h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

About time I caught up again I guess. As I said last time I had a fairly busy weekend planned. After a (grossly overdue) quiet night in on Friday I hauled myself out of bed on Saturday morning for the Bath Hilly 10 Mile. I may have mentioned that the course for this event was supposed to be challenging. There was even an extra warning on the “are you sure you’re medically fit to run this event?” section of the application form. Well all the rumours turned out to be true. There were two or three significant climbs during the course and a killer of a hill for the last mile, added to that it was pretty hot and quite windy. The scenery was beautiful though. I ended up finishing 10th in a time of 62:30. I was hoping to run a little quicker than that, but I underestimated the course and the last hill really took it out of me (I dropped three places including on just on the line). At least I learned that tough terrain deserves some respect and I think I need to work some serious hill sessions into my training schedule.

On Saturday evening my girlfriend was dancing at a 70th birthday party. They were doing the Latin formation routine from that show she was in the other month. I was really just there to drive the car so I felt a bit out of place. I’ve never been to a 70th birthday party before and to be honest it was exactly as I imagined it would be. But I did manage to do some serious damage to the free buffet. Every cloud has a silver lining.

On Sunday my girlfriend and I drove to West Bromwich to see my parents and then on to Stone to visit my brother, his girlfriend and my two nephews while they were on camp. After a long drive my parents treated us to lunch in a little country pub and we spent the afternoon sitting by the fire drinking tea and playing with the new baby. On bank holiday Monday we drove back to Bath stopping off in Birmingham to have lunch with a friend of my girlfriend’s and her fella.

Tuesday was back to work day, as I said, we had the Bath Chemistry Final Year PhD Research Symposium so it wasn’t like a real day of work. To be honest I was a little sceptical about the way the event had been organised this year. Usually all the final year PhD students have to give a presentation about their project around this time of year, but normally what happens is the presentations are grouped into smaller seminars based on the area of chemistry the student is researching. This means that the presentation sessions are a little shorter, but that people tend only to watch the talks that are related to their own area. This year everyone gave their presentation on the same day and everything was mixed up so that one session might contain a couple of organic chemistry talks, a couple of talks on inorganic chemistry and a talk on physical chemistry. I was a doubtful about the wisdom of this because I didn’t relish the prospect of giving a presentation to a room full of people when two-thirds of them wouldn’t really know what I was talking about.

Anyway it turned out I was dead wrong. Because there were so many talks to fit into a single day, each student had a bit less time to talk. This meant that we all tended to only discuss our best and most interesting results instead of droning on about the problems we had purifying this, analysing that or identifying the other. Also because we were aware that we were presenting our work to an interdisciplinary audience, most of us made an effort to explain the basics of our research which made everything much more accessible and easy to follow.

On the whole it was a really good day and I was bored in very few of the twenty-two talks I saw. And just to finish the day off nicely there was a wine reception afterwards followed by loads more drinking in town for the whole department. We seldom get the chance (excuse) to all go out as a big group these days and it was nice to see so many people having a good time.

The week is almost over again and it feels like it’s hardly begun. This weekend is going to be fairly busy again. On Saturday there is a barbeque to celebrate two of the guys’ birthdays. But things won’t be getting too out of control because on Sunday there is a Cancer Research - Race for Life on campus. Loads of the girls from the department are doing it (including my girlfriend) so I’ll be coming along to watch and cheer. To be honest it’ll be a bit of a novelty to watch a race for a change instead of competing.