this piece I was quite simply a bit bored. Despite fairly interesting movement and some nice motifs, it never seemed to go anywhere at all, just movement after movement in solos and pairs without any sort of structure. The endless repetitive Steve Reich music was inoffensive at first, but just as structureless as the piece, and started to grate after a little. At least the dancing was wonderful, with Rubinald Pronk in particular standing out with power and a wonderfully flexible torso.

Loved both Wheeldons, as ever -- I do not think I have ever not enjoyed a Chris Wheeldon piece, from the gentleness of the Tryst pas de deux to the acrobatic fumblings of Polyphonia. Choreographically it seems he can do no wrong! It was nice of him too to come out before the curtain went up and talk to us a little about the evening's programme. Fool's Paradise I had seen before and I had almost forgotten how ridiculously beautiful it is, all golden and shimmering with dancers repeating shape after gorgeous shape, with Joby Talbot's music lending powerful emotional depth throughout. If there is any criticism at all to be made of it, it is that 27 minutes is fairly long to sustain this kind of heart-in-mouth poignant almost-painful slow beauty for. Both times when I've watched it I have occasionally glazed over in the middle somewhere with emotional overload! Still, it is a gorgeous piece, and I'm glad to have seen it again.

The new work Commedia was a wonderful antidote to the seriousness of Fool's Paradise. With harlequin patterned bodysuits and the occasional colourful flouncy tutu, this was lighthearted and athletic good fun, filled with Wheeldon's trademark play with shape. What made it special though, I think, was that it wasn't overdone by any means; there was a magic subtlety to the way it played with the Commedia theme without ever doing anything too obvious and clowny. Leanne Benjamin and Edward Watson danced a central pas de deux which was absolutely brilliant -- there was no pyrotechnics, just immense skill used to make everything seem effortless and fascinating. It could have gone on forever and I would have been happy. Following this there was a fantastic little bit of group work, which was so visually clever I actually can't really describe it properly at all, but played with partnered and solo variations on shapes done in a delicious series of surprising moments emerging from a synchronous whole. Immensely satisfying.

Red cooked pork

2008-09-13T21:34:00.004+01:00

Cooking a kilogram of pork in an entire bottle of soy sauce (plus some other things) for two hours results in extremely yummy melting meaty soy saucey goodness.

Plus, it is incredibly easy, and you can do laundry and download videos in the meantime: a pleasing way to spend an evening.

!!!

(I think I've been reading too much Douglas Coupland.)

Oncoming

2008-09-07T21:51:00.003+01:00

I spent most of August away in the States, at a big behavioural ecology conference in Ithaca and then a holiday in Boston and New York. Had a packed wonderful day in Boston, whale watching (saw 30 humpbacks!), following the Freedom Trail, and wandering through the North End. It seems an immensely live-able city. Then there was a week in New York. Now that I've been a few times it was great to not feel like I had to do anything, so we simply spent much of the time wandering about, particularly in the Village where we were staying, which rapidly became my favourite part of the city -- it is so filled with quirky cafes, restaurants, clothes and record shops, and perfect for an aimless afternoon. I even managed to go and take a dance class at Merce Cunningham's studio, literally a 10 minute stroll up Bleecker, and thoroughly enjoyed myself carving out those wonderful clean Cunningham shapes with the Manhattan skyline out the 11th floor studio windows. My sister gave us a foolproof list of great places to eat; my favourite was Ippudo (at St Mark's) -- wonderful bowls of unbelievably savoury ramen served in an actually reasonable quantity hit exactly the right spot for a couple of lunches. Although the pastrami on rye at Katz's was pretty darn good too. And parpardelle in ragu and a couple of glasses of vino at Frank's made for the perfect late dinner. And... oh dear, must stop now that I am back in the land of egg mayo sandwiches for lunch!

Now that I am back I am faced with that pesky but rather joyful problem of having signed myself up for too many fun things to do. In the upcoming 3 months I am:
1) Producing, designing, choreographing for and dancing in a full-length 2 night show of entirely new work with our new company Cambridge Contemporary Dance at the Mumford Theatre. Because we only actually have about 10 dancers, it is going to be an interesting exercise in stamina.
2) Also for Cambridge Contemporary Dance, doing long term planning and preprarations for further performances in January, March and November of next year in Cambridge and with luck, London.
3) Choreographing a musical which will run for 5 nights at the ADC Theatre
4) Supervising Trinity second years in the behavioural section of Animal Biology
5) Finishing off analysis from my second field season
6) Planning a third field season for which I leave 24 hours after the dance show
7) Attempting to stay sane

Hurrah?

Talking to young 'uns

2008-07-03T22:31:00.002+01:00

I spent today helping to man the Natural Sciences booth at the university's Open Day (more tomorrow), talking to sixth formers and their parents visiting Cambridge to find out about coming to university here. Late in the day we were standing about talking about how shockingly young some of the prospective applicants looked when I realised that this lot were born in the NINETIES and are applying to university. Much shock and horror from us ancient PhD students. People born in the decade after us have no right to be fully formed human beings yet, surely.

It was actually a fairly enjoyable way to spend the day out of the office and feel like you're doing something vaguely worthwhile. I did really enjoy the NatSci course and it is nice to be enthusing about it to young 'uns. Without the course there would be no way I would be working on the Great Barrier Reef following little blue and yellow fish around -- this was definitely not part of the game plan when fresh out of my high school's molecular biology-heavy A level course. I'm not sure when the epiphany struck. Possibly actually very early on, in the first week of Evolution and Behaviour lectures in my first year, when our sage old Cambridge don lecturer demonstrated to us the courting behaviour of the male long-tailed widow bird by crouching behind the lectern, then leaping all at once squawking into the air. What better subject could there be?

It was interesting talking to them because it reminded me how competitive and important it all seemed back then. (Not that it isn't actually competitive and important, it just seems less so in hindsight.) You had to choose the right subjects; know what to say in a personal statement; be prepared for interview; worry about whether 89.8% counts as 90% (!), and it just sort of goes on and on in a big stressful litany. Thank goodness that's all over (though I probably speak too soon, as the selection process for the real world rather than university still lies somewhere in my fuzzy future). Speaking to loads of new people was also really fun -- they run the gamut, from those who come right up to you and say, they are going to do neuroscience, what are the research opportunities and do I need to find a third year project as early as I can; and then there are those who "like animals"! Personally I rather like the ones who just like animals. Like I tell them, it's a pretty good start.

Thingamajigs

2008-06-27T22:37:00.004+01:00

Things I have done in the recent past:

- Produced and performed a contemporary dance show which was probably the most photographed small contemporary dance showcase in Cambridge's history, it was like being a drunken young star outside a nightclub, there was a camera click for every half movement you made. Despite being desperately, farcically last minute from a production point of view --including the entire venue being a wet mess of broken glass and left over bits of tree from the May Ball when we were trying to run a dress rehearsal the night before (fat chance), one dancer being unable to make it for the performance with 45 minutes confirmed notice, a choir showing up after the show actually started -- the audience actually seemed to think it was very slick (goodness me). Production values aside, I think that the dance itself was really rather not bad, both in terms of choreographic repertoire and performance. And of course the cloisters did their job in being generally gorgeous, and the heavens smiled upon us with beautiful sunshine and a brisk breeze to pleasingly rustle the dancers' costumes. So overall, it was not a bad start for Cambridge Contemporary Dance at all. There is loads to plan for next year so I'm very excited! Photos of Impressions are all linked on its Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=58680410592

- Went to a concert by the Gentlemen of St John's in aid of charity. The Gents are the choral scholars of John's, a male-voiced group which on this evening sang everything from early ecclesiastical music (beautiful but a tad boring in bits, particularly without the full ranks of a large choir to fill out the chapel with swelling voices -- although they did manage it with an Ave Maria) to traditional songs (particularly enjoyed Miss Otis Regrets which I thought gently funny and so very English) to, in the last quarter, full-on swinging a capella standards, jazz and a good sprinkling of Beatles. I must admit that I enjoyed the last part much more than the rest, probably making me a bit of a philistine, but it was all so much more fun than the seriousness of the first part of the programme; they even switched their sombre black bowties for comedy patterned red ones in recognition of this! Also I really enjoyed that the close harmony songs gave them the chance to showcase particular voices, instead of it all being a blended choral sound. They all had really wonderful voices, technically so impressive and all with their very own sound. As my friend remarked we really couldn't decide which of them had the best voice because they were all so great and different! I think my favourites were "Is You Is" (..or is you ain't my baby, etc.), and a very energetic "Surfin' USA" complete with vocal acrobatics and a hilarious operatic interlude.

- Saw the one year programme graduation performance at Laban, followed the next night by the Richard Alston company at home at The Place. Somewhat to my surprise I thoroughly enjoyed both of them and found that they weren't actually as drastically different as I thought they would be, based on previous experiences of both Laban choreography and the Richard Alston company! Laban's style tends towards dance theatre and is often driven by some kind of meaningful avant-garde concept. This can often go right off the deep end of the "be-a-tree-and-then-have-an-epileptic-fit-whilst-wearing-some-bandages" style of contemporary choreography, which I have struggled in the past to enjoy, quite simply because I find it rather boring. However I was very pleasantly surprised to find a whole host of thoroughly engaging pieces -- yes, most were concept driven, but there was bucket loads of exciting dancey movement to watch as well, almost no mooing, and loads of humour, which made the fact that they were concept-driven really interesting rather than some kind of modern-art-huh? drag. I particularly enjoyed a piece where two men tried repeatedly to hug without really wanting to show their need for physical contact -- the epitome of simple and effective.

I always knew I would enjoy the next evening's performance -- Richard Alston almost never fails to delight me -- and with the calibre of dancers that they have you could almost just sit there and admire the superhuman control and energy of the performers even if the choreography turned out to be a bit of a drag. But the choreography was very good indeed. I was surprised at first by a Darren Ellis work 'No More Ghosts'; Alston is generally beautiful, elegant and classical, and here we suddenly had an electronic score, dancers in Converse sneakers and tank tops, frenzied floor work with spins on the knee and a duet involving the woman hanging nonchalantly upside down, cross-legged and -armed, the only support point one knee hooked around her partner's arm. It was fascinating to see the company in this departure from their usual style and I really enjoyed it. This was followed by more traditional fare for Alston with his own 'Nigredo' and then Martin Lawrance's 'Body & Soul'. The latter was a wonderful dramatic work, with live performance of Schumann's Dichterliebe, the dancers dressed in slightly period formal long black greatcoats and dresses which swung about them to great effect as they all engaged in a technical tour de force with emotional power and intriguing psychological relationships all into the bargain.

- Gave a talk on my work to fellow PhD students accompanied by beer and pizza. I feel this went down well enough. Little does not go down well when accompanied by beer and pizza. See, I do try to actually do some work when not engaged in my full time hobby of dance. I've also been starting to explore my spatial data collected from dragging GPS units around after fish, which is exciting in a rather geeky way.

- Went to the Pembroke June Event in lieu of a May Ball (the night before Impressions!). Enjoyed myself tremendously. I think there is a lot to be said for the events where you are less conscious of the fact that you have paid a LOT of money and therefore feel less pressure to do everything (also there is less everything to do which makes things easier). I ate a stupid amount (bangers and mash, fajitas, hog roast, sickening amounts of chocolate -- it was after all themed "The Chocolate Factory"), drank rather more than a stupid amount (including shots of Baileys with dark chocolate liqeur yum and tequila which I'd actually never had before -- I rather like the whole salt and lime faff!), oohed and aahed at the Acrobatic Rock'n'Roll performance, bemusedly bounced around confusedly at a ceilidh that put me rather in mind of human bumper cars, and went home early, full, satisfied, and happily woozy.

- Sat around chatting with friends variously from dance, college and work over rather copious quantities of alcohol about, well, nothing much (if you really want to know: fear of flying, protein crystals, what men want, evolutionary psychology, bird sex, &c.) , which is very much a good way to spend an evening.

Culture!

2008-06-11T23:34:00.002+01:00

Or Why I Love Living In Cambridge.

The past week has consisted of everything I love about Cambridge life. Or pretty much everything; I didn't go sit in Heffers with a novel and a coffee, but that was just because it was too pretty and warm so I sat outdoors with a novel instead!

Friday evening: A free concert in the Master's Lodge by the Aronowitz Ensemble, who played Schumann's Piano Quintet in E flat major and Schubert's String Quintet in C major. Was almost in two minds about whether to go, but I was so glad I did. The minute I sat down a very amiable old fellow started chatting to me about music and Trinity and the master and, when I told him I was a zoologist, geese... And then of course there was some glorious beautiful music played absolutely exhiliratingly (it was very energetic stuff, particularly the Schumann, and I thought perhaps the fact that they were all young musicians added to the vigour with which they played it), in a real chamber music format. It is quite something to be sitting in a room of the type which chamber music was designed for (old, small and intimate, portraits of Queen Elizabeth watching over you, drinks receptions waiting outside, lots of distinguished personages nodding away to it all, the summer dusk slowly dimming the view of Great Court and the college clock on occasion gently interrupting), the effect is very different to that of a larger venue. Although neither quintet struck me to the core, I did honestly enjoy a lot of it and pleasantly surprised myself with how complex and interesting I found the Schubert. Having recently read Vikram Seth's "An Equal Music", about a violinist in a quartet, and also in the middle of rehearsing a piece I made last year inspired by Jacqueline du Pre's playing, there was plenty to keep me interested above and beyond the venue and the music, though it hardly needed it!

Saturday: A day of dance. I hauled myself out of bed far earlier than I do in the week (hobbies are always so much more interesting than work!) in order to get to the Royal Opera House on time to queue for day tickets to the ballet that evening. Amazingly they now sell standing tickets as day tickets and so I managed to secure a prime view ticket to the Royal Ballet's much loved (and deservedly so) Romeo and Juliet for eight pounds, believe it or not. After a restocking trip to Chinatown where I did my usual goggling over the vast array of "food from home", I headed off to The Place for my now weekly Cunningham (contemporary dance) class.

The day was rounded off very wonderfully with the ballet. Having seen this production only a year or two ago I knew what I was in for, but as this was one of the best ballets I have ever seen I knew I wasn't to be disappointed at any rate. Marianela Nunez and Thiago Soares debuted in the title roles only a few weeks ago, and were much lauded -- and again, I think, deservedly. Nunez is physically wonderful, with a truly awe-inspiring technique. Her control is such that she can take all sorts of wonderful risks with daringly off-kilter balances in her solos, and manages to achieve an amazing degree of heart-rending physical desperation in the steps she dances as Romeo leaves 'the morning after', and then soon beyond that her very reluctant duet with Paris (as ever it is the amount of control she has that enables her to let go more than a less steely technique would). For Nunez it is her dancing that brings the character across, rather than her plain acting (that long moment where she sits on the bed gathering courage to go to Friar Laurence wasn't quite as convincing as it could have been); whereas for Soares it is almost the other way around. His technique is unfortunately not quite as stellar as Nunez's and it shows particularly in the glorious sequences at the beginning of the balcony pas de deux in which Romeo spins and leaps his heart out to his Juliet -- he just didn't quite pull it off for me. He never did seem to be able to let go physically and trust to his technique to carry the emotion, and as a result his Romeo always seemed a little controlled and internal -- but nonetheless convincing for that. In the town scenes with the harlots and the villagers his dancing sparkled much more, and it was in his simple acting that he really became Romeo -- standing like a lovestruck fool when he first meets Juliet at the ball; mind filled to distraction with thoughts of love as his friends tease and cajole, his Romeo seems to love quietly, but so very completely. It is no trouble at all to stand for three hours when you have choreography and music and dancing of this quality to totally engross you.

Sunday: More cultural pursuits but in a much more modest and personal way. I (successfully) interviewed to choreograph a musical for November this year -- I've always admired the diversity and sheer quality of the work of the musical theatre group here and it is wonderful to be part of the creative team of one (I've publicity designed for them in the past but that doesn't really count). Part of the reason I decided to take this on is that I'm getting more interested in where movement comes from, and I think choreographing a rather serious dramatic story will help me to explore that -- no jazz hands in this one! It is exciting also to be working in a different medium to the 'showcase' contemporary dance shows that I'm now very used to. Otherwise I spent the day rehearsing, cooking and even (hurrah) lolling on the backs with a novel! Sadly my schedule meant that I had to miss the Trinity choir singing from the towers and from punts on the river which they do every Trinity Sunday to sort of herald May Week and the summer, but I did faintly make out their harmonious strains whilst I was waiting for my interview in Clare, and later again when we moved our rehearsal to the cloisters to work out spacing, so I didn't entirely miss out.

Monday evening: The Hummingbirds, an a capella group in yet another beautiful old college room (the OCR this time) -- very enjoyable barbershop stuff, with some Scissor Sisters thrown in, because that seems to be the a capella pop source of choice nowadays..

Tuesday evening: Yet more rehearsals.

Wednesday evening: BA Dinner! Crab cakes, roast pork, and the richest chocolate mousse ever. Yum. We even got champagne as pre-dinner drinks instead of sherry, they're pulling out the stops!

Entire cost of cultural and culinary pursuits of the past week: Twenty-four pounds. Where else would this happen?!

Impressions

2008-06-05T23:50:00.004+01:00

In the thick of rehearsing for Impressions, a small May Week contemporary dance performance we (being our new dance company Cambridge Contemporary Dance) are putting on. Having had a May Week performance first suggested over a "yay I'm back in Cambridge" dinner with some dancers in late April this really has been a very speedy gestation indeed, made possible by a small cast and a essentially mostly a reworking of repertoire rather than making new work. I have thoroughly enjoyed producing this so far. It is such a pleasure to work with a small number of people whom you are familiar with and know you can trust; in addition the novelty of working in the really unusual space of the 300 year old cloisters under the Wren Library in Trinity has made things all very exciting. College has been really supportive, and it's nice to be running about speaking to my Tutor and the Junior Bursar and the Head Porter and Catering, after 5 years of being in this college and never really feeling part of the institutional side of things. I have high hopes for this performance and for Cambridge Contemporary Dance in general; I think we have some really wonderful talent in the group and it is all very exciting. We've even just received a rather large grant from the University's 800th Anniversary Events team, so we're commissioning ourselves to make something Very Very Good for next year. It feels good indeed to be able to be part of taking things to the next level. Scary, obviously, but good.

Dancing, producing for dance, watching dance -- saw some new work in the Linbury at the ROH a couple of weeks ago. Mainly choreographed by dancers within the Royal Ballet ranks, this was always going to be something of a mixed offering but for seven pounds to see Royal Ballet dancers, why not? I heartily disliked one piece, Vanessa Fenton's Monument, which with black unitards and bizarre gestures seemed to me almost ridiculous -- I'm sure it wasn't meant to remind me of a bad MTV style "dance team" routine but it certainly did in parts. On the other hand, I really thoroughly enjoyed three of the works -- two edgy duets by Viacheslav Samodurov (who had the good fortune to be able to choreograph this on co-principals Ivan Putrov and Sarah Lamb) and Matjash Mrozewski, and a group piece by Jonathan Watkins which had a really enjoyable fluidity to it. Reviewers seemed to enjoy a longer, slightly more traditional ballet by Liam Scarlett, but I have to say after the first enjoyable fast-paced witty section this left me cold by suddenly changing moods into something darker and more aggressive, which for me rather killed it all by making it clear that it did not really have anything coherent to say as a piece.

I think I am gradually becoming slightly discontented with movement for movement's sake, and seem to have to look for something more in anything I watch -- certainly not always a narrative or 'message', as I find physical relationships between dancers and space, or a mood and feel, do the job just as well -- so long as it is not just steps placed to musical notes just because those notes are there, so long as the choreography has some kind of aim, it is made so much more interesting for it. At any rate I shall soon have ample ground to test my developing thoughts on choreography as next week I shall be watching in quick succession two performances that possibly represent opposites in London's contemporary dance scene -- a graduation performance at Laban (full of dance theatre and what my Laban friend describes as "epileptic fits on stage"), and then Richard Alston at home at The Place (all Cunningham and beauteous leaping combinations across the stage). I instinctively tend towards the latter, in my watching and my own choreography, but I'm not entirely sure if I may be developing more tolerance and appreciation of the former, even if I still find it almost impossible to keep my attention fixed on people when all they are doing is walking about the stage, mooing. Anyway, I'll try and report back, not that any of you will be much interested (insert usual apology for going into esoteric dance discussion mode here).

All that dance has left not much time or motivation for much else, although I have somehow miraculously managed to stay on schedule with my wrestling with Access and R, and have a sheaf of analysis summaries full of pretty graphs to prove it. I'm at a bit of a halfway point and hope to decide whether I'm heading out again for a third field season very soon. Personally, dance-pangs aside, I would love to head back to Lizard but have to actually think of something sensible to do in it, which is proving rather difficult! Otherwise, more analysis looms large till a conference and holiday break in August. I spent today actually reading some papers in preparation for the next lot of analysis, which was a very novel feeling after having slogged through field work and then stuck straight into statistics for over half a year. I'd forgotten how enjoyable it can be to learn about other people's science, especially when they involve African elephant dominance hierarchies (woo).

Plus, I've even found the time for drinks, dinners out, more experimental cooking, Indiana Jones, Sex and the City, Jude the Obscure, oh and a few weeks back a very nice birthday formal and everyone squished into my room afterwards drinking champagne and eating some very yummy chocolate cake. Life, overall, is really pretty good -- now I just need the sun to come out again so I can resume my lolling about on the backs (sadly interrupted for the past few weeks by a return to the typical miserableness of English weather).

Risi e Bisi

2008-05-11T20:38:00.003+01:00

Not really risotto, but as far as I can tell it is just as yummy and you don't have to stir! Hurrah. Rice, peas, onion, pancetta, parsley, chicken stock and Parmesan. Voila.

High culture and sunbathing

2008-05-11T18:40:00.003+01:00

Friday evening I went to see the Ballet Boyz 'Greatest Hits' at Sadler's Wells. For the uninitiated the Boyz are a couple of ex-Royal Ballet male dancers with a 'trendy' moniker that has unfortunately stuck (I, too, would much rather say that I went to see George Piper Dances, their preferred but sadly not quite as catchy original company name). I have seen them multiple times in the past and have never tired of their brand of top quality contemporary dance interspersed with tongue in cheek videos. It was a great pleasure to watch again Chris Wheeldon's Mesmerics. It had a huge impact on me choreographically speaking when I first saw it years ago at the Cambridge Arts Theatre and I was pleased to see that I was still, well, mesmerised -- although now that I have seen more Wheeldon I don't think Mesmerics is the best of his work.

Towards the end of the evening there were a couple of pieces which I had not yet seen. One of these, EdOx, a Rafael Bonachela pas de deux for Edward Watson and Oxana Panchenko, was for me the very best part of the show. Edward Watson! What a dancer. I am not sure that I have ever seen him before and certainly not in this kind of work (despite having a poster of him and Alina in Chroma on my wall -- a work I have always very sadly missed). Edward is unique amongst male dancers for his flexibility and probably because of this it was a very unusual pas de deux in that it was very almost completely equal. They are both able to twist and bend and throw up 180 degree extensions and for quite a lot of the work they are not in contact at all, instead dancing the same steps if not in unison -- steps that most other male dancers could probably simply not do at the same level. They both seemed to take to the style of fluidly twisted spines and shoulders in a very similar way and in this respect they must have been a perfect pair to dance together. All this alone would have made it fascinating but there were also many semi-supported lifts which again were roughly equal in terms of who was lifted and who supported -- very impressive for Oxana as besides being flexible Edward is also tall and probably solid heavy muscle. So on the rare occasions when Oxana is lifted right up into the air at arm's length, seemingly without any effort at all, it is all the more an unexpected and wonderful surprise for the audience. I am afraid I am not able to be very eloquent about this work. But I loved it all -- the style in the upper body movement, the uniqueness of the equality of the work, and of course the gorgeous performance.

Saturday was busy -- dance class and then rushing back to Cambridge for a meeting (very exciting emerging dance/music collaboration project) and in the evening going to a concert of the Dante Quartet in King's. I am a music ignomarus but it seems the Dante Quartet is very well regarded and they certainly played (to me) gorgeously even in King's Hall which does not have the best acoustics. Of all the pieces I loved the most Puccini's "Crisantemi", which is a gloriously dark elegiac work that flows and emotes in an indescribably beautiful way that seemed to take me on some kind of journey in my mind. I now think that in watching concerts or performances often all you really need is one piece that strikes you to the core and it is all worth it. EdOx; Crisantemi; and I remember a year or two ago watching the Malaysian Philharmonic play Arvo Part's Fratres, which struck me so much I went on to make possibly one of my best dances on it. There was also the world premiere of a new work by the composer Roxanna Panufnik, inspired by Canto 23 of Dante's Commedia. It was for me a rarity to be listening to completely current modern classical music, and I have to say I was slightly surprised by how much I managed to enjoy it when forced to listen properly. Dissonant and almost astructural, certainly, but also so wonderfully rich and with such wonderfully disturbing emotional currents and quite simply very beautiful in parts.

Today, so far, has been spent in a far less culturally aspiring way -- chiefly lolling about on the backs in the sun with a horrendously expensive iced coffee concoction, watching the punts go by (always good entertainment as not only do you get tour guides repeatedly giving you a potted history of Trinity and the Wren Library, but also, well, lots of people falling in, other people trying to retrieve stuck punt poles, Canada geese having hissy fits, and even, bizarrely, two people actually going for a proper swim in our disease-and-old-bicyle-infested river) and reading an old Coupland. One of the benefits of living finally in the main part of college really is being so much closer to the backs, I have been there so much more often since moving here and it is always so beautiful and idyllic, and often wonderfully peaceful.

More experimental cooking tonight in the form of risotto. Yum.. hopefully!

A Perfectly Lazy Sunday

2008-05-05T22:28:00.002+01:00

Ah, I have been reminded why at heart I really am a lazy bum. At first I bemoaned the fact that once off Lizard my urge to work slaloms downhill at a precipitious pace, leaving me with that frustrating feeling (that I am alliterating too much) that procrastination provokes (still doing it). But the joy, the joy of a day off in an incipient summer, is that when not on Lizard I actually can enjoy it fully. Despite improving by leaps and bounds I never quite figured out how to totally switch off whilst living at a research station that, however wonderful, does suck my research money out of me second by second. But here in Cambridge I am a master at the art.

So. Sunday was a very nice day indeed and I should warn you that I am probably going to be sickeningly smug about how much I enjoyed doing nothing all through it. I woke about lunchtime, which to me is very much the Right Time to wake up on a weekend, and after all I had been up late the night before industriously updating a society website (http://www.cambridgecontemporarydance.co.uk), so I felt that I deserved that glorious feeling when you wake up under the quilt and stretch out and all is sweet and silky and swept with late morning light filtering in through the curtain, and then you go back to sleep. Whilst still in this pleasant drowsiness the boyfriend called, and there is a no better way to be introduced to the day.

Having eventually gotten up I went to market and had my weekly ostrich burger, which is according to the stall that sells it the "low fat red meat of the future" but in my books just exceedingly yummy, and wandered about peering at the crafts and Caribbean pasties whilst munching. And then to get a Caffe Nero mocha, takeaway because it is really so beautifully warm of late, and then chats with my Mum and sister on the phone variously whilst walking through Cambridge, sitting at Jesus Lock watching the ducks who were in turn watching small children smearing ice creams all over their faces, and standing in Sainsbury's in the midst of an enormous pre-experimental-cooking shop.

During this walk I saw a couple walking seven, yes seven, full grown Golden Retrievers at once! They were all so well-behaved. A pack of beauties. Then half a minute later I saw a Great Dane, who was so well behaved he wasn't even on a lead. He was kind of trotting along between his owners looking longingly at the ice creams they were eating which were, after all, held at about the same height as his head. What a temptation.

This took most of the early afternoon, and by the time I'd gotten home there was not much to do but sit and read Peter Carey's Theft: A Love Story, which I'd bought for one pound (!) on Euston Road on Saturday whilst dawdling on the way to dance class at The Place, and which was rollickingly enjoyable. Eventually I bestirred myself to laboriously work out the combination setting of my microwave oven and make a potato bake and chicken cacciatore out of my new Italian cookbook. What fun! In the end both were not entries for the Greatest Hits of my cooking repertoire, but certainly tasty enough, and they had better be too because I foolishly made enough to feed me for most of the rest of this week; but I've put some in the freezer so I can have a break in the form of good old garlic fried rice tomorrow.

And then I meant to do some work in the evening. But of course instead I just sat reading my book, and reading my book, in a more and more horizontal position on my sofa, and of course at 11pm what was there for it but to transfer my horizontal self to the bed where it could be more satisfyingly horizontal, and then of course it was a matter of just feeling pleased as punch that I could enjoy a book so thoroughly that I'd read the whole thing by the night after I'd bought it (and it weren't no Harry Potter neither).

Of course I made up for it all today by going into department on a Bank Holiday and making myself rather sad but at least virtuous feeling by banging my head against stats for the best part of the day. Work hard and play harder, eh. I came back through the late May dusk to microwaved chicken cacciatore and Ian McEwan's absolutely gorgeously written Saturday, which both very pleasantly drove the stats from my mind. Life is good.

Being Back

2008-04-28T23:51:00.003+01:00

Bad Things about being back in Cambridge:
1. I have to sit in the office doing stats all day. Or more accurately teaching myself to do stats half the day and then doing it the other half of the day. Or, more accurately yet, surfing the web aimlessly procrastinating half the day, teaching myself to do stats the other quarter, going to tea, and then building maybe one little mixed model between 5:45 and 6pm.

2. Sometimes it is cold and wet (you don't say). But really overall the weather has not been that awful, getting very rapidly better since the two degrees it was when I first arrived back in England, so I have little to complain about, which I am sure is a state of affairs that cannot last.

Good Things about being back in Cambridge:
1. I am DANCING again. Finally. After 6 months of exile this is such a gorgeous feeling, accompanied with much masochistic enjoyment of delayed onset muscle soreness. Last week I did a bikram yoga/pilates class (everything hurt the next day, which was a fantastic feeling because it meant that everything had been worked), contemporary at The Place in London, and my on-and-off crazy London jazz class which is just great fun taken at a severely dehydrating pace. I may add a fourth class into the weekly mix, perhaps a good old ballet one or another contemporary. If I don't tire of the schedule I may maintain Lizard levels of fitness yet! Not only do I get to dance but also watch it, as Sadler's Wells has a fantastic season on and it is only really a desire to have some money left at the end of my PhD that is stopping me from going pretty much every weekend. Next up the Ballet Boyz, hurrah!

2. This evening I got to go to a lecture by Prof Lord Robert Winston (he of The Human Body etc. plus some rather good science) for the princely sum of one pound. And this Thursday similarly I get to listen to Jeremy Jackson talk about the ocean, which is also exciting in a rather geeky marine biologist kind of way.

3. Food that I don't have to cook for myself! Last Friday college very kindly provided for us graduates -- again for a somewhat nominal fee -- a very handsome dinner of sherry, king prawns (albeit English 'king' prawns which are 'shrimp' to anyone from the Indo Pacific region), white wine, duck, red wine, profiteroles with chocolate sauce, chocolate mints, coffee and Baileys. Tomorrow evening another college dinner beckons, this time as a reward for going to a graduate biologist seminar in which I will hopefully learn oodles about natural selection in mammalian promoters and then promptly forget it all during dinner with the high table menu, which for some very odd reason sometimes includes scrambled eggs on toast after dessert. It feels good indeed to be back in this mollycoddled Harry Potter- esque world.

4. My very lovely new room in the main part of college, which for all intents and purposes is a self-contained (bedder serviced) apartment with its own separate bedroom, gyp room (kitchen) and bathroom. I feel quite house proud really and have thus far managed to maintain levels of neatness previously unknown. There is even a pot of flowers and three pots of herbs. Before I know it I shall be baking cakes and inviting people round for cream tea.

I'm glad there is much to take one's mind off the fact that half a world away there is an island that I love sitting gloriously amidst a painfully bright blue sea. Ah, it's got to be blowing 35 knots out there nonstop (I tell myself).

A Day in the Fish Life

2008-02-26T14:03:00.000Z

Many apologies for the long absence (again).

Truth is life has been remarkably full and wonderful. Most times when I fail to write anything in this blog it is because there is nothing to report but the dismal, and as I see this blog as entertainment for the readers I would rather reserve any pathetic moaning about life being awful boohoo to a private diary or conversation. I think failing to write has also been because life here on Lizard, while rather stunningly wonderful, is really fairly routine and difficult to spin pithy blog entries out of. But I'll give it a go.

Most days here are pretty similar, so here is today's, rather in the spirit of that day in the life thing done in the UK a while ago where everybody was encouraged to write in a detailed description of the mundanities of their lives that day so as to capture a snapshot view of how people lived circa 2007.

- Got up late, about 8:30. Such a pleasure to sleep in as not diving till later than usual today. Finally got out of bed as it started to really properly tip it down, monsoon style, and sleeping further not really an option. Sleep-ins pretty difficult anyway on the island as when not raining it is too hot and you get sweated out of bed at about 9am. Breakfast of raisin toast, which I think is quite an Aussie thing and which we've all grown to crave, with, um, refried beans (had an open can left over from taco night!).

- Cleaned the house a little, sorting out our mountains of food as we are moving house in a couple of days to another one of the visitor houses (there are four). We seem to have enough food to feed an entire African village for about 3 months. It is difficult to really get it right when you only get food every 2 weeks and must place your order over a week in advance of it arriving. Some things still pretty mysterious though, e.g. how on earth we acquired six (SIX) separate opened jars of Vegemite (Aussie Marmite but really not the same). Being kicked out by a large group of 15 year old boys who will I imagine somewhat noisily invade our research station for 6 days next week -- now that the Aussie summer is over the mix of people at the station is shifting from bona fide researchers to various schoool/uni groups out here on excursions.

- Fed the fish which I'm keeping in the flow-through seawater aquaria. After over 800 15 minute focal watches and 300 dives they are still cute. Amazing.

- Late morning, went on a focal dive. Bit of a miserable weather day, still very grey and also fairly windy. Rather English really. Makes a huge difference to one's spirits -- when it is baking hot and sunny and calm life is so much easier! But didn't make much of a difference underwater, well at the second study site that we tried anyway (there was strong current at the first site but flexibility is one's best friend in the field), where it was really actually lovely and clear and calm and gorgeous. Watched some fish and did the usual data collection, chiefly counting foraging bites. I count everything slightly compulsively now: foraging bites, footsteps, mosquito bites (no not really -- too many to count).

- Back to the station for an hour where we had leftovers for lunch and I collapsed onto my bed for 10 minutes, waking up every 2 minutes with a start thinking I was late.

- Another dive laying out transects and videoing along them in order to get a measure of habitat quality. Exhausting stuff, these video dives, as we end up swimming each 30 m transect at least 4 times (laying it, videoing it, etc.). Large-ish white tip reef shark animal life highlight of the dive.

- Back to the station again for another hour. Caffeinated ourselves in order to be able to keep going for the last dive of the day, ate some more raisin toast (seem to have been nibbling on things all day and still hungry!), then headed out again. Our dusk dives are pretty uneventful but I don't mind them much; it's rather peaceful hanging about waiting for the fish to get it on, I practice hovering midwater and do somersaults whilst waiting. Tonight's was slightly more exciting than usual however as halfway through the dive it suddenly went very very dark underwater. I popped my head up as we were only about 2-3 m deep anyway to see a big black cloud in the sky; asked my assistant who was being boat person to let us know if it started to get worse and headed back down only to not be able to find my fish anymore. Three minutes later it was even darker and raining and the boat seemed to have very suddenly swung out of sight, after which it was a bit of a race to get back on the boat and try and get home in some whipping wind and really rather painful rain that had come up faster than I've ever seen a storm hit before. Driving very bumpily back I wondered about our almost empty fuel tank and what really would happen if we hit the reef and made a hole and the boat sank and which bits of kit I would grab first (I decided on the boat's safety box with radio and big orange V-sheet and flares and also fins and mask) and whether we'd be able to swim for it and how horrible it would be to swim without a snorkel... These dismal thoughts sustained me till we got back to the station. Still alive, huzzah!

- Rather less dramatically we made two pies for dinner, yum. Quite exciting really as never actually made a pie before.

Very sleepy now. Probably meant to write more in this blog about my Christmas hols, but think I'm going to have to leave it. Hope you are all having a lovely civilised time in all your cities going to restaurants and the theatre. Despite how I seem to have made life here sound pretty awful, I love it and really don't miss restaurants or the theatre very much at all; I'd much rather be watching fish and driving a small aluminium dinghy through tropical rainstorms!

Dusky Nembrotha and a baby cuttlefish

2007-12-02T11:27:00.000Z

More Island Sightings

2007-10-24T05:01:00.000+01:00

1. TWO MANTA RAYS, cruising past us on separate mornings at our study site right in the middle of a working fish catching dive. Having never seen a manta ray before it was the most lovely and bizarre experience to be looking up from a chaos of hand nets and clove oil and scared little blue and yellow fish in plastic bags to see this beautiful creature winging past, when I'd always thought that at some point in my life I would have to pay lots of money and travel 3 days on a boat to go to some godforsaken Indonesian Bornean island especially to see them. With the first one, the first thing I saw was a couple of really quite large remoras right next to me which cruise around with it -- the first thing I thought was "crap, there's got to be something HUGE in the water, what are the bets are it's a giant shark?" but then it turned out to be a manta! There are no photos as only my assistant had her camera with her to take photos of caught fish with, and she says by the time she had finished gaping at them and gotten to her camera they were gone...

2. Our frog doing this most horrible looking belching thing on the shelf yesterday. He kept gulping and his whole body looked like it was convulsing with each gulp. We were really worried but later on he hopped out on his nightly hunt looking as healthy as ever so we have decided he was just eating a really big spider. Here is a picture of him, not belching, in Helen's hand.

3. A couple of unbelievable dead calm days. Even on the best of days in Malaysia I had never seen the sea look quite like this -- like glass, so reflective I couldn't figure out where the reefs were to drive around them. Yet if you looked straight down you could probably do fish focals from the boat, so ripple-less and still was it, and we saw some lovely big rays in the lagoon sand on our drive home from work that day, and visibility was like being out on outer barrier at over 20 metres. Apparently more such calm periods are on the way as the summer develops, woohoo, it makes a gorgeous change from the 25-30 knot wind we had for a few days last week.

4. Don't like putting on a suit everyday to go to work? Here are my work clothes:

Lizard Island Part II

2007-10-09T03:56:00.000+01:00

Our first day off here on Lizard, after a rather unexpectedly successful first week, i.e. we are actually on track. Perhaps having gone through the vagaries of last season I am now simply a little hardier and less liable to let things get me down, but in truth there has been very little to do so thus far. This is a rather pleasantly surprising state of affairs -- I feel I must savour it whilst it lasts, before the inevitable big problems kick in (they didn't do so till after the first week last time either... but fingers crossed). I'm absolutely sure at least something is going to go badly pear-shaped at some point, it probably wouldn't be a field season if it didn't, but I'll jump that hurdle when I get to it.

Notables so far:
- A tiny little squid that jumped onto our boat and lay in the middle of it turning very red and looking rather upset. I put it back in the sea but didn't see whether it survived or got chomped.
- A couple of schools of similarly quite tiny little squid hanging about under our boat
- A really large juvenile harlequin sweetlips -- for divers these are the spotty ones which swim in this totally bizarre flamenco dancery way. This one was about 15cm long!
- A green treefrog that lives in our bathroom. He sits on a shelf next to the sink, and occasionally in the packet of new loo rolls. Sometimes in the day he wanders out in search of food I guess, but mostly he sits and watches us brush our teeth. I've found him in the shower cubicle every so often as well, making it a neccessity to ensure one is not cooking frog before turning on the hot water.
- A boat breakdown as we were trying to move from one study site where we'd decided the current was too strong for comfort to another -- rather than not being able to start the boat, for a while we couldn't stop! I had absolutely no control over the throttle, could neither speed it up nor slow it down, trying to put it into neutral resulted in an insane revving noise and general unhappiness, so we drove at this rather compulsory speed back to the station -- at least I could still steer the thing -- and managed to switch it off just off the station, from where we got towed back by our gallant rescuers and switched to another boat. The second one wouldn't start between dives either, so we had to do two dives at the same site, but we somehow managed to get home when we were done. The drama! Later on in the day when we were heading out on the fixed first boat (turned out its throttle cable had broken -- a first in 19 years of the station's maintenance officer's tenure here) I rather belatedly realised that we were very low on fuel and by the time we had refueled it would have been such a short dive we gave up. It was just... one of those days! Much of fieldwork is learning how to deal happily and flexibly with uncooperative weather, currents and broken down boats I think...
- Several turtles coming up for air seen from our boat.
- No sharks at all! Rather odd.
- No crocodiles, which I have no problems with whatsoever.
- Cold water. At 24-25 degrees this may not sound too bad to some but being immersed in this for up to 80 minutes barely moving because you are watching a little fish that moves all of about 10 metres over the dive doesn't help. At the moment I am wearing a LOT of neoprene. Well not precisely at this moment as it is enough neoprene to fairly quickly induce heat exhaustion on land and also as sexy as wetsuits are I don't think much of them as fashion statements, but you get the idea.
- Great weather, after a first few very windy and rainy and generally mucky days. In contrast today it is blazing hot and about 5 knots wind (a nice little breeze). My days off always have gorgeous weather and I am never out making the best of it diving!

I'm settling back in -- it's the early days that are probably the easiest, but life here is good. We even had popcorn and beer whilst watching Crash (new additions to the somewhat limited film library!) last night, followed by our traditional day-off pancakes this morning. Yum.

Cavatelli alla Norma

2007-09-08T22:50:00.000+01:00

We were in Sicily on a lovely villa holiday earlier this week -- the last stragglers are only returning to rather less sunny England today, but I reluctantly left on Tuesday to immediately head up north to Newcastle for my first scientific conference, where I learnt very cool zoological facts, e.g. birds can sleep with one hemisphere of their brain at a time. However, science aside, today back in slightly grey Cambridge I tried to recall the heady days of Sicily by cooking the wonderfully simple and yummy home-made pasta dish we were taught at a cooking class on Monday! Such intense solo cooking effort seems to me to only be quite worth it if you record it for posterity...

Making cavatelli reminds me a lot of making pork and lettuce dumplings with Mum and my sisters back in the days, and I think as a cultural event it is pretty much an identical thing. Simple food, fun shapes (I always used to end up making rather oddly shaped dumplings which I would have to search for in the cooking pan afterwards to claim) and the womenfolk sitting around chatting seems to be the idea. It's good fun and I see that generations everywhere are bemoaning the fact that nobody seems interested in this kind of food making anymore. But I like it so much I even do it whilst listening to Radio 4 instead of chatting!

The wonderful Sicilian lady who taught us to make this uses only flour and water in her pasta, without the eggs that they use up North. Just add water in parts and knead (tearing the dough seems to be important) until smooth and shiny, then leave to rest...

Then roll the dough into little sausages and chop small pillows off them.

And use your thumb to squidge each little pillow into a curvy shell-like shape - a cavatelli!

Make as many as you are feeling hungry for.

The sauce is simply fried aubergines and blanched/peeled/chopped tomatoes with a little garlic and basil and seasoning:

Cook the cavatelli, add some grated ricotta salata, and enjoy...

Preferably, of course, from the terrace of a real Sicilian villa overlooking the clear blue Mediterranean. (It will still taste nice if you eat it in a Cambridge student room though!)

The Fringe!

2007-08-20T21:41:00.000+01:00

Had an utterly fantastic weekend at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, despite it actually pouring down on us nonstop all day Saturday. Umbrella has never gotten more use and my ballet pumps were threatening to literally fall apart, but they held on (just) for many traipses up and down the Royal Mile, rushing between shows. What we could see of Edinburgh between the rain was gorgeous, all beautiful old houses and quirky architecture, Cambridge on a grander and darker Scottish scale, and I am definitely going to have to go back to actually see the city!

We arrived late on Friday night and wandered out for a meal (the best we could find was a chippie, but they did very good fish'n'chips, and I'm sure their fried mars bars must have been a gourmet's delight), then sat ourselves down in a pub to try and sort out way through the >200 page Fringe Guide. With around 10 shows listed on every single page of this guide this was a bit overwhelming at first, but eventually by means of enough random flipping (flip flip flip say when... say when.. .stop!) we found some choice ones that we booked online back at the hotel...

Saturday morning we walked around in the rain, visited the farmer's market where we had porridge (not salted, mind you, but brown sugar and cream, yum!) and a hog roast bun in the rain, visited the Edinburgh Book Festival in the rain, walked through a shopping street north of Princes Street in the rain, took pictures of the castle in the rain, tried to go to a contemporary/break dance performance only to find out it was sold out in the rain...

3:40pm: Flanders and Swann: at the Drop of a Hippopotamus. My sister is a proper Flanders and Swann fan so we absolutely had to go to this. Two blokes singing the best of their comic songs in a very enjoyable manner. I particularly enjoyed Ill Wind, sung to Mozart's Horn Concerto in E Flat Major (see the wikipedia article for an excerpt), The Gnu and of course, The Hippopotamus. Mud, mud, glorious mud/There's nothing quite like it for cooling the blood... Time was everyone and the Queen could all sing this! We felt slightly embarrassed that we were quite clearly the youngest people in the show, children dragged along by their parents notwithstanding. Not a new phenomenon however.

5:10pm: Nicholas Parsons' Happy Hour! Mr Parsons hosts Radio 4's Just a Minute, and happily, did exactly what he does best, by bringing in guests and chatting to them about their acts. Aussie comedian Adam Hills regaled us with stories of that wonderful Scottish energy drink Irn Bru and showed us his appendicitis scar and his prosthetic foot, prompting the entire audience to "ooo" like wide-eyed schoolchildren. An amazing a capella group called The Magnets also did a few songs -- they call their music "a capella for the rock and pop generation", and they pulled it off totally with such showmanship and the sharpest suits this side of Milan. Not so much barbershop as Mika and the Scissor Sisters with a beatboxer. We enjoyed it so much we decided to go to see them again later that evening.

7:15pm: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. This was a group of mainly Cambridge musical theatre people and as I had a friend and some acquaintances in it I was really looking forward to it. Again, fantastic -- much as I like the big old Rodgers and Hammerstein style, I also love the more modern musicals that have something darker and meatier to them. In this case, the meat being human flesh, conveniently provided by the rather obsessive barber's neat throat slitting of his customers, who then slid conveniently down to the pie shop below his barbershop where his partner Mrs Lovett made them into truly delicious meat pies for the ravenous public. Macabre, chilling, darkly humorous, lovely tunes, with a great twist at the end, and all done in a stripped down and thoroughly effective manner.

10:20pm: Reduced Edinburgh Fringe Improvised Comedy (or some such). These were a really quite enjoyable improv troupe, complete with improvised songs (an Adolf Hitler in Scunthorpe with a dream of being a professional golfer), spooky stories about deaths on the Royal Mile (revolving around a donkey in a chip van), and pithy mimes ("Liverpool" is apparently universally understood by a 5 second sketch of some unsuspecting guy having his wallet pickpocketed).

12am: Adam, Jason and Friends. On the strength of Nicholas Parsons' introduction earlier in the day we got tickets to see this, which turned out to be in a huge lovely venue up near the castle and was even being filmed. Adam Hill's laidback Aussie chatting style played off really well against Irishman Jason Byrne's absolutely insane antics -- Catholic jokes layered over a stand up style that meant that he never actually ever stood still because he was too busy floating away in bubbles and pulling men around the stage in giant cardboard boxes. Again they had several guests, but the highlight of the night must have been their Punch and Judy act got up to interview Nina Conti's Monkey (a totally foul mouthed little ventriloquist puppet), which surely could have had no better ending than Jason's attempts to pick up his interview questions with his mouth through the puppetry screen causing the entire edifice to collapse... you had to be there. The Magnets rounded it all off a few of their songs, including a repeat of the Jackson 5's "Blame it on the Boogie" which is their big finale piece where they get everyone up and dancing. The fact that we had already been taught the moves that afternoon didn't stop us from enjoying it!

Sunday morning we didn't quite make it out of bed till halfway through it. We thankfully found a wonderful little Mediterranean cafe in the Old Town where we had our first real meal since getting to Edinburgh (apparently everybody loses weight at the Festival running up and down between shows, never having time to eat, and sweating in claustrophobic venues heated by hundreds of human bodies), and very lovely it was too. Finally we headed to our last show of the weekend (boohoo), one of the many "showcases" where they get many different acts from Fringe to come on and do excerpts. Many of these were fantastic, including an American duo who did a hilarious spoof of a particular brand of Christian evangelist (dorks singing "Team Jesus" with a 2-note xylophone accompaniment), Japanese mime artists Gamarjobat who, identified by one guy's red mohican and the other's yellow mohican, do the physical comedy thing in a truly awesome way. And for the finale of this whirlwind tour through the Fringe, we had, to our rather bemused surprise (or not)... The Magnets! and the familiar strains of Blame it on the Boogie. (Although the Sunday 1pm crowd wasn't quite as dancey as twelve hours earlier at Sunday 1am!)

Don't know why I haven't been before, it is possibly one of the most enjoyable ways to spend a weekend ever, seeing act after polished act (most of whom want to make you laugh) for about five to ten quid each and traipsing the streets of a truly wonderful city in between. It's definitely going on the August calendar for as many years to come as possible!

Cookies rrr-umumumumum

2007-07-20T20:17:00.000+01:00

I couldn't figure out how to phoneticise what, I have been informed by Wikipedia, is officially known as the "Cookie monster noise" (you would think that the people who create Kermit and Bert and Ernie on a daily basis would have a more creative name for it). Rrrr-ummumumumum it will have to be. Clear I have no future in poetry. Or writing children's books.

Anyway Cookies rrr-umumumumum were what my sister and I made last weekend! More art and craft than cooking, but what fun! Note especially our favourite, the chick on the right.

Technically I think these are biscuits and not cookies, but you do cut them out with a cookie cutter after all...

Four and twenty blackbirds...

2007-07-17T19:52:00.000+01:00

Well really just one. She was not sitting in a pie but rather in my bedroom, whence she hopped out in a most startling manner about twenty minutes ago. And then she sort of did a tour of my living room and desk while I bemusedly wandered around checking that, yes, all my windows were indeed shut. So she must have been exploring my closet and checking the softness of my mattress since my bedder came in in the morning (sometime after nine, before I went to work).

I open a window.

She flaps across to the windowsill, gratefully, I think, but then flies back down again, preferring my carpet.

I open the door. She wanders across, and then down the stairs towards the shared loos and the laundry.

I open the other door, to the outside.

She hops back up the stairs and outside! Hurrah! Here she is in the courtyard where she wandered around for a bit and picked at crumbs. Free as a bird (you don't say).

P/S I hope it really was a blackbird and I haven't just embarrassed myself. Anyway I don't know many nursery rhymes about other birds.

Mm, crackling.

2007-07-06T21:43:00.000+01:00

Today I had a craving for roast pork. So I made some!

With roast potatoes, apple sauce and a mandatory bit of green.

Now I only have to eat roast pork for the next half a week... but this is not such a chore. I shall feed some to friends.

I think, if by some kind of freak change of opinion I ever (purposely) become pregnant, I will be cooking all the time. Oh dear.

The new world.

2007-06-27T23:19:00.000+01:00

Spent the first half of June blisfully blanking out the PhD in sunnier climes across the pond, on a giant family holiday. So very needed, after the travails of field season, and all the more fully enjoyed.

Every time I visit New York I like it more and more. This time round it turned out to be a great cultural tour, my parents being very enthusiastic about such things. All these things I'd not done on previous visits because I was being a cheapo student got done and were really totally worth it.

My second evening there we went to Carnegie Hall -- just a block away from my sister's place! I love that people are living and there are corner delis selling flowers and pastrami sandwiches literally next door to the hall, yet you step inside and it is hallowed as any other great performing venue brooding darkly over a rain-soaked square -- and watched the Emerson String Quartet play the entirety of Beethoven's, no prizes for guessing, string quartets. Starting at 5pm with a dinner break at about 6:45 and starting again at 8pm, this was something of a marathon, but it was amazing music, amazingly performed, and I'm glad I went. It is probably a good thing it was Beethoven and not, say, Schubert, because Beethoven is always complex (and sometimes humorous) enough to keep you awake!

Also trips to Broadway, once to watch Journey's End, a British import: 4 men in a WWI trench talking to each other, largely about how scary dying is and how nevertheless sometimes you ought to go and get yourself killed anyway. Pretty grim-sounding, I know, but it was actually quality theatre, if only I hadn't been jetlagged and perhaps if I'd been male I might have loved it (the boyfriend did -- I wonder what they teach you in NS, hee). A second, more jovial time, to watch Spamalot! So daft you couldn't help enjoying yourself. Enjoy I suppose is the key word here. Sometimes I am a bit of a theatre snob and feel that at some point at least you should also be moved and awed, but I know that I really shouldn't turn up my nose at bad puns (at one point after a rather Tarantino-style fight scene somebody wanders across the stage gathering arms for the poor...) because I do still laugh! :)

We also queued for 5 hours in Central Park, along with many other patient people with picnic blankets, food delivery from the local deli, and a couple of dogs, for free Shakespeare in the Park tickets. It just seemed like something you should try once, and it wasn't at all the ordeal it might have been (other than the temperature -- we ended up making a playlist of sunny songs on my iPod to ward the cold off), and the play actually turned out to be really excellent. I thought it was an incredibly accessible piece of Shakespeare -- I suppose Romeo and Juliet is fairly accessible anyway -- but still it seemed particularly modern in this production. The outdoor theatre and the revolving stage with a giant pond in the middle were also something to be seen. There were even celebrity actors, although the only one I actually knew was Camryn Manheim (The Practice), who was a fantastic Nurse.

Finally, and I've saved this for last because nothing triggers fangirl reactions in me quite like this, was the ballet. I had never been to the Metropolitan Opera House before and it was simply gorgeous. Everything an opera house should be, red velvet and gold everywhere, and the foyer with all those gorgeous curving staircases was a work of art in itself. We saw a new production of the Sleeping Beauty. Great costuming, fireworks for Carabosse, loads of wire flying (woo!) -- it was definitely a big one for the kids. But also, of course, there was also Paloma Herrera rock steady in the Rose Adage, Angel Corella whizzing off his trademark lightspeed turns, and Sascha Radetsky (yes, he of Center Stage) seeming to literally defy gravity in his Bluebird brises. Despite enjoying it, though, I felt it didn't quite have the magic of the Royal Ballet's Nutcracker, nor any of the more modern ballets that I love.

And so I had to go again! We were wandering by the Lincoln Centre one evening at the appropriate time when a funny feeling came over me and I had to go and find out what was on. And it was Manon, the MacMillan ballet that I had yet to see. And so the boyfriend in an act of tremendous kindness and understanding actually encouraged me to abandon him on our last evening in New York and go to watch the ballet instead. Er... so I did. (Oops... but he likes bookshop browsing. ;)) I shall resist going into yet another MacMillan related rave, I've done them too many times on this blog, but I loved it, it was all worth far more than the last-minute-$25-student-ticket price I paid to sit ten rows from the front. To be honest it's a bit of a fragile story, but with choreography like this it was all okay. MacMillan's ability to draw little character vignettes never fails to delight me -- I particularly enjoyed Lescaut's (Sascha Radetsky again after Ethan Stiefel injured himself in Act II and couldn't continue beyond the intermission -- the drama! though I didn't even notice he was injured) drunken bits in Act III. But of course, Manon is a ballet built on pas de deux for the central pair. I had the incredible luck to find myself watching Alessandra Ferri and Roberto Bolle dance these exuberant joyous unrestrained declarations of love and passion, weeks before Alessandra was to retire (which she has done by now), replacing Xiomara Reyes who unfortunately was also injured. Again, surely the best spent $25 of my life. Roberto, whom I'd seen just a few weeks before in London, seemed almost too tall for Alessandra, but I did still like him very much. He has such really beautiful lines and is a gorgeously clean dancer, although I sometimes felt that he has yet to gain the maturity of interpretation that dancers like Jonathan Cope bring to the dramatic MacMillan roles. Alessandra was, quite simply, wonderful. Small and girlish and mature all at once, in a body made for ballet and perhaps an intellect made to act dramatic roles. But of course Manon is, after all, her role (she was MacMillan's muse before Darcey). It seemed strange to be watching these two ballerinas retire at the same time, both still totally at the top of their game, and it is a shame to see them go, but I'll count myself lucky that I did manage to watch them.

I've ended up writing far more and far too haphazardly than intended about the cultural New York experience, so I'll have to leave the rest to another time. But in case I never quite get round to it, the rest was eating: Grimaldi's for definitely the best pizza in New York, the Brooklyn ice cream company next door for fantastic simple ice cream, Joe Shanghai still for its amazing xiao long bao, Burger Joint for the most unexpected yummy hole-in-the-wall burger experience ever, and Han Bat for late night satisfying Korean.

And to think today I had to have a ham, egg and tomato sandwich from EAT for lunch. Sheesh.

Domesticism

2007-05-21T22:53:00.000+01:00

I almost called this blog entry "Cooking, yoga and novels" but then I realised that makes me sound a bit like a new agey housewife (where oh where is the PhD work in this pithy rundown of bloggable bits of my life?). Hence domesticism. Actually the PhD work is at this moment being a little frustrating and aimless, so it is far better to write about cooking, yoga and novels...

So. Over the weekend in one of my usual epic waste time on the web sessions I wandered into the brave new world of podcasts courtesy of the iTunes store. Podcasts being the only thing you don't actually have to pay for in this store I had a little browse. And I found Gordon Ramsay making sticky lemon chicken with champ! Having almost all the ingredients already I decided to give it a go. It was most exceedingly novel to have Gordon yammering away in full colour and sound on my iPod (what a way to follow a recipe, just plug yourself in whilst in kitchen) as I've not used its video function before. I was spared almost all stove-top swearing, perhaps because it was for Times Online. Have to say it smelled really lovely all the way through cooking. I am not really a fan of lemony anything in my main course (other than fish I suppose), but still it was more than passably yummy. I cheated by not using stove heated double cream + full cream milk in my champ (glorified mash with spring onions in), I used my regular semi-skimmed instead, which I am sure deadened the full creamy taste of the champ and I should be ashamed of myself really and what would Gordon say, but on the other hand I can claim to have made the 2% committed dieter's version of sticky lemon chicken... voila. Microwaved leftover version for tomorrow's dinner. Hee.

Such a splash-out dinner must have been just reward for the bikram yoga class I went for earlier this evening. It's a series taught by a dancer I'm friends with, but I'd just never managed to drag myself over to class before. It was tough! I've only ever really done one or two yoga classes in my life before and I think they were more ashtanga. But this! I fell out of balances all the time and I am absolutely certain I will ache like anything tomorrow. Think I may try to keep going for it -- it's not as fun as a dance class because it requires such iron determination (in dance class the music and the performance aspect usually keep me distracted from the pain), but it is a good challenge. We also did some Pilates work, which I hate because my abs are nonexistent, but it will be very good for me, what sort of fake dancer doesn't have a strong core huh.

Finally I treated myself to a bunch of novels on the last of my book tokens from college, one of which was David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green". So very very readable, I found myself staying up till 4am last night finishing it off. I am not sure I have that much to say about it. I could only describe it as another nostalgic isn't adolescence such an awful and wonderful journey book, but that would only be its structure I think and not really its heart. Not how it carries you along on such an enjoyable ride. The only other David Mitchell I have read is Cloud Atlas, which was a world away, wonderful but I am always wary of 'gimmicky' devices like that of Cloud Atlas, so I didn't quite expect this straightforward, feel-good, funny, intimate narrative. But it was quite simply a good read. What an unsatisfying review this is. I should've left it as "I recommend it"!

Darcey dancing.

2007-05-17T22:55:00.000+01:00

Yesterday in a bit of a birthday treat to myself a friend and I went to Darcey Bussell's 'Farewell' show at Sadler's Wells. It was an amazing evening which lived entirely up to all the most ridiculous heights of expectation I'd elevated it to, helped by the centre front of stalls seats I had managed by some miracle to get (they were the last two seats in the entire five night run of the show). Funnily enough it wasn't so much Darcey that I enjoyed so much as the chance to watch varied excellent choreography, all of which I had heard of often but never managed to watch before. Of course, though, she was as beautiful and as amazing as ever. She still has ridiculously high extensions. She still reaches all those extensions with a gorgeous fluidity that melds itself, chameleon-like, into wildly varying choreographic styles. It is simply a real pleasure to watch her -- those giant grant jetes (and giant they are -- you don't quite realise how tall she is until well into the show when tiny Tamara Rojo comes on) eat up the stage in a truly exuberant fashion that is hers alone.

Funnily enough, for a dancer who has danced all the biggest classical roles, I enjoyed the Sylvia pas de deux the least in the entire show, perhaps because sometimes these classical pieces can seem a little odd taken out of context, perhaps because I am perhaps no longer as enamoured as I used to be with the classics. On the other hand, I really enjoyed her Cinderella variation, shown on film, Ballet Boyz style, while she changed backstage betwen dances. Such speed! Such turns! Such neatness! It really does put paid to all the "Darcey is too tall to dance Ashton" myths.

The rest of the first half was made up of two modern pas de deux, both of which I loved. The first, from William Forsythe's In the middle, somewhat elevated, was fantastically exciting and sexy to watch. From the moment the sinfully good looking Roberto Bolle swaggers onto stage and muscles his way into an off-centred balance it holds you in a really physical way. And then Darcey comes on and the remainder is a whirlwind of thrown 180 degree extensions as she is manipulated into one impossible angular pose after another. If anything I liked Chris Wheeldon's Tryst pas de deux even more. Johnny Cope came out of retirement to perform this with Darcey and I could not imagine this being danced by any other than these two gorgeous dancers on whom it was created. In feel it could not be further from the Forsythe, all melting gentleness from which emerge the most breathtaking moments of counterbalance and flexibility that if you hadn't seen for that split second between all the rest of the flowing moment you would think weren't humanly possible. Whilst the Forsythe for me blended into one long impression of Darcey's leg up by her ear, the diversity of the beautiful images left indelibly by Tryst I think makes it for me the more appealing of the two works (though both were brilliant in very different ways!). Darcey on pointe in fourth, tipping so perilously and yet also so stably from side to side, pendulum-like, balanced on just one of Johnny's arms round her waist; Darcey held high as if caught upside down in soaring mid-flight, balancing for one long beautiful moment on the soles of Johnny's feet; Darcey in a full split sitting almost comfortably across his thighs in an expansive grand second plie, look ma no hands. It shouldn't have been possible, but they did it, and they did it in such an unassuming and quiet way that made it all the more powerful and impressive.

The second half of the night was a full performance of Kenneth MacMillan's Winter Dreams, based on Chekhov's Three Sisters. Not being familiar with the play I had a lot of fun concocting my various theories of what complicated love entanglements were going on -- though I did understand that it ended it tragedy for everybody (not uncommon for Chekhov I understand). But more seriously, this was perhaps the most satisfying part of the evening. I've already waxed on and on about MacMillan's ability as a dance dramatist in this blog, but I can't stress it enough. His ballets have an amazing ability to make me lose sight of the dance for the story that they are so movingly telling. In a way I suppose this is a pity because I rather enjoy enviously admiring the beauty of an arch or the line of an arabesque, but on the other hand this is the dramatic form of dance at its very very finest. I thought that of all the choreographers of the evening perhaps MacMillan understood Darcey's dancing the best, with her lush fluidity more obvious here than anywhere else. Jonathan Cope was a revelation, such an amazing actor; his was truly tortured role as the husband who is left by Masha (Darcey) for another man, layered with complexity and filled with so much pathos. But again, it was a quiet, internal torture that he put himself through, and the choreography was quirky but so very, very effective in his hands. Their farewell pas de deux, again, was fraught with emotion.

I tried to understand, what it is I love so much about these ballets, why being moved by the story and the characters is so emotionally fulfilling. Why not, indeed, watch a play, where they are not restricted to stylized dancing but instead can speak their despair, where lovers can fall into each others' arms without triple pirrouetting first? I don't really have a good answer, but some part of it would be that the dance form really is more global. Other than the obvious language issue, the minute you open your mouth you are labelled, particularly in this land of a thousand accents, and with that labelling comes a host of associated social contexts which I think many of the stories that are told through dance can shed. True, this makes them simpler, less interestingly complex. But that doesn't make their simple stories any less powerful. Another part of my answer would perhaps be that often, in our deepest agonies of joy and despair, there are no words, not if you aren't Shakespeare. It is a physical feeling, falling in love as Masha does, being tied to your loneliness as her husband is; and dance is perhaps one of the best ways to express such things. Don't we all want to leap for joy sometimes, even if it's not with pointed feet and in a full split as Darcey can?

Enough rambling, I must have utterly lost all of you by now; forgive me but I no longer write a diary and thus have no other outlet for these ramblings that could only interest, well, me.

I had a really lovely birthday, despite the fact that I spent most of it working as usual. After work I had a really nice long dinner with a friend who shares my birthday, and I've also received in the mail not only my teddy bear all the way from Australia (hurrah) but also this ecstatically received present from the boyfriend. He knows me and my gluttony inside out and I love him for it :)

Bank Holiday Weekend

2007-05-06T17:50:00.000+01:00

Came down to London for the weekend after finishing unpacking (I had to move back into my college rooms which I had fully vacated during field season), mainly to see whether I had left vital items -- chequebook, office keys -- in my sister's house. Thankfully I had, along with mountains of other crap I had to shed on the way to Oz, and I will not have to do some embarrassed foot shuffling in front of our facilities manager (who is actually very nice, but probably still wouldn't be pleased if I had actually lost my keys). Speaking of embarrassed foot shuffling I did however have to do this in e-mail form to the (again, very nice) directors of Lizard Island Research Station to explain that, of all the things to inadvertently leave behind, such as important pieces of scientific equipment or diving gear, I had left my teddy bear. It took me days to build up the confidence to write this embarrassing email. Why I am now publishing this on the world wide web I do not know.

Time in London really quite nice despite being quite disappointed that my sister and her husband had gone off for a Bank Holiday Weekend jaunt in Lisbon and so I had to spend it by myself (no dog to play with either as it's gone off to the dog sitter's!). I have managed to avoid too much couch potato-ing (the temptation is always very strong when I stay here at my sister's because I don't watch telly otherwise, the common room always seeming far too far away) by means of going for a jazz class at a nearby dance studio that I've always meant to try (a fantastic workout, loads of fun and it just felt so good to be dancing again after two months of exile), wandering through the National Gallery's Manet to Picasso exhibition (all paintings in the permanent collection which I have seen before, but I do still enjoy looking at them and the exhibition audio guides were full of quirky little art history details), and hitting the Chinatown grocery stores! Well I also hit a clothes store -- not in Chinatown -- and they gave me a pair of dungarees for free. It would never cross my mind to buy a pair of dungarees. Perhaps I am not alone in this, hence being given them for free. What to do with them? I feel that I need to paint some walls.

In Leicester Square tube a rather nice looking Indian bloke came up to me whilst I was debating with myself the relative benefits of the Northern or Piccadilly lines and started up a rather flattering conversation. This does not happen to me often. When it does it usually comes from drunken and extremely unattractive hairy men. I couldn't stop myself being quite happy, really, that I can actually be hit on by a normal person -- although I must be terribly naive to think that someone who tries to pick up girls in tube stations could be normal at all -- but he did seem it, anyway, so I will allow myself the delusion. I almost wished I'd stayed to chat instead of rushing off with my two gigantic bags of Chinese groceries, but of course I didn't...

Up Close and Personal

2007-04-30T23:54:00.000+01:00

I write this in Cairns airport, with a latte and a wireless connection for breakfast. Funny how easily one settles back into it, when yesterday I was soaking in the great blue sea on my last swim, nothing but coral reef and horizon as far as you could see. (Unfortunately it turned out to be my last wade as the tide had gone out; I plonked myself down in the knee deep water and watched a juvenile damsel use me for shelter.) I got into Cairns last night and at first it was fairly unsurprising, but then as I walked down the esplanade towards the town centre and the number of people went up and I hit my first restaurants, buzzing with neon lights and chattering customers and enticing menus, it all seemed so very, well, novel. It's only after two months on a tropical island I suppose that I would actively choose to walk the restaurant and souvenir store strip of road, rather than through the grassy parkland flanking the sea. I am glad to be back in civilisation, I do like my lattes and I have always really been a city girl, but I also already miss the peace and beauty and solitude (when you want) of Lizard. Although most researchers on the island work their butts off and barely ever see the scenery, there is still a calm to it. When you are bumpily driving along in your boat getting soaked with cold spray at 7 in the morning, not quite awake, having just dropped a tank on your toe, with three dives ahead of you and recalcitrant fish, you generally still manage to recognise that it is a beautiful drive, the best commute in the world. So I am glad to be done with field season one, but I'm also already looking forward to number two.

We stopped fieldwork a few days before leaving the island to allow plenty of time to pack and clean (I never did get eggs again successfully, which is a real shame, but I still hope to make it work more reliably next trip). The directors of the station, Anne and Lyle, decided to spend their day off on the outer Barrier Reef and very kindly invited us along, and so after well over a hundred dives in my two rather nondescript study sites in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef lagoon, we finally got to experience what it was all meant to be about.

On this particular day what it was all about was this:

Cod Hole! Where the visibility is close to 30 metres (in the Coral Sea, just beyond the outer barrier, it regularly exceeds this -- after some 6 metre vis dives on an island where there is a known crocodile this sounds like paradise) and the coral is kaleidoscopic and the huge potato cod are extremely friendly. A couple of them took an especial shine to me and would swim right at me then just sort of stay there, bumping my knee in a friendly fashion every so often for a good half an hour, the perfect fish face models. I couldn't actually get far enough away from them to take anything but fish face photos. We have a theory that they thought the blue coil lanyard on my camera housing was a pilchard, which the big dive operators feed to the cod in a bit of a circus act -- 20 divers with cameras sitting in a large circle with a lady with a large box of dead pilchards in the middle, moving round it with the cod following her and feeding it in front of each diver so that they could get a good shot. Well away from the mayhem of the circle we had our own much more personal experiences with the fish. They were wonderful individuals and their trust and heft and personality put me in mind of a slightly more taciturn version of the Florida manatees. But then again, they would never be so friendly if they didn't hope that I'd produce food from somewhere. We also did a quick snorkel on close by reef called No Name (!), which looked like a gorgeous dive, a wall that dropped off vertically to maybe 30m, deep blue water beyond it, schools of unicornfish and anthias everywhere, the occasional shark patrolling -- that sense of excitement, what will I see next, was palpable and rather different from the tens of dives I had done counting foraging bites (sometimes in Chinese and Malay to keep myself awake).

Edit 4/5/07: Back in Cambridge! Woo. As promised here are a few more photos. I write this at 6:45 am -- jetlag always makes me feel virtuous coming this way.

The wall on the outside edge of the north tip of No. 10 Ribbon Reef:

A couple of fish faces.

Um, and a fish eye...

Goodbye Lizard!

Caviar in Bags

2007-04-24T02:45:00.000+01:00

Less than a week left to go here on Lizard. I've started to enjoy myself a lot more these past few weeks, partly because we simply stopped exhausting ourselves with work (cutting down from an average of 4 to 3 sessions in the water each day), and partly because I have reached that happy state of existence where I am very philosophic about my research: getting data is good, not getting data is not so good but not a good enough reason to fret myself awake at stupid times in the middle of the night. So anyway I hope to finish up with fieldwork in the next few days, leaving a few days for gear to dry out and be packed up, and all sorts of other exciting end-of-season work like taking our boat out of the water to waterblast all the slimy green stuff off it (we actually do this every few weeks, it's amazing how much difference it makes to the speed, no wonder all those boat guys in Malaysia are constantly hopping off the side and cleaning their boat from underwater while we're diving), and lots and lots of cleaning.

A week and a half ago had a Happy Scientific Moment. We were trying out this method which sometimes sounded to me totally implausible. Basically you wait for your fish to spawn with bated breath (well not really because one must Never Stop Breathing while on scuba, for fear of a very painful condition known as a burst lung or two). If they are being cooperative, which is only about 50% of the time currently, the male and the female will swim upwards together then simultaneously release eggs and sperm in a little cloud in the water column. You then rush towards the area where they have spawned with this gigantic plastic bag and you surround the entire gamete cloud with your bag. Then you bring it to the boat and try to figure out how on earth you are meant to lift 33 litres of water in a plastic bag onto your boat; then you subsample your bag; then back in the lab you filter your subsample several times and count eggs and sperm. I couldn't get any sperm, possibly because my methods weren't quite correct and also I had no clue what fish sperm actually look like (I had never before seen this done in my life and was simply following the descriptions in papers); but I did unbelievably get some eggs despite the total mess we'd made of the whole thing, and staring down the microscope I found that they were mostly actually fertilized. It really makes very simple logical sense but for a while it gobsmacked me that you could do this at all; that you could take a big plastic bag and collect gametes with it and subsample and filter and stain and stick in a petri dish and look at under a microscope and COUNT fertilised egg ratios. I suppose it is only because I am a whole animal biologist that I find it amazing, because most of the time I do things that any child could do, counting the number of bites a fish takes or following it around, so anything that involves a slightly more complicated procedure (and things that require a microscope!) seems incredibly sophisticated. But anyway, it worked. Once. We've only been able to do it again once more, due to the fish being uncooperative, and that time it failed utterly with no eggs at all. I'm hoping to repeat it successfully just once more before the season is out, just to prove it wasn't some kind of weird fluke, as the aim really was just to pilot the method for use in the next season. But it might require underwater Barry White broadcasts, as one of the other researchers suggested.

When we are not waiting for fish to get it on we somethimes find time to go on little excursions.

On the way up to Cook's Look, the highest point on the island:

Finally made it!

Another trip to Coconut Beach round the other side of the island, totally deserted with no sign of human habitation...

...except for the fact that the seagulls will come and sit next to you when you are having lunch.

Island Food

2007-04-05T04:08:00.000+01:00

Work progresses as usual, we are well into the slog it out and try desperately to collect enough data (I only have 3.5 weeks left) phase of this field season. We are hampered every so often by exciting events like a tsunami warning due to the Solomon Islands earthquake, that prompted us all to go sit on a rock on high ground with a good view of the sea and eat an apple each whilst listening to the radio. It was quite a bizarre event, all the research station staff and volunteers and researchers (at the time, a grand total of eight) suspending normal activities to go sit on a rock. At any rate there wasn't even a ripple in our area and we went out as usual in the afternoon having been told that the threat had passed.

So in answer to "am I sick of maggi mee yet", the answer is actually no because I only brought four packets of Maggi Mee with me from Cairns and I've only eaten three of them. We order in food from a supermarket in Cairns (barge day -- every second Wednesday -- is rather like a fortnightly Christmas), and cook all our meals in very well appointed kitchens in our houses. I am vaguely sick of spaghetti aglio olio e pepperoncino which is what I always make for a quick lunch (or sometimes when I am very hungry I have a ham sandwich instead, which is even quicker); but we have also had both red and green curry, once I made a rather improvised hainan chicken rice, every Thursday (our day off) we have pancakes for breakfast, every Saturday evening which is the weekly barbecue night we have a gigantic steak each, and it is truly amazing what one will find in the "free food" cupboards (food left over from other groups which have left). Free food had provided us with pizza bases, popping corn (for our movie nights in the library), huge bottles of supermarket home brand bright green lime flavoured cordial that I have discovered is actually made of apples and lots of chemicals and which we have fondly christened our "detergent" drink, more bread than one could ever eat, proper Lee Kum Kee oyster sauce, a whole array of spices, and etc. As is usual when one is diving a lot we eat like pigs, the Tim Tams (Aussie chocolate biscuits with a chocolate filling and chocolate covering, hmm why does this make me think of certain college folks...) get wolfed down as soon as they appear on barge day. But the sheer amount of physical work this whole marine biology thing is turning out to be means that I think I am actually burning it all off as fast as I can eat it.

Which all means that I feel no guilt in baking up the Cadbury's chocolate cake mix that I impulsively ordered on the latest barge cycle, it is Easter this weekend after all!

P/S Fish in the last post was a female, also fondly known in my books as individual A8_3... (I don't give them names, firstly I am looking at close to 50 fish and I'm not that creative, secondly I don't really think you are supposed to according to some points of view -- not anthropomorphising them and all that). Don't worry, they always recover pretty quickly from the stress of being caught and in five or ten minutes they are usually swimming about and eating happily again -- though they do get very paranoid about divers which is a bit of a pain when you are trying to watch them still!

Tricky Little Blighters

2007-03-29T08:21:00.000+01:00

...are fish when you are trying to catch them, according to highly reputable scientific sources (such as my supervisor). A good two weeks after starting on the whole fish catching mission I have managed to catch a grand total of 9 of the things. They swim a heck of a lot faster than you. They maneuvre faster. They can go down little holes in rocks and don't come out. They find the one tiny hole you have left when surrounding their shelter with fence nets and zoom out of it at warp speed. This is not, by any means, a piece of (fish) cake. (Sorry.) After a brief spate of beginner's luck (midway through the first week), we hit a total dry spell, days and days and hours underwater with nothing to show for it, but most recently we have had some minor success again, so it's no telling what will come next! It is kind of fun trying to outwit them. Whether or not the effort (on average so far probably something like three hours to catch one fish, which we keep in a plastic bag and admire for all of about two minutes to take measurements and squeeze their bellies and also to tag them, followed by immediate release) is proportional to the results is something I am not thinking about quite too hard...

Otherwise, research is chugging along. I'm at about the halfway point, and am finally sort of getting on with data collection (it seems a bit odd that it took a whole month just to set things up, but I hope/think I didn't just waste it all), or at least as much data collection as I can manage given the fact that the Tricky Little Blighters are so good at not being caught and also for well over a week now they have not been spawning at all, despite singing of suggestive songs at them underwater.

Life here has become very much the norm, my three or four dives/snorkels a day (this is a punishing physical regime, I think it's been a very long time since I was so fit -- lugging dive gear around and pulling up the boat anchor is bloody hard work), as much sleep as I can get at night, and our very much needed one day off a week where we sleep in till 9 and have pancakes for breakfast! I imagine after the next month when I re-emerge into the world of civilisation there will be something of a culture shock. I haven't actually touched any cash for a whole month, excepting one evening when we went to the staff bar of the resort, which is the only bit us scruffy researchers are allowed into.

Here is a picture of a Tricky Little Blighter that we managed to outwit, hurrah.

Fishy trials and tribulations

2007-03-15T01:54:00.000Z

Have fairly rapidly discovered that one of the difficulties of being on field season is that you think about your fish literally all day every day, and often dream about them in the night or wake up at 5am finding yourself trying to plan the next day's research activities. Hence today we are taking an Entire Day Off, what a luxury, not really one which I feel I totally deserve but I think it will prove good for my sanity, I not only see bicolor angels everywhere now but they are always buzzing around the back (and often the forefront) of my mind in their exasperating cute little fishy way. The Entire Day Off consists really of just staying on dry land and allowing all these little cuts and scratches (I am a walking feast for the mozzies here and I am very bad at not scratching, so I have many!) to dry out a little, and letting me catch up a little with land-type work; so in reality I am not totally avoiding the bicolor-related thoughts, but I do intend to spend some of the afternoon mooching in a way that totally belies the fact that every hour I spend at the research station is very Expensive and Valuable Fieldwork Time that should never be wasted on pain of producing a crap PhD. I also woke up at 9am today, the luxury (we normally wake around 7 and are at the dive shed to leave for morning dives/snorkels at 8:30). We may climb Cook's Look which is the highest point on the island (a reasonable height I think, it takes about 3-4 hours round trip) later in the afternoon if the weather holds.

The past week has been a bit of a rollercoaster, things looking totally grim and prompting thoughts of quitting and becoming an investment banker one day, then bright and sunny with research for life beckoning the next day, and then the cycle repeats. The main issue has been study sites, which I had thought I had settled on by the end of my first week (according to plan) but which then proved to be a problem in terms of diving regulations, as I need to dive at dusk at my sites to watch my fish spawn, and a couple of the sites were too far away for the station's directors to be happy for us to do that without a third person to sit in the boat as an extra safety precaution. So halfway through my second week I found myself starting the search for study sites all over again. Having thought I'd found a wonderful one closer to the station, I then discovered that once the south-east tradewinds start blowing (which happens any day NOW) that site would be too exposed and rough to dive. And so on and so on -- if it wasn't one obstacle it was another putting a big black cross against site after site. Finally I think I may be back on track (though I am now very wary of being overly optimistic and am totally mentally prepared for it to all collapse tomorrow) as I've found yet another site, still exposed to the tradewinds but marginally more sheltered, and the station directors have very very kindly allowed us to dusk dive at one of my further away sites. Phew. You didn't need to know that, but it makes me feel better to have complained about it all one more time!

In happier thoughts, next week I am going to try to catch some fish (to measure and tag them, and also to squeeze their bellies to see what if anything comes out...!) which sounds like most frustrating fun, everybody has warned me how much of a total nightmare it can be, so we will see. Er, maybe that's not a happy thought after all. Anyway I am glad to be starting on something new instead of searching for yet more study sites -- in plan anyway.

Home sweet home:

Wet season means I've been taken out of or not been able to get into the water countless times due to the weather, but when it's nice, this is the view from the dive shed of our beach and weekly BBQ area:

Looking the other way down the beach towards Palfrey and South Islands at low tide:

Research station boats -- mine is No. VII with a 25hp motor in the front and behind it is Kirsty K, used for longer trips to reefs outside of the Lizard Island Group.

Lizard Island Life

2007-03-07T07:58:00.000Z

End of my first week on Lizard Island -- it has been a good week in that we have more or less achieved what we wanted to for the first week, which I must keep in mind is far more than can be expected for most fledgling projects of this kind! In celebration we are taking the afternoon off, actually just time out of the water to catch our breaths and sort out various mundanities of island life like laundry and collecting the next fornight's worth of food from today's barge and thinking about some science...

This place really is the most luxurious field station one could possibly want to work on. Perhaps the pinnacle of this luxury is the (solar) hot water showers that are available not just up at the houses that we live in but even round the corner of the dive shed. I think this is the first time I've ever had a hot water dive shed shower in my life, including visits to fairly swanky resorts. (I wonder if the Voyages resort a few beaches down, the only other development on the island, can boast as much.) More totally unexpected amenities include spacious kitchens far better than my own (and a free food supply from research groups who have left!); washing machines; satellite phone and Internet connections at reasonable rates; a well stocked library with all the theses ever written about Lizard as well as other science and fiction; lovely composting toilets; and I could certainly go on. Normally, the privations of tropical coral reef island life (in the past this has included tent living and unsavoury loos 200m from camp) one tries not to mind because of the beauty of the area and the simple fact that you get to dive gorgeous reefs every day; but here we are totally well supplied with creature comforts in addition to experiencing views like the following (this picture taken on the way home after a particularly exhilirating dusk snorkel in which I observed my fish spawning for the first time; fish sex and romantic sunsets complete one's day very satisfactorily):

So yes, it is an extremely nice life. The Research Station is fairly empty at the moment with only one other small group of researchers here other than myself and my field assistant, so I can certainly see how one would go a little stir crazy after a while (as is this time typical of tropical island life, one's world revolves around a very small triangle of house, lab and dive shed; with all other forays outwards always by boat with scuba gear), but I hope to put that off for a while at least. I am too busy now dealing with my visions of my little Centropyge bicolor -- I have started to catch sight of them everywhere out of the corner of my eye, including whilst on dry land walking through a field... hmm.

The Yellow Brick Road

2007-02-24T05:54:00.000Z

Am on my way to Lizard Island, Queensland, Australia! I will be there for the next two months watching my little fishies (Centropyge bicolor or the bicolor dwarf angelfish for anyone who wants to know). Am meandering over very gradually via London, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore (current location) and Cairns -- so it is taking a little while. I'll try to post on this blog when I can about the trials and tribulations of being an intrepid field researcher on a resort island on the Great Barrier Reef...

:)

2007-02-09T14:04:00.000Z

In a paper about some fish:

"During courtship the male approaches a female, swims parallel and slightly behind her, then the pair swim side-by-side and, wriggling frenetically, rise slowly for 2-3 m into the water column, release eggs and milt in a visible small cloud, and move back immediately to the bottom."
- Marconato et al (1995) The mating system of Xyrichthys novacula: sperm economy and fertilization success. J. Fish Biol. 47:292-301

Am I alone in thinking that if I ever watch these fish court and mate I will laugh so hard at the thought of their frenetic wriggling that I'll spit my regulator out by accident (either that or somebody will think I am suffering CNS oxygen toxicity and convulsing much like that man in the PADI video...)

What I Did This Morning

2007-02-08T20:29:00.000Z

Just a little taller than me thanks to the rather chic hat the other Trinity people who gamely joined us in building our snowman put on him! I donated my scarf for purposes of picture taking...

I also built him a baby brother on the Trinity Bridge, looking out onto the Cam towards John's.

And this was my view out the window when I got up.

Finally, my favourite snowman (of many seen over the day as I trekked all through the backs on my way to the University Library). This little guy was guarding a doorway in Clare's Memorial Court.

A Long and Rambling Post

2007-01-31T21:18:00.000Z

Right then, to it. Mainly because I am so disgustingly full from my chicken curry dinner that I can't even be bothered right now to move myself downstairs to shower, and that is a disgusting level of fullness indeed. Reminds me of our Florida holiday meals, wherein somewhere after the main course we would be at a happy level of fullness, considering whether to get dessert (usually Key Lime Pie, yum) to achieve an unhappy (=disgusting) level of fullness... and of course we always did. Oh yes, also just earlier this week some friends and I went to La Tasca, pleasantly surprised to discover the happy phenomenon of their Monday "Tapas for a Tenner", where of course you feel obligated to order more after the first very robust round just because of the whole all-you-can-eat mentality. Oh, the gluttony. I convinced myself during the dance show that I must be bouncing up and down on stage so much (literally - the techies took to calling me anti-gravity Tzo, not sure if this is a pleasing nickname really) that any backstage consumption of bananas and Quality Street and one evening actually two entire dinners (pre- and post-show) was fully justified. Alas, no such excuses anymore. Still, gluttony is such a very wonderful vice.

My field season looms ever and ever nearer. I am not panicking. Yet. I shall save panicking for when I get to Lizard Island and find all the dwarf angelfish have emigrated to Antarctica. Meanwhile I am employed in still remarkably little science and quite a lot of last minute equipment and logistics sorting. For instance sometime next week I have to submit my first food order -- you order food from a supermarket in Cairns, which delivers it to the barge yard, and then the barge chugs its way over the Lizard Island every fortnight, and so food must be ordered about three weeks before you even get a sight of a single blessed carrot. I've had to ask my field assistant whether she has favourite cereals or whatnot. Apparently the only thing she won't eat is spinach... so I imagine we'll just go without, I do quite like spinach but not to Popeye levels.

I've also been engaged in a bit of a dive bag saga, having decided that my beloved bright yellow duffel/mesh bag simply wasn't practical enough (you can only carry it in one hand or on a shoulder, hardly the most ergonomic of things). So having spent literally days browsing through dozens of dive gear and regular luggage shops and half settled on about 8 different bags in turn, I made the discovery that the place to go is.... Argos. So today I went and bought the most humongous rolling holdall they have, still "cheap as chips" as somebody on a dive forum very astutely recommended it as. It's even got lots of pockets inside to organise stuff in, and I am very hopeful for it -- if only it doesn't fall apart as Argos stuff is rather prone to do. I do realise this must be one of the most boring paragraphs I've written in this blog (maybe not, you can make me eat my words if you can find one about statistics in the archives), but after all you read this at your own peril.

What else... oh yes, the dance show! It was our annual thing, become a bit of a tradition over the years as we occupy the same five night slot at the ADC (oldest student theatre in the country, its venerable-ness not quite compensating for the dilapidated dressing rooms, do I really care so much that Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry might have preened in front of the same mirrors -- though they are meant to be renovated soon) each year. I was fairly heavily involved this year artistically, though I'd handed on my previous producer's role. It seemed like the show was longer in the gestation this year than previously, what with more pieces than ever in it (25!) and many of the most active dancers in up to 5 or 6 dances and so having a very hectic rehearsal schedule. Nevertheless by dint of running it umpteen times in the few days running up to the show it came together, and I think by opening night we were as solid and beautiful as we have ever been. There was a unique diversity of styles this year, the show having evolved quite a lot from its what I think were quite purely contemporary (of the "be a tree" school of dance) roots -- the first half in particular being populated with everything from bellydancing to Irish to flamenco to hiphop to tap to breaking to a piece that was Baroque court dance inspired! The second half was far more contemporary in feel and I think it worked out fairly well, as the more serious contemporary pieces do take some settling for the audience and perhaps they were more ready for it by then. Commercially we did our best ever -- three of the five nights utterly sold out and the other two certainly not to be blinked at. Bizarrely, neither of the student newspaper reviewers liked it much -- but ah well, what do the critics know? ;)

I was most exceedingly pleased by our contemporary teacher's very kind remarks that I should really choreograph, seriously. I would indeed like to never really abandon the dance that has become a "full-time hobby" as my college friends put it -- I will never make a dancer (that hallowed creature), simply not got the body or skill for it, but it would be so much fun and so satisfying (in a very intellectually exciting way) to be able to continue making dances if people want to see them, in between fish watching seasons. Of course there is the whole temptation of taking it even further than that, of getting myself some real training and exposure, but other than parental horror, I'm not confident enough -- raw blinding talent in the arts being something still seen by me as a prerequisite for any sort of success and certainly not something I would ever dream of claiming for myself. But then I don't really need to succeed, do I, if I do it for fun? Full-time hobby is probably the best way to do it. At the other end of the scale sometimes I wonder if I should allow myself any space at all to hold on to dance, single-minded determination another one of those things I sometimes think of as neccessary for success in anything, but then again, I would like to remain sane and balanced, thank you very much.

Pictures of the show linked in the post below and backstage on facebook -- not so much fun if you've not actually seen the show, particularly as we are not professionals and when photographed have a very bad tendency to be caught very inelegantly between positions, but there are some lovely ones if you would like to have a look!

Elemental!

2007-01-28T14:48:00.000Z

Five night dance show run ended last night -- I haven't the time to write now as I am off to a rehearsal (no, it never ends), but here are some links to some initial photographs:

Duncan Grisby: http://www.grisby.org/Photos/397/index.html
Claude Schneider: http://www.cantabphotos.com/view_genre.php?genre=genre_performance

Woot.

31/1: Edited the link for Claude's photos -- more up now on his main cantabphotos website.

Jumbo polythene bags, anyone?

2007-01-15T22:03:00.000Z

For the past couple of days I have been engaged in ordering various bits and pieces of equipment for my impending field season. The essential equipment of a marine biologist seems to consist of the most bizarre things, leading to my faintly bemused perusal of websites selling all manner of what can most accurately and precisely be described as "bits and bobs", ranging from Simply Scuba, gps4less, Millipore filters and Net Manufacturers UK (perhaps understandable) to Food Safety Direct, cheap-rope.uk, Lakeland Limited - The Home of Creative Kitchenware, Tooled-up and Forsport UK (?!?). Yesterday I spent something like an entire hour trying to find giant ziplock polythene bags (to collect pelagically spawned eggs and sperm in, in case anyone is wondering). Nobody makes them except for ZipLoc itself, which sells them for an exorbitant price. So I resort to regular jumbo polythene bags (from a packaging website) and then I spend another hour trying to figure out the best way to clip these shut in some sort of secure waterproof fashion. Options range from bits of string and clothes pegs to NASA quality Clip'n'Seal (sold only in the US of A) to some kind of miraculous one-handed plastic clip made in Sweden called Twixit that is mysteriously difficult to track down (in the end the home of creative kitchenware comes to the rescue).

Oh and of course not to forget the snazzy Durarite underwater paper and all-weather pens (writes underwater and upside down!). Expensive, but I couldn't resist and it is probably actually quite useful as unless I carry a giant plastic slate down (which is what we normally use underwater, with a pencil) I'll never get an hour's worth of observations down.

You know sometimes I think I ought to be spending a little more time thinking about Science. But then, intrepid and resourceful field biologists surely must know the ins and outs of standard UK polythene bag sizes. It's all part of the training, I'm sure...

New Year's Eve

2007-01-01T21:57:00.000Z

Passed very quietly indeed; I didn't much feel like going out to a friend's party in the evening, so stayed in, watched the countdown and the very impressive looking South Bank fireworks on telly, had a Sex and the City marathon, and felt rather pleased and not at all sorry for myself -- more proof, if I needed any, that I have definitely arrived out the other end of that social insecurity that seems to hit all who move overseas for university. Woo, 2007, and all that. I've never been much of a one for New Year's, probably because my family never really "did" New Year, and also after last year's Times Square insanity I almost feel like I've been there etc.! Nevertheless, wouldn't want to rain on anybody's parade, any excuse to have a party and such -- I even had a celebratory glass of Pimm's while watching the countdown ;)

Earlier in the day I took myself to the V&A, had a bit of a wander and went to the da Vinci exhibition they currently have on. It was interesting enough -- not of his art, but rather about how he 'thought' on paper, so lots of sheets of his notes and diagrams were on display, carefully exhibited by theme. I came away without having gained much knowledge other than that he was a genius and a damned good artist, but somehow I think these are not new conclusions. Still the notebooks were interesting, full of his 'mirror' writing (apparently because he was too lazy to train his dominant left hand to write left to right) and gorgeously sketched doodles of craggy Roman face profiles. Some of his anatomical drawings in particular were wonderful (he'd even noted the optic chiasma), and the exhibition was careful to point out examples of his highly lateral thinking with constant almost seamless drawing of analogies between nature and machine, microcosm and macrocosm. He seemed to think that natural design was the ultimate perfection; a very worthy philosophy, I suppose, although now I think we would hesitate to design a machine with an eye that has a retina wired in backwards like ours does.

Elsewhere in the V&A I also enjoyed:

This 1955 Givenchy dress which I fell in love with,

A light installation in the central courtyard,

and a rather jolly sculpture of the quack doctor Joshua Ward.

Afterwards I wandered next door to the Natural History Museum to have a look at the ice rink:

Christmas Cheer

2006-12-28T23:19:00.000Z

But first a link to photos of the pre-Christmas holiday in Florida where we dived the Keys, ate far too much (hardly a new thing) and best of all, met the manatees! I'm afraid I'm not going to write much about it. But it was a really lovely if brief holiday -- I really liked the chilled-out Keys atmosphere, and the manatees were really something special. There are probably very few other wild animals you can just go and meet and they will come up and play with you. I made friends with one in particular who kept holding my hand (really!). Aww. It is sobering to know they are severely endangered though, mainly by habitat destruction and boat-related accidents.

After America I came back to ostensibly work for a week, a difficult task when Christmas holidays were very palpably in the air. Christmas itself I spent at my friend's house in Oxford, as she'd very kindly invited me when she found out I wouldn't have any family in the country over Christmas! It has been a really long time since I'd spent Christmas in the way that I did as a child and I had a lovely time re-living it. A 7lb turkey and compulsory Brussels sprouts, presents under the tree and even a stocking full of goodies from my friend's grandma! It was such a shame that some of the family came down with some sort of nasty stomach bug/food poisoning over Christmas Day -- so it wasn't quite as full a party as originally expected, but the rest of us soldiered on and I discovered that I am not bad at all at Absolute Balderdash (useful skills for a PhD student).

Since Boxing Day I have been in London meeting up with friends, hitting the sales (oof) and today I watched both the Royal Ballet's Nutcracker and Guys and Dolls. Dr Johnson knew what he was talking about. It has been a most pleasant day indeed wandering around Covent Garden and the West End between shows. I'd not originally thought of going to see the Nutcracker -- I had already seen this production twice -- but I am so glad I did really. The costumes and sets and production design in the Royal Ballet's version are simply gorgeous and there is so much going on it sometimes doesn't matter there is little drama and virtuoso dancing in it. Who needs pyrotechnics and tragedy when you have a giant growing Christmas tree? Marianela Nunez and Thiago Soares danced a lovely grand pas de deux, she was so happy and had such a stage presence I almost didn't mind the very slightly off-sync allegro section at the end of the pas de deux. And I enjoyed Ricardo Cervera's Hans Peter/Nutcracker very much -- I'm hoping to see him promoted to principal sometime soon! The Snowflakes were also simply beautiful and so effective -- all kudos to Peter Wright of course, who apparently choreographed all that based on original notes that went something like "waltz for 4 minutes". Guys and Dolls was less breathtaking, I'm not sure if it's the musical itself (weakish story) or this production of it (minimalistic sets but without the razzle-dazzle of Chicago to compensate), but it did have its (few) high points especially in some of the big dance numbers.

Walking home from Piccadilly after the show I plugged myself into my iPod. Is it just me or does walking with music make other people also feel like they are in a music video/tv show/film? Suddenly life has a soundtrack (in this case the Grateful Dead followed by Robert Plant and the Strange Sensations). It was also nice to be out in the cool night air (autumnal rather than wintry weather these few days) after the too-hot theatre, and enjoying the sights of the Christmas light up along shopping streets no longer insanely thronged with crowds -- now just the odd party, couples, singles like me wandering along party-wards or home-wards. I was just heading up pedestrianised South Molton Street, lit up with gorgeous blue and yellow fairy lit columns on either side, Robert Plant still loudly singing away, when I thought I'd perhaps stop and take a photo. So I did almost stop, turned to look around myself, and then somehow segued into realising that the young man walking down the street the other way had similarly turned to look behind him -- that in turning myself we had both turned to catch each other's eyes. We shared a smile. I turned back, took two photos up the street. Put my camera away, was about to continue up the street, but on impulse turned again -- he was still at the bottom of the street, watching, smiling. And as I turned back again, continued to walk home, Robert Plant made the encounter seem like, well, something out a film. I smiled all the way home.

So merry Christmas everyone and have a very happy new year.

Fish, dance, the usual.

2006-11-28T22:27:00.000Z

Apologies for the long absence. Not all that much exciting seems to have happened really... weekdays I do my 9-5 (more typically 9:30 to 6, actually) in department, ostensibly reading papers but really just blanking out most of the time, and weekends I mooch. It's a good life. Occasional twinges of guilt, but I figure the first year of PhD must be something of a grace period, so I'm enjoying it mostly.

I haven't been totally unproductive (although it probably comes close!) as I've finally figured out where I will be watching my fishies -- on the Great Barrier Reef! A picture of where I will be working follows... Yes, you may now turn as green as you like.

I'm also dancing far too much, as usual. Three-quarters of the way through term I foolishly decided to take on far more choreography than I'd originally intended. I currently have six dances (ranging in length from 1:15 to 13 minutes) bouncing around in my head, three of which are my own choreography, which one would think makes it easier but doesn't really... nevertheless, I am enjoying it. I seem to have experienced something of a shift in style, my body and brain now want to do contemporary movement rather than the old ballet that I used to stick some flexed feet into so I could call it contemporary. I like to think that it's all producing far more interesting stuff to watch. I haven't done a ballet class for months and while I used to miss it so much, now I think if I went into one I'd probably find the forcing of my body into turnout and square alignment and holding everything permanently (you never let go of a single muscle in ballet, I think!) very restrictive. It's discipline that I still value tremendously of course and I really should go back into ballet class, and you want dancers to be able to produce perfect arabesques and pirouettes so that they know exactly how to let go of that, but I suppose I knew I was never built for ballet. It's nice to finally stop feeling a bit of an imposter in the whole "I dance contemporary" thing, at least!

It is absolutely brilliant though. In the finale piece of this year's show I get to be a fish for about 5 seconds, doing breast stroke (okay, so maybe more a frog) in mid air. Everybody thinks it is hilariously apt and that I should probably do it in full scuba gear.

Only another week of work before I rather cheekily take off for slightly over a week's holiday in the States. We are going to Florida to dive and meet the manatees! I can't wait.

What Nemo Did Next

2006-10-31T21:39:00.000Z

Recent conversations with a banker and a lawyer (to be) have reminded me that the little fishy world I inhabit is in fact unutterably cool and interesting, and that most people don't know that much about it, and therefore it is bloggable! Ha. You spend your days in the office reading paper after paper after paper, and occasionally you get excited by something stupidly esoteric that only your supervisor would also get excited by (you hope), and you forget that the basic facts of the system are really pretty fascinating in themselves.

What Nemo Did Next, if he had a long and happy life, is that he turned into a woman. Quite a lot of marine fish are sequentially hermaphroditic, changing sex either from female to male or from male to female at some point in their lives. Nemos (or more accurately the clown anemonefish Amphiprion percula) are a particularly well-studied system due to some funky guy who figured it all out whilst living in Madang Bay in Papua New Guinea, isn't the marine biologist's life a tough one? These clownfish live in anemones, as you know, and in each anemone lives a little social group -- the largest fish is female, the second largest male, and all the rest don't actually breed. There is a really strict linear hierarchy based on the relative sizes of the fish in the social group, so the female is Top Fish, followed by the male (clownfish have got it right!), followed by the rest in decreasing size. When the female dies, everybody else grows quickly and moves up a rank: no. 2 changes sex from male to female, no. 3 becomes the breeding male, and every one else is one step closer to the Top Fish Position. So if you think about it, Marlin (Nemo's dad) should really have turned into his Mum within a few weeks of his Mum being eaten by the big scary barracuda. Not that his Mum was his real Mum anyway, he was adopted, because when the eggs hatch (after being very very carefully tended for 2-4 days by the father and not the mother -- did I say something about clownfish getting it right?) the larvae just get swept away by the current and eventually when the baby fish get big enough they pick a random anemone to join -- hardly likely to be the one they came from originally.

But you know, I love the film, and they got the coral looking quite realistic, so I don't really mind that they didn't try to explain to all these kids that what Nemo really wanted to be when he grew up was, well, a girl.

P/S Lots of other fish do it the other way round, with females turning into males, especially when the males need to be big and powerful in order to maintain harems of females. So when you are small, you might as well be female so you can reproduce a little bit; when you get bigger you change sex into male so you can reproduce a lot (by mating with lots of females in your harem). Currently I'm hoping to study some fish which do this. It's very cool because some females, instead of patiently waiting to move up the hiearchy step by step towards big male-ness, try to employ alternative strategies like changing sex earlier and hanging around as a small bachelor male, growing quickly (not using any energy on producing eggs as a female) to a size where they are big enough to compete for harems; or changing sex and trying to sequester some of the harem's females for themselves so splitting the harem, etc. etc. And it's even cooler because more and more such fish are turning out to be able to reverse their initial sex change, which brings up all kinds of other questions about whether a small male might give up and change back to female.

So anyway really my PhD is about how fish try to have as much sex as possible. If you think about it. Hmm.

Happy Stomachs

2006-10-20T22:46:00.000+01:00

The boyfriend is visiting, which always prompts eating a lot of good food. Highlights from the past week include:

- Sunday roast at the Eagle, a lovely (if touristy) pub in central Cambridge, where Watson and Crick announced their discovery of DNA. It also has a ceiling with graffiti by RAF and US Air Force bombers during WWI and II. But all that pales in comparison to the Yorkshire puds.

- Buttered scones and apple pie washed down with good old quality English Breakfast tea at the Orchard. Down in the village of Grantchester a few miles south of Cambridge, the Orchard has been serving "morning coffee, light luncheons and afternoon tea" to Cambridge students since 1897 under its apple trees. It was home to Rupert Brooke who was often visited there by his pals "The Granchester Group", including Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell and Maynard Keynes. But still, you know, what would it be without the scones?

- Lovely Vietnamese food at tiny little Thanh Binh on Bridge Street. Had an exceedingly yummy duck hotpot with vermicelli.

- Unagi bento set and salmon sashimi at Teri-Aki. Felt thirsty afterwards, but the lure of Japanese food and MSG filled miso soup is simply too much.

- Dinner at the Vaults on Trinity Street, an underground restaurant/bar. Very stylish stuff and such brilliant food. All dishes are starter size, much like tapas, but food is a diverse mixture of European, Middle Eastern, Oriental. My favourites were pigeon breast with chorizo in a red cabbage sauce, roasted aubergines stuffed with tomatoes and spicy rice, and butternut squash mash.

- My very own culinary work. College has taken my gas ring away by command of that paranoia incarnate known as The Fire Safety Officer, but I am surreptitiously cooking on a very serviceable electric cooker I own. And thus managed to produce:

1. The classic melon and parma ham (and some salami for good measure)

2. Tapenade spaghetti -- so yummy I was quite impressed, but the ingredients make so much sense really. And so unbelievably easy to make as it is a no cook sauce! Will definitely add this to my list of everyday things to make for dinner.

3. Cod poached in a tarragon broth -- again surprisingly yummy, I was quite sceptical about having to pour loads of orange juice into the broth, but it was great and went wonderfully with the fish.

Life between tea breaks

2006-10-13T22:17:00.000+01:00

The first week of real PhD-ing is just over and it hasn't been bad at all, really. As far as I can tell academic life is really just one long glorified tea break interspersed with occasional bouts of work. The tea room serves tea (20p), coffee (35p) and various unhealthy tempting munchies everyday at 10:15 and 3:15 for about an hour. So you get into the office somewhere between nine and ten, and then you contemplate tea at about ten or eleven, and then you have lunch about twelve or one, and then you contemplate tea again at three or four, and then you go home about five or six.

It is incredible how anybody gets any work done (something my sister was also amazed at when she rejoined academia after years in finance -- the culture shock!), particularly as throughout the week there are also lots of exciting talks and seminars about ants and moths and cuckoos and whatnot (ain't zoology great). Somehow we manage it, though, I think I have learnt a significant amount about humbug damselfish over the past few days following the great paper trail through Web of Science, albeit probably less than I would have if I didn't have so much tea. (I only actually go to tea once a day, three breaks in a working day seems very slightly excessive...) In my bid to do a proper literature search on these little fishies I have properly availed myself of Cambridge's impressive library facilities, even making an early evening trip to the University Library in search of this 1977 paper in a journal called, deep breath now, Helgoländer wissenschaftliche Meeresuntersuchungen. It took me 20 minutes to even find the journal in the stacks on the top floor in the furthest corner of the South Front, and then I had to walk to the other corner of the library (please understand this is a library which stocks every single published book in the UK and then some) to photocopy it. Now that is what I call dedication. But I do love the UL, it makes me feel like the human species does know a little bit about the world and it is so nice to know that I can read about it all. Um, theoretically.

There is a lot to be said for tea and lunch breaks though. It is lovely to be in an environment where everybody is honestly excited about their work -- and what work it is. Up on the third floor where I have lunch with members of the Large Animal Research Group (mostly meerkats, to be honest, although also deer and sheep) and my own Evolutionary Ecology Group (bit of a random name, Behavioural Ecology and Conservation Mostly Underwater is slightly more accurate but a mouthful), the conversations veer back and forth between the next Nature paper somebody's got coming out, sightings of the rare Giant Crested Newt, anonymous papers involving beard clipping mass as related to testosterone levels as related to the next time the hirsute Anon. would see his girlfriend, Pratchett and Dawkins (in that order; we have our priorities right), and feeding discarded kittens to pet snakes, I kid you not.

Outside of the working day life continues much as before, although much improved by the fact that because I spend all day in department I feel no pressure to work after I get home, leaving me time to do too much dancing as well as a happy level of socialising. The lack of essay crises is novel and a wonderful thing indeed.

Gallivanting

2006-10-01T17:41:00.000+01:00

I write this ensconced very familiarly at my old desk in my somewhat palatial college room which I am lucky enough to be inhabiting for the second year in a row. Unfortunately it remains very bare and sad looking because the porters are holding hostage all my boxes which I left over the summer till tomorrow. I am living like a refugee and this morning had to shower with two hand towels. In a bid to make it temporarily seem a little more like a home I have put up some of my old posters which I rather cheekily hid in a high cupboard over the summer; and also went shopping at the trusty beginning of year poster of sale. My room is newly beautified by this little series of posters: penguins, snoopy, and a close up of a cow. Must keep up the zoologist face, you know.

September passed very pleasantly indeed in a whole series of trips around South-east Asia:

SINGAPORE
Was lovely for all the usual reasons of seeing the boyfriend, old friends etc. Went to watch E's dance performance at NUS; supper at Holland Village very convivial. Even went to Sentosa and spent a very happy day cycling, kayaking through the muck that passes for sea there, trying to get the boyfriend to sit on the beach; dinner at the lovely and very tasty Capella at CHIJMES. Such idyll.

BALI

Having just gained a professional diving qualification I naturally just had to get into the water again. Bali was a fantastic holiday all round -- far too much to see and do, charming, quiet, tremendously value for money into the bargain. The tourist tackiness we had expected was actually the exception to the norm, and despite the obvious tourist orientation of the entire island, we thought that the development had been done with lashings of taste and care to preserve the famous Balinese charm. The architecture is so lovely, everything done in dark wood and stone and completely open to the environment, melding seamlessly into the gorgeous plants and gardens everywhere.

Diving was amazing! There was amazing macro (little critters) at Tulamben in the north east of the island. I've never been muck diving before but could spend ages and ages peering amongst the sloping seabed of fine black volcanic sand looking for brightly coloured nudibranchs, crazy shrimps and crabs of all shapes and sizes, and various other denizens of the watery world. Saw so much that I'd never seen before in my life and couldn't identify at all. Highlights of the macro were probably the boxer crabs, tiny little 1cm crabs which stick anemones on their claws and wave them around kungfu-style to ward off danger, gorgeously coloured harlequin shrimp, and squat lobsters (AKA hairy blue crabs). I also spent probably something like 10 minutes watching this one cuttlefish. They are the coolest creatures ever, the way they change colours is phenomenal. It would flick from a smooth white with pulsating black, blue and silver spots, to mottled brown with spikes all over its body, and back again through a hundred incarnations within seconds. Despite the display being visual its speed and variety puts you in mind immediately of speech, and I did feel as I swam along with it that it might be talking to me. At one point it spread out its two side tentacles, stretched forward the rest in a tight triangle, pulsating strips of black and white at tremendous speed down them, and glooped a little fish or something (I couldn't see) from the water. It made me want to squeal into my regulator, it was so exciting.

And then, and then, and then there were the MOLA MOLA!! Also known as oceanic sunfish, these are the most massive bony fish in the world and we were tremendously lucky to see two of them as they came into the reef at Nusa Penida (an island off the east coast of Bali) to get cleaned. Both were about my size from fin tip to fin tip and these were small for the species. The Mola mola made the entire trip worth it even if everything else had been a disaster. It was so surreal swimming along with these unbelievably bizarre fish. I shall leave a picture to do the talking:

There was so much cultural stuff to do and of course we had no time to do it because we were underwater all the time. A second trip is definitely called for. We did, however, make it to Jimbaran to have seafood on the beach where a local band played at our request Rasa Sayang (Mum) and Hotel California (my sister and I); they could do Japanese and Spanish songs too! And we also watched a stunningly beautiful sunset from the temple at Uluwatu on the south west corner of the island. Finally, the females of the party had of course to try one of the Balinese spas -- we hadn't much time, but the little local one we went to for an hour long massage delivered quite the goods for USD25!

HONG KONG
Went back to Kuala Lumpur after Bali just in time to leave for yet another jaunt, this time in Hong Kong. I'd never been before and actually really liked the city, it has that sense of bustle and life that makes you want to explore and get carried along with the thousand and one events happening all the time. We stayed right next to the financial district which was certainly impressive.. the view almost everywhere you turn is quite phenomenal, particularly from Victoria Peak at night. Tower after tower, it is such a vertical city! It feels so different from Singapore; more like a Chinese version of New York I think -- less sterility, more life. There was a strange mixture of feeling more familiar than Western cities because of the Chinese culture and food, and more remote because I don't speak Cantonese. But it is perhaps similar to Singapore that there doesn't seem to be much to do! We largely went shopping and I was surprised at the sheer number of high fashion brand names -- I had to console myself with Espirit and Mango. I have such a lovely polka dotted... but you don't want to know about that, so I shall leave you instead with a picture of the Fragrant Harbour (as my sister calls it).

CAMBRIDGE
And now, alas, the Exciting Pre-PhD Summer is most definitely over. Real life beckons, or rather the PhD beckons as it can hardly be called real life. For the next three years I shall hopefully regale you with the trials and tribulations of how to figure out what little fish are doing underwater. See, now I just have to figure out which fish (possibly humbug damselfish so far) and where to do it! Piece of fishy cake. If only!

Underwater shenanigans

2006-09-07T03:40:00.000+01:00

After the dancing madness, my Exciting Pre-PermanentheadDamage Summer continued with diving fun at Pulau Perhentian, off the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia. I spent almost a month there doing my divemaster course with a dive shop that my family knows and loves (my sisters and I first did our Open Water courses there 7 years ago).

The divemaster course was pretty hectic, especially the first few days where we were trying to "anticipate and provide for instructor's needs" (oh, Americanism) without quite knowing where anything was kept, on top of reading the endlessly boring Encyclopedia of Recreational Diving for our theory exams. The first couple of weeks I largely spent tagging around after diving students herding them to the boat and babysitting them underwater, with the trusty Encyclopedia my companion at breakfast, lunch and dinner (I had such fun reading about the 1980s revolution in BCD design). There were also such underwater shenanigans like exchanging all my equipment while sharing a single regulator second stage (i.e. one thing to breathe from) with a guy about twice my size. In separate developments I had to rescue the same guy from underwater unconsciousness -- this is okay underwater but the dragging up the beach to begin CPR business was a bit tough on my rather ickle frame. More power to me for managing it somehow (!). Towards the end of the course, however, I started being able to dive better sites as I guided certified divers -- some of them were gorgeous with fish soup (i.e. you can't see for the fish in your way) and nudibranchs galore. I even had time in the last few days to sit on rocks staring at the sea, always a good way to contemplate the beauty of the world and the fragility of our coastal ecosystems -- or else just blank out with tropical island bliss. I made friends with the 5 dive centre cats who eat and sleep all day while divers tramp around them (I loved their names: Gizmo, Fat Boy, No Name, Monkey and Tom Tom). One afternoon I even had a go at sitting on the beach, a novelty after three weeks of just tramping up and down it loaded with full scuba gear!

It made me very brown and very happy. I like being on little islands, even without the luxuries of civilisation (air conditioning, hot water, internet connection, etc.); the peace and beauty and unspoiled life of the reefs more than make up for it. Even the things you lack make you appreciate a chocolate milkshake or a RM2 ice lolly with that much more pleasure. I didn't want to go home and even now after a week back in the city I would rather have the beach and the scuba tank than these airconditioned offices and noisy cars and endless shopping centres. And yet I have always thought of myself as a city girl. My PhD years, hopefully, will be the ideal mixture of Cambridge cafes and Malaysian fish.

And now I am spending happy hours looking forward to a diving holiday in Bali in a couple of weeks! Mmm. The addiction is growing stronger.

This is Gizmo:

Dance Dance Dance

2006-07-23T17:05:00.000+01:00

In the middle of a two week contemporary dance summer school at Laban, a professional dance school in Greenwich. It is an absolute killer dancing six hours a day (!!!) but so much fun, and possibly the best way possible to do a two week intensive exercise regime. I do two contemporary classes, a ballet class, and jazz. By the time you get round to the jazz at 4:30pm everyone is so tired that it takes all of our lovely bouncy teacher's energy to keep us on our feet, as well as promises that "next week, you will all be like Rambo!" and "if it hurts now, that is good, it will stop hurting soon". I think anybody who really likes dancing has more than a streak of masochism. The wonderful thing is realising that your body does indeed get used to it. On Wednesday most of us could barely stand up without groaning, but by soldiering on through the deep aches in hamstrings/calves/quads/abs/back/shoulders/neck/everywhere, Thursday and Friday miraculously saw the aches diminish if not actually disappear.

Despite the physical activity being the most prominent part of the course, there is so much to be said for the dance itself. I do a gorgeous Cunningham contemporary class which is an oasis of calm and beauty in the middle of a hectic day, all 20+ of us reflected in the mirror as we plie and rise and carve out simple but perfect strong shapes in unison. And jazz at the end is just so much frantic fun, from grinning and posturing to get one through an ab-killing held pose, to the manic routines where your dog tired body manages to do it yet again (and again and again), and it's still a laugh every time. I'm so glad I signed on to do this, and meeting people from all over the world (from Korea to Iceland) who have flown in just for these two weeks of dance is an amazing opportunity. Although I long ago gave up any dreams of really being a dancer, I am very excited to be given a glimpse into the world of budding professionals and at Laban at least it's wonderfully supportive and not at all the cut throat place I always thought it might be.

Laban's crazy but very cool building:

In other news I just had a meeting with my PhD supervisor. Other than me being totally useless having not actually thought about PhD ideas prior to the meeting (...), it was okay -- although slightly freaky because he started going on about how if I want to set up my own field site in Malaysia (let's say), I would probably have to buy a boat (!!!) and hire a local fisherman to be my boatman and even possibly build a hut (not literally with my own hands, but close enough) in order to live on site. Heavy, heady stuff. Still, it sounds like an express course to growing up properly, I suppose you either sink or swim when you are out there in the field, and I am quite determined to only sink on purpose when I am starting a dive, thank you very much. This is the stuff of (slightly intimidating) dreams. Erm. :)

A Big Furry Hood

2006-06-30T23:02:00.000+01:00

Yay, I've graduated!

Graduation was fun, and definitely quite full of pomp and ceremony. After a fantastic alcohol-filled graduation dinner and post-dinner party, the next morning you blearily figure out how to wear the big furry hood (fake fur, we are kind to the rabbits nowadays). Then everyone from your college walks in a bit of a parade towards Senate House, where we graduate in a lovely ceremony involving lots of latin and silly hats and holding of people's fingers. And then we take far too many photos. Tada!

London for under six quid

2006-06-10T18:15:00.000+01:00

Have come down to London for a few days as the sheer blobbiness of Cambridge was getting a bit much. After way too much TV watching I decided I had better make the most of this scorching afternoon in my favourite city. But how do you spend an afternoon in London without lots of money? (Been shopping recently, therefore feeling guilty.)

1. Tube journey to Westminster -- 1.50
2. Tate Britain. I was thinking about the Constable exhibition they have on, but decided to be cheap and just wander around the main galleries instead.. by the time I'd got through them, even though they weren't large, I was tired and didn't really have the energy to look at the Constables. A pity but it saved me eight pounds, heh. But the free stuff was lovely. My favourites included the Turner gallery, a few Stubbs paintings (including one of a fuzzy English water spaniel), and a gorgeous rather geometric one of the English channel with the light playing on the water (Brett I think), which reminded me how much I love the sea and how much I'm looking forward to diving in August, albeit not in the English channel. I skipped the entire half of the gallery with modern art, to me if often simply seems angry and grotesque. Perhaps that is a valid point, but not a particularly pleasant one!
3. A long walk back along the Thames and up Whitehall. Walking past the houses of parliament with their imposing architecture and weight of history, what should I see but a whole herd of butt naked cyclists speeding by. It was hilarious and not a bad stunt I think, to protest the dependence on oil and the difficulty of cycling in London. I guess normally that difficulty doesn't include "getting your knob sun burnt" as another bemused passerby mentioned.
4. At Trafalgar Square, slightly more dubious street entertainment in the form of many, many football fans cavorting in the fountains in various states of undress, though not quite to naked cyclist protest level. The police looked a bit disgruntled. All in good fun, but as Radio 4 pointed out this morning, if we've stopped all the hooligans from heading to Germany, that means they're still here! All that celebration for an own goal. Hah!
5. By this time, very tired, so bowed to corporate evil and bought a caramel coffee frappuccino from Starbucks. Actually a very posh Starbucks on St Martin's Lane with this black looked-like-gilt-lacquer storefront. The air conditioning was a blast, but in combination with the frap soon drove me out into the streets of summer London again... 2.90!
6. To Chinatown. Buying supplies for a steamboat I'm having tomorrow. This expenditure not counted.
7. Home on the tube, another 1.50, accompanied all the way by another band of young white men in jerseys singing very badly. Only the beginning.

Blobbiness

2006-06-07T15:58:00.000+01:00

Exams ended on Saturday. My last exams ever ever ever, thank goodness for never having to write an essay in an hour again ever ever ever, now I just need to write a phd thesis and defend it in front of a committee of experts, should be a piece of cake eh.

After the initial shock of having nothing to feel guilty about I am getting used to the new exhausting routine of sitting on a series of punts and grassy patches sunbathing over the day. I am feeling increasingly like a blob. But next week things start happening, the diary looks busier and far more exciting than it has for a month (wherein it has mainly consisted of: Tuesday - chapters 1-5 Behavioural Ecology).

Yay!

Capitulation

2006-05-25T00:32:00.000+01:00

I gave in today: microwaveable pasta for dinner. So terribly unsatisfying, despite Marks and Sparks' best efforts, but I haven't really the energy to contemplate cooking much. In a way it will be a welcome break standing around in Sainsbury's (M+S was a random departure from the norm) trying to concoct minimal fuss meals. In my first year I managed it by dint of seriously cheap microwaveable fisherman's pie type things and ham with veggies I could throw together into a salad. It was quite fun actually, my twice daily trip to sainsbury's (once to buy soup for lunch, and once to buy dinner -- one must maximise the time in the fresh air).

After over a month of pretending to work in my room but in reality falling asleep on the sofa and playing some seriously mindless and addictive computer games, I have finally in the last week before exams gained the will-power to plonk myself in the departmental library for the better part of the day (er, only 2 days so far, but I am hoping for a few more!). Followed often by a stint in caffe nero after an early dinner so it is not a totally rigorous scheme (it's not just me! there's this other girl who has done exactly the same work hours in the cafe the past two nights, we even both get a latte and a muffin to stimulate the brain cells, she must be a kindred spirit), I am quite incapable of the sort of dogged hermeticism some others have. But anyway finally I am putting in some hours that I consider vaguely respectable -- less than a week to exams! What great advances I can make in my zoological knowledge in another 5 days is highly dubious, and I am honestly worried because I really did waste time for about a month in a seriously grades-destructive manner, but there is no point regretting not working before the opportunity to work is fully past. The worst bit is comparing my pitiful work over the past few weeks to the last two years' exam prep -- but, again, that is pointless worrying, even if like most pointless worrying it is impossible to stop doing it.

I wish my mummy were here to cook me nutritious brainy food. :) But I suppose in light of actually being 21 I must give up such thoughts and content myself with the ready-to-eat section of the supermarket. Mum did send me twelve whole bottles of brand's essence of chicken though. Screw three years of diligent (?!) study, it is the essence of chicken that will get me my first!

Heh heh. If only superstitions were true.

Bondage and Laughter

2006-05-06T02:06:00.000+01:00

It has been one of those really unsatisfying days of work, but you really don't want to hear me moan about how boring yet frightening the whole exam situation is, so I will spare the world, and it is a good deed I say.

Despite ostensibly being at work all day (okay, more like all afternoon and then early part of the night, me being incapable of the 9 to 5 routine), I have managed to see two pieces of theatre as supposedly well-deserved breaks, though I'm not convinced I did deserve them.

Deborah Colker (a Brazilian contemporary choreographer) with her new show at the Barbican was amazing and if not particularly uplifting, at least it was entertaining, gasp-inducing and really rather sexy. The show was called 'Knots' and is quite rightly called the first ever bondage ballet. Lots of very lithe muscular dancers tying each other up, counterbalancing each other at impossible angles while attached by rope, bodily picking up trussed up companions to fling around in the air like so much lustful meat. It was acrobatic and terribly exciting to watch. Near the end of the first half a rope-less duet for two women amongst a forest of rope strands hanging down onto stage was one of the most beautiful moments in the whole show, following which two men and two women threw themselves into various piled up heaps, entangling and disentangling limbs and torsos only to entangle again. Set to Ravel, it was sexy rather than vulgar. In the second half the ropes disappeared, to be replaced by a huge Perspex box in and out of which dancers climbed like so many intent sexy monkeys. Much pressing against the perspex and dancing crazily around inside it.

In all it was a show which took innovative ideas and pushed right to the end with them in terms of the physical and visual boundaries of what you could possibly do, and the dancers were uniformly amazingly athletic, bendy, beautiful and bang on with every step. My two friends came away gushing and it certainly was an awesome sight, but I did feel there was something slightly missing which I couldn't quite pin down for a while. When I came home I read the reviews and they crystallised it for me -- it was a certain lack of innovative choreography, real new ways to move and new shapes to create that don't involve having to tie someone up first. I suppose it depends on whether you are looking for good dance, or good entertainment. I haven't anything to say against the latter (or I'd be far too snobbish for my own comfort), but the show did fall rather into the latter category. I've always been something of a purist as far as dance goes, and props while terribly exciting do cause you to neglect the actual dancing. Then again, Deborah Colker's shows are all prop driven (giant hamster wheels, stages littered with vases) I gather, so it is simply what she does, and she does it very well indeed, and I'd recommend anybody else to go see it if it turns up in your city.

Last night I went to see Simon Callow in Noel Coward's Present Laughter at the Arts Theatre. I'd not watched/read any Coward before, so I thought I would remedy the situation and rather thought I'd enjoy it -- and I did, tremendously! The plot is inconsequential really, it was all about perfect diction, sly innuendo, silk dressing gowns, flamboyant overacting, dashing arrogance you can't help loving, a neverending stream of one liners, and quite everybody falling in love with the protagonist. Loved it. Would love to see more Coward. It is a kind of entertainment that I sometimes feel a little premature in enjoying (my friend and I were sure we'd single handedly brought down the average age in the audience by a significant number of years), but I think I might as well resign myself already. (I listen to Radio 2, after all: jazz and showtunes, if that ain't old people music I don't know what is.) I've just skipped the whole drunken partying age and gone straight on to sparkling sophistication and maturity, ha ha!

need/want/love

2006-05-01T21:38:00.000+01:00

Mostly want, actually, and then not even with any great conviction.

It being the month of my birthday here is a list of frivolity that I would like. I don't expect to get any of this. I'm just bored with revision! Waiting for the work related dreams to start -- when studying for A levels I think there was something subliminal about Giant Bouncing Phenols. Thank goodness it can only be about bird sex this time.

1. A first for my finals. Isn't it annoying when something you want can only be gotten through your own sheer hard work? You're so in control of the situation you only have yourself to blame if you don't get it.
2. Dive equipment - regulator system and BCD!
3. A sheep from market square (fluffy and wooden for the uninitiated, not actually bleating and edible). Not the hot pink one called Barbie.
4. Any DVD of a Mats Ek production. Actually any ballet/contemp dance DVD. Cloudgate theatre?
5. Tickets to the Royal Ballet's June 75th anniversary event, heh.
6. Errr.... er...
7. Man I am bad at wanting things ;)
8. Classical music CDs. No 'Ultimate cool classical compilation No. 2' PLEASE. Something solid. Some Brahms perhaps. Mozart/Puccini operas would probably also go down well. Anything goes, I own nothing but The Planets and Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, I am pathetic. I am also partial to cello and piano music. I think.
9. A new dance poster?
10. Books, if you want to be boring but still appreciated! Maybe Ian McEwan (not Atonement or Saturday), or Jonathan Safran Foer's short story collection. I will read most things if they are not inspirational or nonfiction.
11. Pretty girly things will not be sneered at.

I think that is good enough, I am having lots of trouble with this! I am sorry the list turned out to be really rather useless in doing anything but reminding everybody that it's my birthday soon. ;) I tried. Ah, me and my unmaterialistic view of life. Love, contentment, and lots of parma ham is all I really want. Hah!

Oh, the Guilt.

2006-04-25T01:50:00.000+01:00

One of those write-off days as far as work is concerned, so I'm just completely giving up now. I could, of course, be dutifully consolidating my very confused view of parent offspring conflict and the battle of the sexes, in glorified graphed out optimality model / Evolutionarily Stable Strategy format, but you know. Literary stardom calls. Hnah.

There isn't much to write about in the usual attempt to wring something interesting out of my life, as revision is wobbling along rather fitfully between long bouts of procrastination and guilt (I do not so much take breaks from revising as study between my main occupation of breaks) so randomness follows.

I was sitting in Caffe Nero today, pretending to work; two distinguished looking old men at another table chatting over coffee and muffins. Got to thinking, one rarely separates 'distinguished' and 'old man' here in Cambridge. They all look like they have headed entire departments and are chatting not about their pensions, but about the next Nobel Prize and which of their friends might win it. (This doesn't really apply to old women here so much, but that is a whole other morass which I won't jump into, I'm not entirely sure what brand of feminism I subscribe to, anyway -- so probably the confused brand.) It is something I suppose you find in any academic institution and because the whole of Cambridge essentially is an academic instution (take that, townies), it is perhaps more noticeable. I like it, quite a lot really. When I am 60 I want to be having coffee and croissants and discussing the new wave of thinking about fish behaviour. They never stop, these people, never seem to stop being excited; thinking about things isn't something that you stop doing at 65 when people decide to stop paying you to sit at a desk every day -- so much the better, therefore, if thinking about things is what you do for a living. This drives me a lot more than thoughts of retiring in wealth and going to the ballet every evening, really it does. Perhaps 5 years into my academic career, poor and tiring of the fish (no!), I will wish I had just gotten a real job like everyone else. But hopefully not.

Not particularly original thoughts, but I must do all I can to convince myself dull academia isn't dull after all!

By the way, anybody still out there? ;)

Cake blisters

2006-04-16T19:29:00.000+01:00

Spent a few days in London doing very little work indeed. But 'twas fun, I re-read two Pratchett books in four days -- a sorely needed break from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which I am wading through oh so slowly, I really can't deal with more than four continuous pages about Hell and Stephen's rather annoying internal battles with his sin, his heinous sin, blahblahblah. And also spent over five continuous hours doing absolutely nothing but cooking.

I haven't the photos but we made my second sister a going away feast as she is moving to the Big Apple. It consisted of all the most labour intensive recipes we could find, by accident rather than any sort of masochistic urge. We made:
1. Lamb and turnip stew (an Indian one). This spent about 3 hours on the stove. :)
2. Okra stuffed with spiced finely chopped onions. These did turn out nice, but I'm really not convinced they're worth the effort. I spent literally hours sitting there stuffing these damn things and started having all sorts of thoughts about stuffing, viz. is somebody employed to stuff fishball mixture into all those stuffed okras and chillis we get for yong tau foo, and are there machines that stuff those rambutans you get with cubes of pineapple in them? (When I was very very little I once asked an unsuspecting family how they got rambutans to grow with pineapple cubes in them... what, it was a valid question okay.)
3. Lentils and spinach. A scant hour to make!
4. Kulfi (Indian ice cream). Made from first principles, meaning hours of the milk reducing on the stove. Seriously yummy stuff, and quite healthy -- no cream in Indian ice cream! With almonds and pistachios. And some melon balls. I didn't know there were such devices as 'melon ballers', but you learn something new everyday.
4. Choc'lit cake! Yummy, yummy choc'lit cake with only about 12 oz sugar and quarter of a kilo of butter and 200 g chocolate and we're only talking cake here, nevermind the chocolate butter ganache and the mounds of icing that went piled on top of it. I got shortlived cake blisters on my right hand from all the attempts to get a whole bowl of coarse sugar and butter 'light and fluffy', but it was all worth it! We put white royal icing around it and piped on little green dots and a good luck clover (which was hilariously wonky). It turned out to be huge, and my other sister is also off on holiday, so I had to bring the remains back to Cambridge. I have been feeding chunks of it to friends to prevent myself from eating it all.

I think I think about food too much. ;)

Oh yes, I've decided to stay on in Cambridge. This news is a little stale now but I think I did tell all the most important people immediately so I didn't bother to write about it. This dear little town has grown on me, but most importantly, I wanted to stay so that I could work on my beloved fish back home in Malaysia (my supervisor did his own PhD on the same system and has a lot of contacts). It's something I know I would love to do, and I thought why take a gamble on the unknown when I can have what I want now. Maybe it's playing it safe, but I'm happy with my decision ultimately -- there is a lot of personal peace in it.

Meanwhile it's back to the work. I am now trying to write an essay plan about why females often copulate with more than one male. Doing behavioural ecology does funny things to your view of the world. Did you know that in reed buntings which appear on the surface to be monogamous, 86% of a male's reproductive success comes from extra marital affairs? And that in dunnocks (a little brown bird), females do this wonderful balancing act where they shag two males just enough so that both males help to look after their chicks, but they make sure to shag the alpha male more so that the chicks are of better genetic quality -- the beta male often ends up helping to raise offspring which just aren't his. Ah, the joy of internal fertilization... (beats spewing eggs into the sea any day, surely). Ahem.

Illustrated culinary adventures

2006-04-07T20:14:00.000+01:00

Some recent things that have come out of my very own little gyp room (kitchenette). It is not to be sniffed at and remarkably well equipped for being small enough that only one person can actually stand in it. And it has been helped by the likes of Gary Rhodes, my Mum, many years of eating, and the team that wrote something called the Food of China.

1. Salmon with a tomato and herb salad (and some potatoes thrown in for carb value)

2. Roast chicken with sauteed potatoes (and A LOT of salad thanks to K). I forgot to take a photo of the bird so here it is in the process of being mutilated by Daniel. So we aren't very good at carving...

3. Panfried pork fillet, with home made chips, lemon herb sauce and random green bits.

4. Roast pork with crackling, home made chips and spinach/tomato salad. Also made an apple sauce as well as the trusty Bisto gravy. No photo because I was too busy eating.

5. Hainan Ji Fan!! Okay so I've never seen Hainan Ji Fan served with a beautifully arranged ring of cucumber before but I was feeling decorative... not, of course, anything like Nam Heong but it's actually recognisably tasting of what it is supposed to taste like.

Oh, the beauty

2006-04-02T01:07:00.000+01:00

Saw Kenneth Macmillan's Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Opera House on Thursday. Alina Cojocaru and Johann Kobborg. Forced myself out of bed at the unheard of time of 9am to queue briefly for day tickets -- got one in the stalls circle, so a sideways on view but close to the stage. Turned out to be a gorgeous place to sit, as Macmillan's ballets call for acting as well as perfect pirouettes, and from that close the acting is visible -- and what acting it was. Not that they are mutually exclusive: his steps are always an illustration of a personal emotion. Whether Lady Capulet's soul-shattering grief, clenched fists beating the ground over Tybalt; or Romeo's sheer joy (perhaps with a tinge of macho showing off?) at the beginning of the balcony scene, turns in attitude and exuberant tours jetes; or Juliet's stiffness as she dances with Paris after her lover has left with the morning sun.

It has been a while since a ballet has affected me so deeply, not since Cranko's Onegin several years ago, also with Alina. (Mayerling was for me a bit too much; syphilictic madness I can't relate to as much I can love..) Alina is so small she is totally believable as Juliet, but not just in the girlish first scenes -- she grows so much with the ballet, it is apparent already as she begs Romeo not to leave; as she sits for that interminable time on her bed gathering her courage to run to Friar Lawrence; and it is truly heartrending when she awakes to find Romeo dead, kisses his lifeless lips. Kobborg's Romeo was interesting, heroic but with a careless side, a dark side; his dancing was clean and perfect. The marketplace scenes had so much little detail for each corps dancer you never tired of picking out new vignettes happening in a corner of the stage. The sheer power of the balcony scene, lifted by Prokofiev's soaring music, confirmed it for me as my favourite piece of ballet ever. And in Act III as the tragedy wound its way to its conclusion, I thought that the power of ballet to tell a story and to move audiences surely must be at its pinnacle here. It was not Shakespeare made pretty and put en pointe; it was Shakespeare itself, dance proving a more than able replacement for words -- and perhaps more global.

An encounter with geese

2006-03-26T15:14:00.000+01:00

The tree outside my window is covered with new leaves and I am just about to put the winter coat into the closet: sure signs that spring is upon us. So I went to pay a visit to my favourite "isn't Cambridge just gorgeous" spot, Jesus Lock, and took some pictures -- of geese rather than ducks or swans this time, in my bid to photograph a diverse mix of Cambridge waterfowl. Just the moorhens to go now.

And on the way home I met a pair of doggies and their owner.

The simple things.

2006-03-21T19:53:00.000Z

I am feeling expansive and warm; my linguine bolognese (I prefer linguine to spaghetti just because it cooks faster!) dinner was one of those surprisingly satisfying ones (every so often my cooking astounds me and sadly it is always by pure luck) followed by a healthy 'king of crunch' Braeburn, leaving me feeling particularly smug about my well balanced and very cheap student meal. Go me. Also I am looking forward to the 5 week holiday that I've just embarked upon in gastronomic terms, having just bought Gary Rhodes' 'keeping it simple'. Lots of pretty pictures and very usefully laid out. As a student I really cannot be bothered to make things which take 4 hours and about 30 ingredients to make, and am much more concerned with learning to roast the perfect chicken than how to dress it in the celebrity chef's equivalent of McCartney and Manolo -- usually involving spices which I can just about spell but don't have a faintest idea about the taste!

Forced myself to the library this morning to meet a friend for something after 6 hours of sleep (Yahoo! arcade games are too damn addictive), then sat fairly productively there for about 4-5 hours with a lunchbreak at my beloved German cafe. It was a pain struggling very slowly through all these papers, what does intragenomic conflict have to do with behavioural ecology anyway, blahdeblah, but I persevered with the help of a 35p mug of coffee from the tearoom when I found myself watching the bloke next to me falling asleep over Albert's The Cell more than my paper (and no, he wasn't a very interesting sight either). Ah, we scientists. So sacrificial. So damn keen. Another friend came into the library which was being used as a holding room for PhD interviews and looked so bored I found Dr. Seuss' The Lorax for her to read (it is on our overnight loan shelves -- recommended Conservation Biology Module reading!), unfortunately then her interviewer came to get her while she was reading Dr. Seuss, I hope I am not the cause of a bad impression!! Oops. She was trying to read the current issue of Nature before Dr. Seuss I think; obviously it failed as stimulating pre-interview reading material.

Doing several hours of work -- after multiple botched attempts on previous days when I got up about lunchtime and then didn't get to the dept so did no work whatsoever -- made me feel positively angelic so I wandered around in Borders and bought myself Mr. Rhodes (whom I shall always know as the perfect poached egg man having first seen him on telly making one) and also Ian McEwan's Saturday. Read a few pages before dinner, there is something incredibly emotionally and intellectually satisfying and pleasurable about sinking into a great book. Like many other authors whom I enjoy he is a master at the detail of a life (extra)ordinary, I don't pretend to understand why the sentence "The overfull litter baskets suggest abundance rather than squalor; the vacant benches set around the circular gardens look benignly expectant of their daily traffic - cheerful lunchtime office crowds, the solemn, studious boys from the Indian hostel, lovers in quiet raptures or crisis, the crepuscular drug dealers, the ruined old lady with her wild, haunting calls." can make me smile, pause to think, enjoy -- but enjoy I do. The simple things: food, books, the lack of study related guilt.

Spring is being very reluctant to arrive and I dearly hope it changes soon. I want to sit out by the Cam with my book and feed the duckies and feast on the sight of the daffodils in bloom across the bank. I am aware now I think that my time in Cambridge may well be fast drawing to a close (I am leaning ever more perceptibly towards Princeton, for a new start) and I suppose like everybody else I want my fill of this beautiful town before I uproot myself to another one.

Oh yes, thanks for the comments everyone. :)

Ah, tradition

2006-03-17T23:51:00.000Z

Is a gorgeous thing when it involves fancy schmancy dinners consisting of:

Melon and Parma Ham w/ Pflanzreben Riesling Rolly-Gassmann 1998 (white wine)
Scotch Fillet Steak, Red Wine and Shallot Sauce, Herb Scented Potatoes, Tomatoes and Mushrooms w/ Domaine Marcous Chateauneuf du Pape 1998 (red wine)
Individual Chocolate and Hazelnut Mousse with Coffee Sauce w/ Domain de la Rectorie Benyuls 2001 (dessert wine)
Cheese w/ Warre 1983 (port)
Coffee
Amaretti Biscuits

Which is why I am very very pleasantly full now and also very slightly woozy! College Commem Feast was gorgeous as I suppose it must always be, and I think I had a far more convivial time this year -- less time to be stressed out about talking to Nobel Laureates and also I am probably far better at dealing with those four confusing glasses of alcohol and all the cutlery and all the standing up and sitting down and looking at ease with pomp and ceremony and laughing politely during speeches and making small talk with important old men. I chatted rather pleasantly to Profs Handley and Davidson (whose place names I have stolen as a memento!!) on my right and left about conservation, fish and fluid dynamics, China, archaeology, US vs UK PhDs, the number of years they have been to commemm feasts (40! have yet to beat Aaron Klug from last year), Darwin, David Attenborough, bilingualism, women in academia, how to name species in Latin, Malaysia, classics, etc. etc. etc. I think my social skills are far more attuned to retired professors than Brits my age -- perhaps not quite so bad a thing?! I was lucky enough to be sitting at high table again where you get to exercise such rarified skills as talking about the world in general rather than Cambridge drinking holes and what one is doing over the next holidays, and also can now claim to have sat only 3 places away from the Master himself. (Although my sister chatted to Sir Michael Atiyah so I can't quite beat that!)

Also at the feast:
Toasts to the queen, the college benfactors, the master, etc.
The choir singing God Save The Queen, Pastime with good company (written by dear old Henry VIII himself, our founder), John Brown's Body -- I did not know they sing the same songs every year!
Speeches by the Rt Hon Oliver Letwin (son in law of the nice old bloke sitting next to me) -- tolerably funny, and the Master -- not so funny.

I came back from London just in time for the dinner, after a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful week with the Boyfriend mostly here in Cambridge ostensibly finishing off my term (I have had my last ever examinable lecture EVER, woo!) but really just spending many happy hours, well, being in love. I am such a sickening sap. But I know you will read this when you get home so what the hell. :)

Huh.

2006-03-05T16:59:00.000Z

So today was absolutely beautiful, still is. I woke sometime after noon, lazed around, talked to the boyfriend, refused to do my essay.

Thought I would go pay a visit to the duckies, I have missed them dearly, haven't been to see them properly since term started. (Also I had several pieces of stale bread in my room which I had to get rid of.) The walk there was peaceful, through the late afternoon shopping crowd, then down Portugal Place and across Jesus Green. Families playing football and collies fetching. Everything green and crisp and it seemed for a while that the Met Office mayn't have been quite so utterly stupid with deciding spring has already arrived. I love this town and it is so difficult to consider whether to be gung ho and young and must-see-more-of-this-world and uproot myself to America (albeit New England, so it is not as if I am going to Texas; I'm not sure any force could make me spend 5 years in Texas actually), or just stay here in lovely old decrepit England with the ducks et al.

The ducks didn't want any of my stale bread! :| I watched them a while, but not long before coming back. Rejection from poultry is hard to take.

Academia vs Actually Getting a Job

2006-02-27T23:14:00.000Z

The woes of being a finalist, AKA the complicated affairs of my potential career which has taken over my life for the past few days (or really the past year). I've taken liberties with the chronological order of things as the real order is just mind boggling, really.

1. So since all that fishy watching seemed to be going so well, I thought okay, let's watch fish for the rest of my life, it is pretty good fun, I've been very lucky with my undergrad research efforts and may turn out not to suck at it, people will think I am very clever and it will make my parents happy.
2. I apply for PhD positions at Cambridge and Princeton. Much stress.
3. I GET PhD positions at Cambridge (if funding appears) and Princeton (with funding). Much happiness. On balance, after a lot of faffing, I decide the Princeton PhD is probably a better one.
4. I start to have doubts about whether or not watching fish (or zebras or red winged blackbirds or whatever) is the way to go. What about the real world? I've never really given anything else a go. Ooh, exciting, could actually get a job which might possibly involve some creativity, designs and words (I swear scientific articles aren't really writing in any sense of the way I love it), a real product you can hold in your hands, living in a vibrant city that breathes with things that happen, actually get paid more than a pittance, and generally be a part of the Real World. On the other hand the Real World could suck and I might hate it. The point really is, I don't know which.
5. Exploring the Real World requires taking a year off, knocking on many many doors, getting rejected almost as many times (hopefully only almost!), having the tenacity of... of... a queen termite, but in the end being rewarded by definitely a better understanding of what the Real World and Real Jobs are like, probably a better idea of what I like and don't like, and possibly a newfound passionate interest in making magazines or advertisements or whatever it may be.
6. So, can the PhD wait (to be taken up after a year, or not)?
7. Princeton's blunt answer is no, and also I will lose this funny fellowship thing they have decided to give me, and in doing this I will piss the department off (apparently they can't give it to anyone else so the dept will lose the fellowship money which comes from the university), and possibly bias my chances should I decide to re-apply. I mean, people are human, I don't blame them (much).
8. Cambridge looks (so far) like it will let me defer; also should I decide to go back into academia I could always apply to other universities, of which many excellent ones do exist, I know it in my heart ;)
9. Lots of people tell me I am young, I should take the year off, it leaves my options open
10. Princeton faculty try to persuade me that should I go there I will be brilliantly motivated, I will do a great PhD with a department that they seem to think I will fit very well into, etc. (but of course they do) And I believe them, I don't think it's in any way a bad option, I think it could be the start of a brilliant career - but is it one I want?!
11. I am Confoozled.
12. I decide I am going to talk to as many people as possible about their experience in the non-academic industries I am vaguely interested in -- if it still excites me, perhaps it is worth closing the Princeton door.

There we go. Still generally Confoozled although I would dearly like to be less Confoozled at least within the next few weeks, mainly because being Confoozled is psychologically tiring and takes up a lot of time that could be better spent in trying to pass my final exams, or actually feeding ducks. Any thoughts much appreciated, although the situation only seems to get more complex by the day, and I don't think many of you actually still read this blog ;)

Possibilities

2006-02-18T22:26:00.000Z

What do you do on a Saturday evening in when you don't feel like being in the least productive because you've managed to wring an essay out of your braincells over several piously hardworking hours being the sole sad person in the Zoology library? And you feel much better both physically and emotionally after the rollercoaster of the first half of term? And you haven't caught up with most of your friends for aeons? Reach out, of course. But none of them are obligingly online at this moment so I am filling in some of the big gaping holes in this little blog'o'mine.

My dance show was a lovely success but then it is every year; producing it really is simply a matter of making sure it happens, and then in some kind of amazing artistic emergent properties kind of phenomenon it just grows wings and turns into a really exciting and visceral thing which sells all the seats in the theatre towards the end of the 5 night run. Much crazy printing of programmes in the Trinity computer room (which my co-producer and I colonised for several hours over several days) in order to save money. Much dramatic dancery horror in my toe bleeding all over stage (two nights in a row before I clued in and bandaged it to within an inch of its life), although apparently the audience couldn't tell and in true professional fashion I couldn't either till I got down to the dressing room (I caused my stage manager much anguish because her health and safety record needs to be squeaky clean for her satisfaction). Much interesting talk in the dressing rooms viz. whether or not one wears underwear under tights, and whether or not this is disgusting. Some comment on how ubiquitous costume item appears to be "girl boxers" from topshop -- not sure if topshop knows it is a lifesaver for dancers who require big pants to protect their modesty. Much laughter last night when one of our dear dancers simply didn't make it onto stage for a short 40 second interlude; the remaining two of us simply danced it without her in a very bemused "what the fuck?" fashion; and dear E didn't realise till we came downstairs afterwards to find her standing and ready to go on. Many, many, many boxes of chocolates (yet to get through them). And of course bucketloads of beautiful, virtuoso, exciting and original dance.

Photos http://www.grisby.org/Photos/335/index.html and http://www.cantabphotos.com/view.php?album=claude/060124202125

The next few weeks went by in a cloud really and I'm not very sure where they went. I spent two weekends in London with Mum and sisters doing lovely exciting things like having Chinese New Year dinner (general steamboat yumminess), watching Mary Poppins the musical (excellent, I'd recommend it to anyone), and walking the doggie. The weeks in between I tried to do some work and also spent much time stressing about my interview at Princeton, which was this weekend just past. The interview itself (or rather the 6 interviews) went okayish, one can't really tell with all this American friendliness. Got caught in the huge snowstorm -- whilst seeing two feet of snow dumped on unsuspecting Princeton was beautiful (you couldn't actually see the porch steps of my host's house when I left), it wasn't so pleasant for me as I'd just at that point spent over 12 hours in bed feverish, aching and listless and then had to spent almost another 12 hours in the airport (drugged up on Tylenol, alternately reading Brokeback Mountain and Cosmopolitan, just what every sick person needs for the airport really, a short story about gay cowboys and a magazine filled with half naked blokes), and on the plane. It had been parked well away from the terminal building so they had to snowplough it out, resulting in something like 5 hours of delay, followed by another 2 hours while they tried to pump water back into the plane (it'd all been removed for fear of it freezing over), only to find the pump was blocked by ice -- or that is as much as I caught from the apologetic captain while dozing fitfully under my blanket in my little cattle class space as we sat on the runway. At least my illness helped me sleep the entire flight away, but I can't say I was overly impressed by my New England send off!

Far better now, just catching up with work (much more to do this weekend really) and speculating feverishly about what to do if I suddenly go utterly bonkers, decide not to do a PhD and dedicate my little life to the greater pursuit of knowledge about fishies for no pay, and actually join the real world upon graduation (or at least after a few months of gallivanting around watching fish for pleasure). It is quite exciting really because having a degree in Zoology doesn't really point you towards any job alternatives from watching fish, so everything is open. Having once again convinced myself that I simply fail to be interested in the jobs that will make me lots of money (they are mostly about making lots of money, which, strangely enough, doesn't fascinate me), I have been flirting with ideas of perhaps going into science communication (science writing, editing, broadcasting, etc.) -- very much an in thing to do for disillusioned scientists, it sounds so exciting, doesn't it? But I am first waiting to see whether this never before heard of urge to actually get a Real Job is only a temporary insanity or not -- perhaps a PhD offer will come in and I will be back to my geeky world of libraries, endless arcane papers with crazy equations, and little beady eyed fish. I have only had this new craziness start for a few days (spending entire days in Princeton trying to sound like science is my all consuming lifelong passion has had a reverse effect), so don't worry, I haven't done anything drastic -- yet! Will try to keep you updated on where the whims of my fickle mind take me. Back to where the Clever People sit in tearooms discussing the niceties of zebra social society models, my parents will urge me. Ah well.

Being young and full of potential is usually a good thing; when it makes you feel like you could do anything, when it's all exciting, when you could jump off a cliff and never crash. At other times it is frighteningly open and stressful. I suppose it is all a matter of knowing the glass is half full and that it is up to you to fill it -- you might as well go about it with a verve. K observed to me today that it is the next 5 years of our lives that will really be the exciting ones, as we all make decisions and start to carve out our adult spaces (before we all get married have kids and become utterly boring). Tonight I'm feeling pretty good about that.

I'm alive -- barely

2006-02-14T17:51:00.000Z

Been away for far too long, just thought I would post a couple of lines to let everyone know I'm still around... Got very caught up with the dance show, not doing enough work mainly because mum visited (yay!) so spent a couple of weekends in London, and then the weekend just past flew to New Jersey for an interview. It was a shockingly tiring weekend particularly with some 2 feet of snow resulting in a 7 hour flight delay (in some senses it has been a shockingly tiring month), I am now down with some kind of truly evil flu kind of thing (apparently it is too severe to be just a cold, according to the medical student ;)). Need desperately to get better to I can get my act together and start sorting out my work and last minute PhD funding applications -- but having spent literally all of today in bed (other than dragging myself to a morning lecture) doesn't bode well.

But anyway I shall not wallow in self pity -- off to a dance rehearsal where I will sit and watch because yesterday I made the mistake of actually dancing, which resulted later in a coughing fit that felt rather like I was coughing my insides out (like sea cucumbers!), so it may not be such a good idea really... Here is wishing my immune system perseverance.

I hope you are all well and in far better health than me :)

Late night nostalgia

2006-01-19T02:07:00.000Z

Sometimes I think I was at my best when I was about 15, and it's all been a casual slide downhill since then. This is, of course, only the ought-to-have-been-expected result of being thrown into the real world (insofar of course as this venerable university can in any way be considered real at all), where popularity is not defined by grades and you no longer have to fold (not roll) your socks down such that the width of the fold is at least 1.5cm. Ankle socks with frogs on are now allowed, thank goodness. (I don't actually own any ankle socks with frogs on, although a debating coach when I was 15 did, and we loved her for it.)

But then again, that is too pessimistic a view. So here we go, a little of the good and bad (in all honesty, cross my heart etc.) approximately five years on. (I think I lost some years in between, mostly to exam fever and non-salaried copywriting drudgery, but nevermind that.)

THE BAD (because I am a sucker for happy endings)
1. When did it cease to be easy, socially? I never expected to even have to think about it. People are lovely when you get to know them -- underwater, next to sheep poo, in dance class -- but I have yet to get the hang of the whole making friends over a pint business. This does very little for one's self-esteem, which does little for small talk abilities, which makes it one big vicious circle (on the plus side, I have now developed very thick antisocial skin).

2. Goodbye hobbies. I spend more time sitting cynically with coffee and Stephen Fry (or Begon, Townsend and Harper's Ecology when all else fails) then industriously charcoal-ing or harping on about sunsets and apples. So perhaps I was never destined to be Whistler or Wordsworth, and it happens to everyone, but still there is a bit of a loss.

THE GOOD (it was a pleasant surprise that that didn't last long)
1. Scientific geekdom is a pleasant place to be antisocial or not in, as one wishes, particularly when you have the prospect of doing most of it underwater in the Indo West Pacific. Fish never expect you to be clever, witty and sexy (or maybe they do, but you don't particularly mind disappointing them). And they can be reliably depended upon to do interesting things (swim, feed, have sex, lay eggs, fan air over nests, brood young in mouths whilst starving, etc.), unlike some human specimens. You just need to have the right frame of mind.

2. 20 poems. (I'm only ever cryptic about You Know Who, no not the scary evil wizard, yes I know that's a bad joke.)

3. So yes, I've lived a little in some other country out of SE Asia and not from mummy's lap, as I was itching to do when I was 15. Some of it has been breathtakingly beautiful, most of it has been grey, much of it has been peaceful in a solitary kind of way. The thick skin developing and the delayed teenage angst has been largely dealt with. So now I can feed my duckies and do my own laundry in peace (huh, where did that combination of riveting activites come from?). On balance, it's been nice. And I'm far from done -- the HDB towers will not take me yet! (As I've tried to explain to many people, Singapore simply doesn't strike me as a place to be, well, young.)

4. Old friends are truly wonderful beings. I was silly to half-expect to move on entirely, and I'm very very glad that I haven't.

There we go, more goods than bads without even trying. It is too late, I will be sleepy tomorrow morning, I hope this entry doesn't sound awfully cryptic and self-serving tomorrow such that I will be tempted to delete it. Happy Chinese New Year everyone if I don't get round to another entry before then!

The Big Apple

2006-01-09T01:37:00.000Z

Just a redirect to a group blog at http://christmasnyc.blogspot.com: me and four 4/1 friends in New York over Christmas and New Year's; be warned that you may understand very little of it!

Back in Cambridge now and absolutely loving it. Ah, the comfort of my room, the heavy English coins, the nonstop drizzle, the 4pm loss of what daylight dared to poke its face through the clouds. It feels like home. Back on the show production job; academic work shall soon raise its guilt-inducing and frankly quite terrifying head.

Fish and the Big Freeze

2005-11-26T21:01:00.000Z

It is Cold. Every ten years or so a particularly hard winter comes along. Or it is yet another manifestation of climate change and the intensification of extreme weather. Or the Gulf Stream has reversed (although I fail to see very badly CGed wolves running around our frozen streets a la The Day After Tomorrow). Or whatever. At any rate, it is Cold, it has been Cold for two weeks now and it is only getting Colder. Yesterday Cambridge saw its first flakes of snow, while lots of people had to abandon their cars on some moor somewhere else in England which got rather more snow. Pretty, but it needs to snow a hell of a lot more before it is worth this Cold!

I went into the lab today to do a couple of hours of fishy work (it's back to the spiky sticklebacks!) and discovered that I made a mistake on Friday, so I have to re-do another couple of hours of videoing, so I am going back into the lab early tomorrow morning (Sunday!) to do it. All I could think at the point was, I have too much scientific integrity for my own good. At least I was in a good mood today and therefore didn't swear at the fish concerned (which I did do on Monday although I thought I never would, the stress of final year work and PhD applications and all is making me go slightly insane, and why wouldn't these bloody fish eat the bloody bloodworms I was charmingly pippetting right onto their noses), but rather just amusedly thought myself a bit of a git.

Went for dinner tonight with CL and neither of our cards got accepted, so he very charmingly legged it out into the Cold to get money from an ATM (which turned out to have run out of cash so he had to nick some off a passing friend) while I sat in the restaurant and deleted old messages on my phone and pretended that I do in fact have good credit. Haha. Odd really, card's never been rejected before.

Might have had to do with rather large deposit for an Operation Wallacea expedition I am trying to go on next summer. Operation Wallacea is a group of several hundred UK scientists and students who have established field sites in Indonesia, Honduras, Egypt and Cuba, to which they go every summer for 10 weeks to survey biodiversity, plan, implement and monitor conservation schemes, and generally study reef and forest systems. I am planning to go to the Indonesian marine site (the island of Hoga off Sulawesi), to act as a Research Assistant. I hope also to get my Dive Master qualification, and subsequently provide DM cover for hard coral and reef fish survey teams and students doing dissertations on cleaner wrasse behaviour, which I would also be interested in investigating myself. This is all very pertinent to my future career as I am hoping to do a PhD working on coral reef fish behaviour, linking it to population structure and conservation implications. The expedition will cost me GBP1750 and I am going to be actively fundraising so that I can go on it -- if I don't raise a significant portion of this money I'm simply not going to be able to afford to go, although I would love to! As a small portion of my personal fundraising effort I am hereby announcing a Present Amnesty: for Christmas this year and my 21st birthday next May, do NOT give me presents if you were going to -- contribute to my Operation Wallacea fund instead! Any little is really appreciated.

Submitting the Princeton application tonight if I have the guts (and my credit is no longer shot). Fingers crossed. May they invite me to interview in the midst of the New England winter, I can chat to them about the Meaning of Cold.