My Little Plantlet

We have just one indoor plant in our home, a weird specimen that has thick bulbous branching stems with furry looking edges, topped by medium sized leaves and a habit of occasionally showering small black seeds that look very much like mouse droppings into the surrounding area. I should have taken a photograph to go with this entry because, obviously, that description really needs an illustration to make it believable. But I didn’t. It is also incredibly resilient, which explains how it manages to still be alive. It can seemingly go for months without being watered, dropping all of its leaves but then rapidly perks up when given a soaking. I obtained it years ago from my parents. I have no idea what it is called.

The problem with this plant is that our specimen is decidedly wonky. It curves over to one side and then back again and for this reason it looks pretty ugly in its pot. So, a few months ago I decided that the next time one of its seeds landed in the soil that houses the plant and started to grow, I would grab the tiny plantlet, pop it into a new pot and TRY to keep it alive to grow a new, more balanced, specimen. Then, a few weeks ago such an opportunity presented itself.

To begin with my new little plantlet just sat in its pot doing nothing and I wondered whether it was going to ‘take’. But a couple of days ago I noticed signs of new growth and today I can see a tiny new leave to accompany the two original ones that were there at the time of transplanting. For someone who has a good track record of killing plants this is exciting and I am proud of my little plantlet as it attempts to make its way in life. I cannot wait to see what it will be like in a few months time when, hopefully, the stem will have thickened out and the whole plant might resemble its rather weird parent. For now though, I have to simply enjoy it as it is…

Big Little Lies… and a Banging Soundtrack

Over the last week or so we have watched the HBO drama Big Little Lies on TV. My wife had already read the book that the series of based on (by Lianne Moriarty) so she was watching it with the benefit of knowing what happened in the end whereas I was able to enjoy trying to second guess the plot (which I have to say I pretty much did after 2-3 of the 7 episodes). Anyway, it was an enjoyable series to watch but the best part about it was the soundtrack which, to use a phrase that my younger daughter would use, was packed with absolute bangers (i.e. great tracks), almost all of which were by artists that I didn’t know (apart from a couple of really excellent covers of Elvis songs). The result has been that I am now exploring some of these artists further, starting with Leon Bridges, then moving on to Agnes Obel (who I had heard of but had not listened to her hauntingly beautiful album Aventine). Now I am listening to Michael Kiwanuka (who provides the track that opens each episode). Next on the list will be the Villagers.

So far I have been really enjoying the music, particularly the Agnes Obel album which is one I think I might listen to a lot. There is obviously something about the laid back vibe of the music chosen to accompany the coastal California locations and lifestyles in the series that I like. What I find interesting is that whilst the music all seems to resonate with me, it comes from all over the place – Bridges is American, Obel is Danish, Kiwanuka English and the Villagers are from Ireland – and the styles are quite different. Someone did a really smart job putting together the music for the series.

50 Again? Conquest of Avalon

A few weeks ago I had a big mental struggle trying to decide what races to run this year and whether to go long again and do another ultramarathon. I resolved this by doing nothing, abandoning the tentative plans that had been forming in my head, entering no races and just getting on with trying to run regularly.

Then, in the last few days, I have even found myself wondering whether I want to run another marathon at all or whether I might be happier sticking to half-marathons with the occasional 15-20 mile race thrown in (like The Grizzly in March or the Seaview 17 in July). But suddenly, today, after I saw a Facebook post promoting the run, I find myself strangely drawn to a race that is taking place in June called the Conquest of Avalon. The route takes in some beautiful Somerset scenery (the county of my upbringing), ends at Glastonbury and includes running up and down the famous Glastonbury Tor. There are 30 mile and 50 mile distances. Doing the 30 mile event would be the sensible thing for me to do, but out of the blue I find I am hugely drawn to the 50 mile version. The first 20 miles or so of the route, which is the part that differs from the 30 miler, look to me like the most interesting part, taking in Ham Hill and Cadbury Camp. It’d be a shame to miss out on those landmarks.

Part of the reason I am drawn to this event is that on my wall at home I have a painting that my father did in the 1950s from my parents’ then home near Castle Cary, looking west towards Glastonbury Tor (which you can see in the distance of the picture). I look at this picture every day – it beautifully shows the type of countryside that the run covers. How could I not want to run in that picture? How could anyone not want to run in THIS picture…?

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa… in Mutley

Yesterday morning, at the end of a lecture I gave on Waves and Tides, I showed a picture of Hokusai’s famous work of art The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. My lecture was being observed by one of my colleagues (every year we have to observe and be observed) and she remarked afterwards that there was a Plymouth version of The Great Wave painted onto a wall in the Mutley area of Plymouth. After a short discussion we established roughly where this mural was and I was surprised to find that it is on a road that I have driven along many times. My colleague said they thought they had a photograph of it and just now they have tagged me into a tweet that they have posted with their picture. It’s absolutely tremendous – a graffiti style rendition of the great work in bold colors, somewhat simpler than the original but capturing the same scene and sufficiently similar to be immediately recognizable but not so similar that it is simply a copy.

Here is the picture – I am absolutely going to have to make a special trip there soon to find the building a take a picture or two of my own…

Board Games… It’s Work, But Not As We Know It

I spent this afternoon at work in what is perhaps the most unusual manner of any afternoon that I have spent at work, in a room overlooking Plymouth Sound with 60-70 first year students all playing board games. These students are one week into their four week ‘Our Ocean Planet’ module in which they design and present an artifact to communicate a marine science-related issue. Artifacts can include posters, videos, TED-style talks, campaigns, blogs and …. board games. So, the idea of the session today was for the students to spend 2-3 hours playing one or more games in their groups, evaluating their experiences and having a think about what works well and what doesn’t. Alongside this of course, they were working together as a team and getting to know each other.

It was a really interesting experience to watch them at work. Groups of (mostly) four students (mostly aged 19-20) clustered on individual tables (per group) chatting away, reading rules, setting up, playing games through – thoroughly social, thoroughly engaged in their activity, clearly treating the session seriously and getting something out of it. This, on a Friday afternoon when the sun was shining outside and when no-one would actually have picked them up on not being there.

My role, along with that of the other tutors present was to help them along, to encourage, to join in, to pose questions about what they were doing.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing of all was the fact that for most of the session, certainly for the first hour or so and for some groups as much as three hours, there was almost none of the continual interaction with smartphones that is so prevalent everywhere these days. For a few tens of minutes, these students put down their tech and became immersed in cardboard pieces, counters, rule booklets etc. and, critically, each other. They became truly social animals and it was blindingly obvious that they enjoyed it.

I expect that on leaving the session most slipped almost immediately back into their internet-connected, social network-driven existences, but I do I hope that the little glimpse of real reality that I saw in action this afternoon continues to blossom in their lives.

Lucky Les – The Best Book Ever? – Reader, You Decide…

By far the best, most inspirational, book I had as a kid was ‘Lucky Les’ by E.W. Hildick:

The hero of this book is Les, the youngest member of a family of anthropomorphised cats who, being black, is naturally the luckiest of all his brothers and sisters. In fact, Les is so lucky that he is probably the luckiest cat alive. He always gets the cream on the top of the milk and ALWAYS got the black one in a packet of fruit pastilles (a part of the story that has always lived with me). He was that lucky.

The book is beautifully illustrated with pen drawings like these on the title page:

But the main reason that Lucky Les is such a great book is that it is cleverly arranged to provide multiple possible stories. At the end of most chapters the reader can decide what will happen next to Les (one of two choices each time pointing to specific later chapters) such that he can go to one of two schools (Dr Scratch’s Academy or Miss Tabb’s [Dr Scratch is essentially a pirate masquerading as a headteacher whereas Miss Tabb is so soft and caring as to be completely ineffectual at running a school – and guess what, if you put the two of them together you get the perfect school]) and then follow one of two primary career paths (going to sea or becoming a farmer) each of which then leads to various other branches (as a farmer he can grow apples or hops, a choice which ultimately leads him in two different directions). As such, Lucky Les perhaps represents the first piece of career guidance literature that I ever read (and at that time I certainly wanted to be a farmer so it is ironic that I ended up not going to sea but studying it!). There are five possible endings to the book but a couple of parallel branches along the way so in total I think there are about nine permutations – which seems to me like a great way of keeping a young reader interested in a book for an extended period.

I really loved reading Lucky Les as a child (in the early/mid 1970s I guess) and am so pleased that I still have my original hardback copy. I must read one or two of the permutations again soon.

I have often thought that it is surprising that there are not more branching books of this kind and wondered whether I might one day have a go at writing one. Perhaps there is scope for a follow up, something along the lines of ‘What Lucky Les Did Next’ or, if I allow myself to be really cynical for a moment: ‘Unlucky Les: What Happened When The Luckiest Cat In The World Grew Up’.

Meet Spike

This morning I gave a once-per-year lecture session on ‘Creating a Website’ as part of the ongoing Marine Science Communications module ‘Our Ocean Planet’. In this session I talk about how easy it is to produce a website these days using platforms such as WordPress and I use a few of the websites that I have produced over the years as examples. Amongst those example websites was, of course, this one.

I have written before about how I don’t write the entries on this blog for anyone in particular. I know that there is almost no audience looking at this blog on a regular basis. I am simply using writing these blog posts as a way to maintain a discipline of writing something everyday. Of course, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I’d like to think there could be an audience, at least for the occasional post that I write that actually says something interesting or useful (if these even exist), but that is different from writing in the expectation that anyone out there is at all interested in what I have to say.

Today though, suddenly, this site has attracted a few readers, as evidenced by the spike in visits and views shown below:

These numbers are still small, but against the background of the visits and views for a ‘normal’ day the spike in activity is huge. It is also, of course, artificial. These visits and views have only occurred because I was using this site as an example in my lecture this morning. They simply show that there were a few students in the audience who were either interested enough, inquisitive enough or perhaps just plain nosey enough to visit and dig a little deeper. They very probably took a quick look and left rapidly never to be seen again which is, of course, absolutely fine because that just returns me back to normality. But who knows, it’s possible one or two might come back again in the future in some random moment when they are at a loss for something to do and wonder what I might be writing about, whether anyone is still sat in a chair, whether beetroot is still on the menu or whether I have finally managed to come to enjoy marking.

It has been nice to see Spike today, but he’s only passing through and will be gone tomorrow.

Marking and Running

I spent today at home marking student courseworks from my second year Meteorology module. Regular readers of this blog (yes, I know, there’s no such thing really) might recall at least one previous post that I have written moaning about how much I hate marking and mostly I just want to say it again – I hate marking. In fact, I really, really, really detest marking. Of course the completely ironic thing about this feeling is that most of the students who produced the work that I am marking hated having to produce that work. Some of them probably really, really, really detested having to produce it. Which makes us kind of even I suppose, although it seems a bit unfair that they each only have to suffer once whereas I have to suffer as many times as there are students. Sometimes I think we should enter into a pact. I’ll not set them any work to do, they won’t have to do it, I won’t have to mark it and we’d all be happy. Sadly, of course, such a beautifully simple and elegant solution is not allowed. Marks there must be and, in truth, it is through having to do assessed pieces of work that most of the learning happens which is, after all, the whole point of studying a subject at University.

As I get older I try to see the positive side of things and so I have to ask myself what the positive side of a day spent at home marking might be. The answer is actually rather simple. On a day when I go to work I spend approximately 40 minutes getting to work in the morning and another 40 minutes getting home again at the end of the day. I have a two mile walk (usually – tomorrow it is three because I am starting at the Marine Station) which takes me between 30 and 35 minutes but there is always some time lost at either end going through doors, taking off my coat etc. All of which means that by staying at home to mark I get back 80 minutes of my time, and what can I do with 80 minutes? I can run 8 miles. Which is exactly what I did at the end of this afternoon – 8 miles down and around Mannamead (Thorn Park, Mutley Park) across Mannamead Road along Seymour Road and up and down a few hills, back across to Mutley Plain, down into Hyde Park and Central Park, past Argyle’s ground and home after a few twists and turns along the way – a route that seems to have become my go-to route over the last few weeks – 8 joyous miles in the misty, drizzly half-dark which more or less cleansed my mind of the horror that it had been through for most of the rest of the day (I exaggerate a little).

Marking and running. Without one I wouldn’t quite have had the opportunity for the other and probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much either. In the end then, it was not such a bad way to spend a day after all.

‘Our Ocean Planet’ gets underway

Today is the first day of a module that I help to teach called ‘Our Ocean Planet’. It is completely different from other modules I work on because 1) it only lasts 4 weeks and is the only thing that the students who are taking it do for those weeks and 2) it has very little technical content. The idea of the module is for small groups of students to pick an issue relating to the oceans and develop some kind of ‘product’ designed to communicate the issue to a wide audience. In the past we have had groups produce talks, books (for various age groups), websites and quite a few games. It’s quite a fun and interesting module to be involved with because no two groups are the same and at the outset there is no knowing what direction any particular group will take both in terms of the topic/issue that they cover and the vehicle through which they choose to communicate it.

This year I am involved in two ways. First I will be ‘looking after’ four of the working groups (each with four students), although this going to be a somewhat lighter touch than in the last couple of years as there is only one formal meeting with each group each week. Secondly, I volunteered to give a few lectures to provide some background information on the oceans, aimed mostly at the students on the module who are not covering any marine science in the rest of their course. On the module we have students from various marine science and marine biology degrees but also some from geography, geology and environmental science and also some from English and creative writing. I gave the first of my lectures this morning, titled ‘Geography of the Oceans’, and covered the general distribution of the oceans on the planet, the shape and form of the seabed in different domains (continental margins, deep ocean floor, ocean trenches and mid-ocean ridges) and talked a little about the dynamic nature of the seabed and the Earth’s crust more generally (plate tectonics, seafloor spreading). The session seemed to go okay and I was pleased that I got the timing about right (this is always tricky when giving a session for the first time despite years of experience – partly because the more teaching you do the more comfortable you become just talking around a topic and this can mean that you take more time on topics than planned).

This afternoon the students have been out on and around Plymouth Sound taking photographs of the water and, in particular, litter and pollution in the water, and tweeting their pictures and thoughts about what they see. Later on they will be analysing this data to get a look at the bigger picture.

The real fun starts in a couple of days time when the groups start to properly form and, panicked by the short timescale available to them (3 weeks), start to decide on their topics and how they are going to communicate them. It would be nice to see some novel topics this year and some creative approaches to the communication side of things. We shall see.

Okay I Am Sat In A Chair

I received a text today from my younger daughter which reads ‘Okay I am sat in a chair’. For some reason I keep turning this phrase around in my head as if it has some kind of deep and profound meaning which I cannot quite grasp. It doesn’t of course, it was simply a reply to a text I sent telling her that we would meet her in the cafe in the IKEA store in Southampton (she was already in the store and we were putting some purchases in the boot of the car). But it is going around and around my brain and I can feel myself peering into the cracks between the words trying to draw out the hidden meaning that my intuition tells me is there if I only look hard enough. Perhaps it needs some punctuation. A comma after ‘Okay’ obviously does the trick but it could be a little bit Yoda like if there was a comma after the word ‘am’ to split it into two phrases – ‘okay I am’, ‘sat in a chair’ – but not quite. Now I come to think about it, I think it is this Yoda-like quality of the first three words that is making me ponder the whole phrase, and realizing that might just give me a means to escape the mental torture that I am putting myself through thinking about it so much. I should try to move on. In fact, I should not TRY to move on, I should just move on. After all, as Yoda himself once said ‘Do, or do not. There is no try.’