Tag: family

Categories
nostalgia

Back to the Eggli

Eggli mountain

Here’s a photo of the Eggli mountain in Saanen, Switzerland. It’s taken from the hospital where I broke my leg. In fact I had this great view of the slope from my window while I was there, and could watch clouds of billowing snow shot from cannons in the evening and early morning, saw the snow-cats preparing the piste for skiers, and then the carefree skiers sashaying down the slope.

It really made me want to ski again. I promised myself I would too, until I understood the nature and tedium of the physiotherapy that would have been required to restore my hamstring even to it’s formerly feeble state.

And then I thought…meh. Skiing – it’s not that great.

I’m sitting here in my brother and sister-in-law’s gorgeous chalet in a tiny mountain village near Gstaad, watching their twin babies while their parents finally grab a chance to ski. The babies are scrumptious! One pink and one blue. The village sits at the end of the valley, smack up against the Spitzhorn mountain, of which I have a terrific view, also of the nearby glacier (where there’s a roller coaster at 3000m!!!).

And it’s around -10 degrees celsius outside – not even December yet!

Maybe my brother will shut up about global warming for a bit now.

Well I can’t sit here blogging all day. I’ve bottles to prepare and nappies to change!

And a manuscript for ‘Jaguar’s Realm’ that needs looking at…

Categories
nostalgia science

Intimidated

I looked at my site stats for the first time ever. Intimidating! Not that there are that many site visits, but apart from the four or five people who comment here, I didn’t really believe anyone read my blog.

It’s better to imagine that no-one reads it except for a tiny few. Now I feel all intimidated and inhibited in what I might write!

I spent yesterday evening with my brother-in-law Paul. We ate Szechuan food and he talked to me about scary stuff; scary because of just how serious it is – his biotech company, the share price, investors, pitching to big-shot stock brokers, mergers and aquisitions, clinical trials.

And not for the first time recently it struck me how all my friends from my science days are now reaching quite elevated positions in their work, where the fortunes of quite a few people rest on their shoulders. Magda making full Professor at Monash University, my Spanish friend Ana considering a job as Country Manager for a clinical research organisation, Paul as Vice-President for Drug Discovery at his super-cool biotech outfit Phylogica.

Meanwhile I make up stories about conspiracy theories and actually get paid for it…

When I listen to Paul and Magda talk, I can’t help but wonder what I’d be doing now if I hadn’t left science. It’s not regret as such but curiosity because you know what…science is so, so, SO cool, especially biological science. It’s world-changing, awesome, totally mesmerizing.

Why would anyone study anything else?

Which I guess shows just how much I’ve been rehabilitated. Because when I left science I was tired and jaded, fed up of running gels and spending my weekends looking after tissue culture cells and worrying about funding.

Meanwhile Paul is as hilarious as ever. It was freezing as we walked to the restaurant, and Paul remarked that he wished global warming would properly kick in if it’s going to, cos all this cold was pretty rubbish. He’d just come back from Davos, Switzerland where they’ve had some nice deep, early snow. We talked about carbon footprints and people’s guilt over that. “The only people I’ve got time for,” he said, “the people with the tiniest footprint are people like my Dad. He consumes almost nothing, cycles everywhere and recycles as much as possible. And he doesn’t give a damn about the environment – he does it out of thrift! Good Scottish thrift. He’d reuse a nail! That’s why people shouldn’t waste stuff.”

I’m very fond of Ted (Paul’s Dad) too. When we go to Perth we stay in a flat built by Ted, on top of his own house. (He’s not a builder by trade, actually he was a Professor of Philosophy…but why hire builders, a real man should be able to do that himself!) It has terrific views towards a meadow and a pond which is almost dried out when we are there. Palm trees grow at the side of the house, which has a verandah all the way around the top. The trees are and nourished by waste water and the septic tank under the house. When a breeze blows the palm fronds rustle against the roof. Ted pre-stocks the fridge for us with a stack of Aussie beers, a huge slab of cheddar cheese, bread and industrial quantities of ice-cream. And because he knows I’m terrified of spiders he always does a special check for huntsmen and redbacks, scourge of Western Australia.

Best of all, the flat houses the collection of books with which my brother-in-law and his six siblings grew up. Including an entire collection of E.Nesbit books, which I settle down to re-read with enormous pleasure.

Categories
getting published writing

Introspective, moi?

I don’t usually turn to introspection on this blog because well, basically, it’s not very fun is it? It gets awfully close to that writer’s angst I try to avoid.

But today, just now in fact I had a moment of clarity in which I realised that being a published author is going to make me not more interesting as my teenage daughter imagines, but less.

(My teenage daughter observed recently, “I’m looking forward to your book being published. Then maybe your life will finally become interesting. And you’ll have things to tell me. Instead of it being the other way round.”)

I read an article about something, can’t remember what, and was just starting to form a theory, synthesize a thought, who knows it might even have been interesting…when a very strict part of my brain cut in and said NO.

NO. You can’t think about that. It might be interesting but NO. It’s not relevant to the books you write. It’s potentially too interesting to think about as a leisure activity. It’s not comforting enough to justify as a daydream. So: simply NO.

That strict part of my brain has a propensity to let me think all I like about the stuff that it deems relevant to my job and hardly at all about anything else. There were times when I was a scientist that I literally turned up at parties unable to speak. I forgot how to make small talk. I didn’t want to talk about anything but molecular biology, and no-one at the party wanted to hear about that so…I said nothing.

So I can imagine that what will happen in the next few years is that I will think more and more about my books. At the moment I can count on the fingers of a hand the number of people who have ever wanted to have any discussion with me about my books that goes beyond “You’re writing a book, really, what’s it about?”…my reply and then, end of discussion.

What if it were lots of people, though? What if that becomes all people ever want to talk to me about?

Then I’ll be back where I was in the old days, when I was mad keen to talk about subcloning DNA or whatever part of my research I was up to…and good for little else. Except now the only thing I’ll be capable of talking about is a bunch of stuff I made up once.

I’ll be back to being a nerd.

Actually I’m being daft. I could right now make a list of 10 friends who will NEVER want to hear about my books. They should help to save me from becoming a total bore.

Categories
nostalgia

How to be thin – don’t eat enough

Well it’s all downhill for me, intellectually speaking. I’m experiencing a strange symptom of what is probably an early-onset form of dementia. It’s this: I’ve completely lost the ability to guesstimate how much pasta to cook to feed a family of four.

I used to be an overestimater, if anything. I figured that extra was always good, because you could always make tomorrow’s lunch. But now through no intentional action of mine, I’m an underestimator. When I cook pasta – which is something I cook at least three times a week – even though they all howl with disappointment. Not just that it’s pasta (boo!) but that there’s not enough. They’re always still hungry.

It reminded me of when I was growing up. We were never, ever given meals that left us feeling satisfied. My stepfather had grown up during the post-war rationing period and believed in small portions. (It was different in Mexico, obviously, where you could eat until you popped and proud relatives would stand by going ‘Look how well she eats!’)

But I was stick-thin until I was about 20, so this not-eating-enough thing clearly has something going for it. I’m sticking to the underestimating and telling my family to be glad of going to bed hungry. I try to fool them by heaping salad on top so they don’t notice the pitiful serving of pasta underneath. When they complain, I growl, “S’more than I used to get, so think on!”
They don’t listen though, these kids. They head for the cupboard and eat big spoonfuls of peanut butter.

P.S. No-one suggest using a balance, please. Weighing ingredients is for cissies who can’t cook in anything but a properly-equipped kitchen. That’s not the way I was taught Domestic Science by Mrs Blackwell. It’s acceptable to weigh amounts for confectionary and high-end baking – say French pastries – but nothing else.

The principle can transfer to some aspects of laboratory work. I speak as one who even learned to make tissue culture medium and bacterial growth broths by flicking out The Right Amount, who added DNA and restriction enzymes in amounts we referred to in the lab as A Smidgeon, A Wodge and A S***load. (a s***load was 10 microlitres, just to give you the scale)

Categories
raves travel

When You Just Have To Go To Bali

On the phone today to my brother-in-law in Perth, Western Australia, I found myself once again being drawn into one of his hedonistic schemes.

It’s my family’s turn to make the trip across the planet so that we can all spend some quality time together. But Paul has a better idea. It seems that there’s been a distinct shortfall in his family’s experience of sumptuous luxury this year. They’ve been slumming it in their suburban house in Perth, where they don’t even have a swimming pool, poor things, watching goanas try to find cover in what used to be a wild back yard, as builders put up the cheapest possible (I’m assured) extension known to Western Australia. My sister has had to do all the decorating, whilst Paul is kept busy by his nascent biotech firm.

There’s been a serious lack of pampering, of decadence, of perfumed air, gentle gamelan music and serenading musicians as you eat lightly steamed fish with flavours like lemongrass, saffron and mango. There’s been a shortage of surfing in conditions that Paul explained to me (in detail) were nigh on perfect between March and December.

“You want us to meet you in Bali,” I guessed.

“The Hilton,” he said, “wasn’t quite luxurious enough last time.”

Last time, I remember arriving at what looked like a modern-day temple of extravagance, being met from the airport limo by gorgeous young women in sarongs who placed frangipani flowers in our hands and gave us warm, lemon-scented towels to soothe our fevered brows as we endured the hotel’s checking-in process, pressing chilled glasses with tropical fruit mocktails into our weary hands.

Paul continued, “Since then, it’s been taken over by someone else and they’ve turned the decadence up a few notches.”

“I don’t think we can quite run to the Hilton,” I said. “The Melia?”

Paul checked with my sister. The answer was no. They’d been to the Melia. It’s not up to the job. But if we choose to slum it, they’ll be down the beach at Nusa Dua, where we can visit them. In a proper hotel.