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Thanks, and Sorry

Posted in Biographical on July 25, 2012 by telescoper

I know from the emails and other messages that I’ve received over the past few weeks that friends and readers of this blog have been a bit concerned about me. I owe you all an explanation and an apology. I have actually written a very long post detailing everything that has happened, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to post it at this time. Or perhaps ever. Maybe I’ll keep it for when I write my memoirs. Or not.

The short version, which will have to do for now, is that not long ago something happened that caused something I’ve lived with for a very long time to flare up worse than I’ve ever experienced before. Certain other factors, which I won’t go into either, exacerbated the situation still further. Anyway, all this hit me so hard I had to seek medical help and have been declared “unfit for work” for the last three weeks. Most of this time has been spent trying – and, until recently, failing – to find appropriate treatment to allow me to get back to “normal”.

I know that in this period I have let down a number of colleagues and students who had every right to expect better of me. I know also that I’ve ignored many offers of help from friends who have expressed concern about my well-being. I haven’t done this out of rudeness, but because I knew I that I had to solve these problems on my own. I was greatly moved by the kindness shown by so many people, but at the end of the day a problem shared is a problem doubled.

I know that at times, during especially low periods, usually in the early hours, I’ve abused the social media by posting horribly self-indulgent and self-pitying items, usually poems. I can only apologise, but it’s been an indescribably lonely journey and I’ve only had social media for company. Insomnia is a bastard.

Fortunately, I think I’ve now turned the corner. I will be off work until the end of the month, but at least I’m no longer dreading going back. My GP and the University Counselling Service have done a brilliant job in working so hard to sort out a programme to help me recover. I now think I know what to do to get myself out of the hole I’ve been in. It won’t be easy actually doing it, but at now have something to aim at I am much more confident.

I am so very sorry to those people who I’ve upset or alarmed with the way I’ve behaved over the last few weeks. I wish I could explain more, but it’s such a long and convoluted story that (a) you’ll all find it extremely boring and (b) I don’t think you’ll understand anyway. All I can do is apologise if I’ve upset anyone. That wasn’t the plan at all. It’s my problem, not yours. I just haven’t been strong enough to keep it entirely to myself, as I should have done.

Now all I have to do is to think of a way of persuading the University and, more importantly to me, my students that they should give me the chance to prove I can be what I am supposed to be.

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A Cut Below

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , , on July 23, 2012 by telescoper

This morning, sitting in the garden catching up on the weekend’s newspapers, I found an opinion piece in yesterday’s Observer about male circumcision. This of course stems from a story that broke a few weeks ago about a court in Germany ruling that the circumcision of male children constitutes “bodily harm” and is consequently in breach of their human rights.  Since this procedure is traditional practice in some religious groups, including Jews and Muslims, there has been a predictable outcry that the court ruling violates their right to religious freedom.

At the risk of causing discomfort among (especially male) readers of this blog I thought I’d comment on this issue from a personal perspective. I’m not going to go into the ethical question, actually. I can certainly see the argument that an infant is unable to give consent and there must be limits to what parents can do to their children in the name of religion.

I will however, state parenthetically that one thing that does puzzle me is the court’s statement that being circumcised as an infant interferes with a person’s right to determine their religion later in life. Huh? That’s a non sequitur because there’s nothing to stop a circumcized man becoming a Christian. Is there?

Anyway, in the modern world female genital mutilation is rightly regarded as abhorrent, so why should male circumcision be any different?

But there is an angle to this story that most commenters have ignored, and that is that not all male circumcisions are carried out because of religious or other traditions. You’ll probably all think this is too much information to write on a blog, but I myself was circumcised, not as an infant, but as a young boy of seven or eight. I’m neither Jewish nor Muslim nor anything else in particular when it comes to religious belief. I won’t go into the reasons I had it done, but they were entirely medical. Anyway, I’m not in the slightest bit embarrassed to be a Roundhead rather than a Cavalier. In fact, I like my willy just like it is.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to show you a picture.

Being gay, and therefore having more than a passing interest in such issues, I’d also say that a “cut” penis is arguably more attractive and certainly more hygienic compared to the “uncut” variety. I guess my aesthetic judgement is influenced by the fact that that’s what my todger is like, but I know plenty of other men and women who prefer their partners that way too. At any rate the operation certainly doesn’t impair sexual function in any way, and possibly even improves it. At least in that respect it’s very different from female circumcision.

Of course I’m not going to argue that such preferences constitute good reasons for the involuntary circumcision of young boys. My point is that virtually all the rhetoric on this issue implies that to be  circumcised is to is to be incomplete. Mutilated. Damaged.  Inferior. I don’t think of it that way at all. Indeed, it bothers me to think of the effect this language could have on younger guys just coming to terms with their adulthood. Do you really want anyone to feel ashamed or embarrassed because they have been circumcized?

What I’m saying is that it’s not circumcision that’s bad, but the circumstances in which it is sometimes carried out. So by all means let’s debate the deep ethical conflict that this issue highlights between religious observance and the prevention of bodily harm to infants, but let’s also have a bit more respect for those of us who are, and are happy to be, a cut above the rest.

P.S. I was going to relate the famous schoolboy exam howler about how Sir Francis Drake circumcised the globe using a 60ft clipper, but decided not to.

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Posing

Posted in Biographical on July 21, 2012 by telescoper

I’ve been spending some time over the last few days indulging in a bit of nostalgia therapy, scanning and uploading old photographs onto Facebook (and sometimes trying to remember when and where they were taken). The good thing about doing this is you get the chance to choose the ones which are flattering (i.e. misleading). So here are a few (obviously very old) pictures of me when I was young and svelte – appropriately enough, in black and white…

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Santa Sangre

Posted in Biographical, Film with tags , , on July 18, 2012 by telescoper

Having spent most of this morning talking about the past (to someone who at least is paid to listen to such boring stuff), I dozed off this afternoon and had a peculiar kind of dream which featured sequences of a film I saw way back in 1990. Strange how the unconscious brain plays with such connections. When I woke up I even thought for a few moments that I was back in 1990 again. Most unnerving.

Anyway the film in question is a neglected masterpiece called Santa Sangre (“Holy Blood”), directed by Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky. I’m amused that the wikipedia page for this movie is prefaced by a suggestion that the “plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed”, because the plot is so bizarre and convoluted that it would take pages of explanation to do it justice. Anyway, Santa Sangre, set in Mexico, and made on a budget of less than $800,000, is a kind of surrealist horror film, with a complex flash-back then flash-forward narrative structure, that revolves around the life of a young man called Fenix who grows up in a circus. Among a number of traumatic experiences he encounters in his childhood is that his mother has both her arms cut off. Later, in adulthood, Fenix and his mother perform a stage act in which he stands behind her and pretends that his arms are hers. It’s a moving and shocking image, just one of many in a film which is in turns bizarre, disturbing, offensive, violent, horrifying, funny, beautiful and utterly utterly brilliant. Why it’s not more widely celebrated I’ll never know.

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To “boldly” go…

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on July 15, 2012 by telescoper

I thought anyone reading my rather gloomy recent posts could probably do with a laugh so I thought I’d put this up. It’s something I posted a while ago, in fact, but the video links on that have long since evaporated; a newer version appeared recently on Youtube so I thought I’d update it and re-post the piece.

This clip contains a short item  I did about twelve years ago for the BBC series Space, which was presented by Sam Neill. It was subsequently screened outside the UK with an alternative title, Universe. Originally we were going to demonstrate wormholes using a snooker table, clever editing and reversed video. However, the producer, Jeremy,  decided that wouldn’t look spectacular enough so instead we went to St Anton in Austria: I was flown over the Alps in a helicopter and then driven through the Arlberg tunnel in an impressively fast car. Well worth the cost to license fee payers, I’m sure, even if the three-day trip to Austria by me and a crew of six as well as the hire of the helicopter ended up as a mere three minutes of screen time…

The episode I was in, the last of 6 in the series, was called To Boldly Go. I remember suggesting to the producer that the only way to travel faster than light in the manner required was with a split infinitive drive, but they didn’t use that in the final script.

The segment I’m in starts at about 18:00 on the video. Notice how, in the helicopter sequence, I give the appearance of being completely terrified. A fine piece of acting by me, I thought. *Cough*

The item is daft, I know, and I don’t really believe any of that stuff about wormholes, but it was great fun doing it and I have to say the camera guys took some amazing footage of the mountains from the helicopter.

P.S. The next sequence, after mine, explains how the Anglo-Australian 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey was done in order to provide a map for future generations of intergalactic space travellers. Really?

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Student Comments

Posted in Biographical, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on July 14, 2012 by telescoper

I sneaked into the department this morning to pick up some things from the office and leave some other things that I’ve finished with. I went quite early, to avoid the Saturday crowds there and back.

One of the things I found in my pigeonhole was a packet of student questionnaires about the third-year module Nuclear and Particle Physics for which I was responsible. It seems like a decade since I finished teaching it and marked the exams, but it can only be a couple of months. I was dreading reading the responses this time because I know I struggled a bit with this module, partly because it’s the first time I taught the Nuclear Physics part and partly for other reasons I won’t go into.

In fact the students were very kind and gave me quite good reviews; the only score that let me down really was that they thought the material was rather difficult. I’m not really surprised by that, because I think it is. However, as I’ve said before, I don’t think it’s a physics lecturer’s job to pretend that the subject  is easy; it is  a lecturer’s job to try to convince students that they can do things that are difficult. I don’t mean making  things difficult just for the sake of it, but trying to get the message across that a brain is made for thinking with and figuring difficult things out can be intensely rewarding.

The main criticism that students wrote in the space provided for their own comments was that they didn’t like the fact that I used powerpoint for some lectures. Actually, I don’t like using powerpoint for lectures either, but unfortunately I had no choice on some occasions. First I had a rather large class (85 students) and one of the rooms I had to use had a very small whiteboard; I was worried about its visibility from the back and the need to keep cleaning it every five minutes. Also in that room the projector screen covers the same area as the whiteboard, so it’s a pain to keep changing between powerpoint and whiteboard. Anyway, it’s a fair criticism. I’ll try to work out a better way of doing it next year.

To be perfectly honest I don’t like whiteboards much either. Call me old-fashioned, but  chalkboards are much better. Received wisdom, however, is that we have to have whiteboards, with all the ludicrous cost and environmental unfriendliness of the accompanying dry-wipe marker pens. But I digress.

Anyway, next Wednesday afternoon will see our graduation ceremony. Graduation day always reminds me of something somebody told me years ago when I attended my first one, at Queen Mary (and Westfield College, as it was then).  The essence of the comment was that what you have to remember as a lecturer is that when the students do well it’s their achievement; but when they don’t it’s your fault. Life’s like that, it’s never as symmetrical as particle physics.

Many of the students who took  Nuclear and Particle Physics will be graduating on Wednesday. I’m distraught that I won’t be able to go myself; this will be the first ceremony I’ve missed since I moved here five years ago.  If any of the graduating Physics class from Cardiff University happens to read this, I really hope you have a great day on Wednesday. I wish I could be there to shake your hand and wish you a very fond goodbye, but sadly that’s just not possible on this occasion.

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Safe Mode

Posted in Biographical, Poetry on July 11, 2012 by telescoper

It’s broken down.
So what? Who cares?
Silence. Move on.

System restart.
Using safe mode.
(Without plug-ins).

Should do the trick.
Or perhaps not.
Who cares? Move on.

Claim a refund?
No warranty…
Take to the tip?

It was rather
Expensive. True,
but years ago.

Not worth the cost
Of repairing,
Things of that sort.

In the mean time,
Back in its box.
Leave it a while.

Switch the thing off
Then on again.
You know the drill.

Usually works.
If not, just get
Another one;

A different
Make this time, more
Reliable.

by Peter Coles (aged 49).

 

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Munch at Tate Modern

Posted in Art, Biographical with tags , , , , , on July 8, 2012 by telescoper

On Friday I had the morning off from my stint at the Royal Society Summer Exhibition I mentioned a few days ago, so I took the short walk from my hotel to Tate Modern to see an exhibition of art by Edvard Munch called Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye.  Before seeing the collection, which is housed on the second floor of Tate Modern, I took a picture of the view from the balcony looking across the Thames from Bankside towards St Paul’s.

Not inappropriate weather for this exhibition!

Everyone knows Munch by his famous work The Scream, which isn’t part of this exhibition. I don’t regret this omission it allows the visitor to focus on his lesser-known works, some of which I think are even more powerful than The Scream which, incidentally, I have seen when it was part of an exhibition of Munch’s work in Berlin in 1995. In fact I bought a poster of that exhibition, the design of which includes a copy of The Scream; it is hanging in my study as I write this.

The gallery’s booklet describes Munch’s paintings as

..profoundly introspective, unflinchingly depicting his experience of ageing, emotional turmoil, sickness and bodily decay.

Indeed. Some of the works are so powerful as to be almost unbearable to look at. I’ll just mention a few that struck me in particular.

One room is filled with a number of almost identical paintings entitled Weeping Woman, in which a naked female figure stands bowed and sobbing within a dreary claustrophobic room. The repetition of this theme across many canvases seems almost compulsive, and they’re painted with crude almost frantic strokes.

This is a painting called Red Virginia Creeper, a plant that grows on my house in fact, but which in this case has transformed into a dripping bloodstain behind the crudely drawn but obviously bewildered figure in the foreground.

But the most powerful works by Munch were made later in his life. He was born in 1863 (100 years before me) and suffered a complete nervous breakdown in 1908. Here is a self-portrait called The Night Wanderer, showing himself as a gaunt insomniac figure wandering around a darkened house:

Then, right at the end of the exhibition, is his most moving work of all. Self Portrait between Clock and Bed, painted near the end of his life – he died in 1944 – shows a lonely old man standing between the clock, symbolising the remorseless passage of time, and the bed in which he no doubt expected to die.

This exhibition is not exactly a comfortable experience, filled as it is with images of alienation, despair and inner torment, but it was a “must-see” for me as Munch is such an important artist. Groups of schoolchildren were being led around the exhibition while I was there. Most of them giggled. I wonder how long it will be before they understand that the world really can be exactly as Munch painted it?

Anyway, I headed back across the river to the Royal Society to do the afternoon shift at the Herschel Telescope stand, which included playing with an infra-red camera to show the visitors young and old how it detects body heat, and taking pictures of them in the near infra-red as souvenirs. To show that the Munch collection hadn’t affected me too much, I took one of myself.

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Five Years On

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , , on July 1, 2012 by telescoper

So here we are then. July 1st 2012. Five years to the day since I started my job here in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University. Cardiff students reading this will probably be surprised that I haven’t been here for longer than that, because it no doubt seems to younger folks that the staff must have been here since the Boer War. In fact, though, I’ve only been here long enough to see one generation of MPhys students through from induction to graduation; the second such group will graduate in a couple of weeks.

There’s a wikipedia page listing all the important events of July 1st 2007 but owing to some form of administrative error my move to Cardiff isn’t listed there. I notice that July 1st 2007 was also a Sunday, incidentally.

Thinking back to 2007 all I can remember was that my departure from Nottingham appeared to precipitate a collapse in the world’s financial system, ushering in the Credit Crunch just when I put my house in Beeston on the market, with the result that it took me the best part of a year to sell it and buy one here in lovely Pontcanna. In the meantime I had to rent a flat in Cardiff in which I lived during the week and travel back and forth to and from Nottingham at weekends. Actually, the weather in the summer of 2007 wasn’t too different from that of 2012; heavy rain in June and July that year led to the Severn flooding, causing considerable problems for my weekly commute.

Coincident with being the fifth anniversary of my arrival here from Nottingham, today is also the day that I’m officially promoted to Deputy Head of School and Director of Learning and Teaching. Or is it Director of Teaching and Learning? Anyway, five years isn’t exactly a meteoric rise through the ranks but I’m still shocked to have been placed in a position of such responsibility. I fear that the Peter Principle may be doubly appropriate.

The reason I got landed in it was given this opportunity for career progression was the departure of Derek Ward-Thompson to a position of Director of the Jeremiah Horrocks Institute at the University of Central Lancashire (in the Midlands); there was a farewell party for Derek at the Poet’s Corner on Friday which I attended briefly before heading off to the concert I wrote about yesterday. After fourteen years in Cardiff, Derek will be missed around here and I wish him well in his new job.

Meanwhile, life goes on. The last five years have certainly had their ups and downs, both personal and professional, but I’ve definitely got no regrets about moving here. I wouldn’t have predicted in 2007 that I’d be able to gather such a wonderful group of PhD students (Jo, Geraint and Ian), for example, nor that I’d find Cardiff undergraduates such fun to teach, especially as project students.

Here’s to the next five years!

PS. I am tempted to joke that Derek’s move from Cardiff to UCLAN improves the quality of astronomical research at both institutions. But of course I wouldn’t dream of saying anything like that…

🙂

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Book Signing Caption Competition

Posted in Biographical, Books, Talks and Reviews on June 29, 2012 by telescoper

Having had a bit of fun recently at Ant Whitworth’s expense, I think it’s only fair I should let you have a go at me. Here’s a picture of me taken at a book signing a while ago….

Please feel free to suggest a caption through the comments box…

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