Archive for the Biographical Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Domestic Post

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth, Politics with tags , , , on November 1, 2020 by telescoper

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being.
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.

Those lines from Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley came to my mind this morning not only because it’s blowing a gale outside but also because it is just after Halloween Samhain which was a noisy night because of all the fireworks, but at least I wasn’t disturbed by trick-or-treaters. I guess none of them made it past the barbed wire and electric fence…

Anyway, being confined to quarters for the day has allowed me to catch up on some domestic matters, including dealing with my first ever demand for payment of Local Property Tax (LPT) which arrived on Friday: before I bought my own home, my landlord paid the LPT on the flat I was living in. Coincidentally, along with the bill for the Local Property Tax came a letter from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection (DEASP) confirming that they had changed my address on their records. I told them two months ago.

The Local Property Tax plays a similar role in Ireland to that of the Council Tax in the United Kingdom, and is also based on some notional estimate of the value of your home, but it’s quite a lot lower than in the UK. Although my house in Maynooth is worth considerably more than my Pontcanna residence the property tax is less than a third here than it is in Cardiff. You might think that’s a good thing, but the consequence is that there is a much poorer provision of local services here. In fact Local Government as a whole is a much lesser thing here than it is on the other side of the Irish Sea. Although there are elections to the local councils (in my case Kildare County Council) as there are in the UK, the ability of the councils to do anything useful is very limited.

One particular aspect of this is that householders in Ireland have to arrange their own refuse collection via a private company; in Cardiff the refuse collection service was provided by the Council. When I took over the house I asked the previous owner about refuse collections and, since I had no experience of any of the companies listed as offering this service, I simply carried on with the company she had used.

And so it came to pass that my weekly refuse and recycling collection is carried out by Bord na Móna (literally “The Turf Board”), a company set up in 1946 to supply peat as a form of fuel. Although you can still buy peat around these parts to burn on the fire, it is a very dirty fuel and harvesting it causes damage to the peat bogs in the Irish Midlands that provide a unique habitat for wildlife and plants of various kinds. Bord na Móna has therefore been diversifying into more sustainable lines of business with the intention of withdrawing entirely from peat production in the next decade or so. Among these new activities are renewable energy generation and recycling, the latter being relevant to this post.

The refuse collection, carried out through a subsidiary called AES, is quite a sophisticated operation. I have four wheelie bins (one for recycling, one for organic & food waste, one for glass, and one for general waste). Each of these bins is microchipped and the amount of general waste collected recorded at each collection. I am of frugal habits and don’t usually produce very much waste, especially general waste, though I have had a number of things delivered to the house since I moved in which always requires disposal of a considerable amount of packaging. Happily they also send a free SMS reminder of what bin to put out when.

Anyway to return to the opening theme of this post, I’ve discovered a “feature” of my new house. Being situated at the end of a row of similar properties with a wall to one side to mark the end of the row, it seems that leaves which have been blown along the road collect in great heaps on the path leading to my front door. I have to go out quite regularly with a shovel to clear them away. At present I put them in the organic refuse bin, but I’m thinking of getting a compost bin for the garden. It seems I am becoming quite domesticated in my old age.

Postscript: no sooner did I finish this post than all the power went off in the house.

Postscript to the postscript. It came on again after about 2½ hours in my area, but as I write it is still off in parts of Maynooth.

2 Comments »

Stormy Samhain Super Saturday

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Irish Language, Maynooth, Rugby with tags , , on October 31, 2020 by telescoper

So we have arrived at October 31st, Hallowe’en or, in pagan terms, Samhain. This, a cross-quarter day – roughly halfway between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice represents the start of winter (“the dark half of the year“) in the Celtic calendar.

Incidentally, Samhain is pronounced something like “sawin”. The h after the m denotes lenition of the consonant (which in older forms of Irish would have been denoted by a dot on top of the m) so when followed by a broad vowel the m is pronounced like the English “w”; when followed by a slender vowel or none “mh” is pronounced “v” or in other words like the German “w” (which makes it easier to remember). I only mention this because I hope to be starting Irish language lessons soon, something I always wish I’d done with Welsh when I lived in Cardiff.

Anyway, it’s a wild blustery day with the wind howling down the chimney of my house in Maynooth sounding like a ghost. At least thanks to the present Level 5 restrictions I won’t have to endure trick-or-treaters this evening. Or will I? Should I sit quietly at home with the lights off again?

Today’s schedule will revolve around the final round of matches in this year’s Six Nations championship. The settled order of nature having been disturbed by Covid-19 back in March it has only just become possible to finish the competition with three games today. Ireland travel to France for the last game this evening, after England play Italy and Wales play Scotland. Ireland currently head the table, but they have a difficult task in Paris: they need not only to win to secure the Championship but to do so by a bonus point because England will almost certainly get a bonus point against a poor Italian side. The Irish press are talking up the national team’s chances of winning handsomely, but it seems to me rather unlikely especially because France too have a chance of the title if they beat Ireland and get a bonus point. Both sides clearly have to attack, which should make for a good contest.

For what it’s worth, my predictions are: Wales to beat Scotland, England to beat Italy (with a bonus point) and France to beat Ireland (but no bonus point). That combination would make England the champions, with France second and Ireland third.

Update: 16.05. Wales 10 Scotland 14. My predictions are not off to a good start. Scrappy, error-strewn game with Scotland’s try from a maul that shredded the Welsh defence the highlight of the game. Bad result for Wales but it is good to see Scotland back as a force to be reckoned with.

Update: 18.45. England improved dramatically after a poor first half, and eventually ran out winners by 34 points to 5. That means their points difference is +44 compared to Ireland’s +38. Ireland need a win by 7 or more points (or with a bonus point) to win the Championship.

Update: 21.00. Half-time France 17 Ireland 13. France leading without having played particularly well, thanks to two big Irish errors. Ireland need to score 10 points more than France in the 2nd half.

Update 22.00. Final score France 35 Ireland 27. France won with a bonus point but not by a sufficient margin to win the Championship, which goes to England, with France second and Ireland third. It didn’t go exactly as I predicted but I wasn’t far off!

6 Comments »

El Espectro

Posted in Biographical with tags , , on October 30, 2020 by telescoper

I have quite a friendly name for anagrams, with mixture of fairly common vowels and consonants that can give not only `telescoper’, but such gems as ‘closet peer’, `elect prose’, ‘poles erect’ and ‘tesco leper’. It is only recently however that I have discovered that this also extends to foreign languages, specifically Spanish. The character `El Espectro‘ (un Antihéroe ficticio publicado por la editorial estadounidense DC Comics) is a seasonal example:

It is a shame that Mr Espectro does not look much like me. Admittedly we do have similar physiques but he alas has no beard.

2 Comments »

Lá Saoire i mí Dheireadh Fómhair

Posted in Beards, Biographical, Covid-19, Irish Language, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags on October 26, 2020 by telescoper

Today being the last Monday of October, it’s a Bank Holiday here in Ireland so I’m having the day off (well, at least the morning: I have a telecon this afternoon). This week is Study Week too so there are no lectures or tutorials – real or virtual – until next Monday. Now that I have a broadband connection at home I’ll be working from here much more as the Level 5 restrictions require me to. It won’t be ideal because a lot of my work stuff is still in the office on campus, but at least I’ll be more comfortable than first time round, when I was in the flat.

Normally, most students go home for some or all of Study Week and return to campus the following week. This year I suppose most will stay where they are, although some might go home and stay there until the end of term since virtually all their teaching is online this term. They won’t even have to come back for the examinations after Christmas as these will be online too. It’s anyone’s guess whether we will have teaching on campus next Semester.

Coincidentally, the first campus closure started just before a Bank Holiday too. That was St Patrick’s Day. It seems like an eternity ago. The news of my award of the St Patrick’s Day Beard of Ireland would surely have made front pages across the Republic had it not been for the Covid-19 Pandemic. I think I’ll refrain from trimming my beard for the duration of the new restrictions like I did during the original lockdown.

Incidentally, the Irish word for beard is Féasóg. Also incidentally, I’ve signed up to have Irish language lessons this term; they start in November.

As I’ve mentioned before, this Bank Holiday (as others of its type in Ireland) has a sort of astronomical connection. In the Northern hemisphere, from an astronomical point of view, the solar year is defined by the two solstices (summer, around June 21st, and winter around December 21st) and the equinoxes (spring, around March 21st, and Autumn, around September 21st). These four events divide the year into four roughly equal parts each of about 13 week. If you divide each of these intervals in two you divide the year into eight pieces of six and a bit weeks each. The dates midway between the astronomical events mentioned above are (roughly) :

1st February: Imbolc (Candlemas)
1st May: Beltane (Mayday)
1st August: Lughnasadh (Lammas)
1st November: Samhain (All Saints Day)

The names I’ve added are taken from the Celtic/neo-Pagan (and Christian) terms for these cross-quarter days. These timings are rough because the dates of the equinoxes and solstices vary from year to year. Imbolc is often taken to be the 2nd of February (Groundhog Day) and Samhain is sometimes taken to be October 31st, Halloween.
Another name for the present Bank Holiday is Lá Saoire Oíche Shamhna (Halloween Holiday), although Halloween itself does not occur until next Saturday. Bank Holidays are always on Mondays here so they’re often a few days away from the dates above.

2 Comments »

Level 5 Holiday Weekend

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19 with tags , , on October 24, 2020 by telescoper

The last Monday of October (Lá Saoire i mí Dheireadh Fómhair), aka the Halloween Holiday (Lá Saoire Oíche Shamhna), is a national holiday in Ireland so I’m currently in Bank Holiday weekend mode.

Tougher (Level 5) Covid-19 restrictions came into play at Midnight on Thursday so I guess I’ll be spending most of this weekend time at home, but that’s OK. It will be a chance to recharge the old batteries.

I’ll also have time to read the big booklet that arrived in yesterday’s mail.

This new regime is not at all like the first lockdown in March but my main worry is about compliance. The vast majority of people have behaved sensibly throughout the pandemic but enough haven’t to create a very worrying situation. I’m concerned that those people who flouted the Level Three restrictions will flout Level Five too, but we’ll see.

Last night we resumed the “virtual pub” night on Zoom with former colleagues from Cardiff, which went into abeyance when actual pubs reopened there. Wales has now gone into a stricter lockdown too, for at least 17 days. I think England will probably follow soon.

Anyway today’s tasks are: (i) to activate my home internet and (ii) to avoid reading work emails using it.

I arranged to have the router box etc delivered yesterday. The courier texted me in the morning to say they would deliver between 2pm and 4pm. I had a lecture scheduled from 12 to 1 so I went on campus, did the webcast from my office, and returned home by about 1.30. I waited there until almost 6pm and then gave up and went to buy beer and pizza.

When was coming back with the goods my next door neighbour saw me and came around with the package. The courier had arrived at my house at 11am and discovering that I was not in, had left it with her. No note at my house. No text or phone call to my mobile to say they’d been.

Nightline is the name of the courier company. They wasted a whole afternoon of my time. The driver also forged my signature in the process, surely a criminal offence?

6 Comments »

Goodbye, John

Posted in Biographical with tags , , on October 19, 2020 by telescoper

Today, along with many other friends and colleagues, and members of his family I attended (via Zoom) the funeral of my thesis supervisor Professor John D Barrow who passed away on September 26th. This was my first experience of a funeral by Zoom and it felt very strange sitting in my office watching the proceedings. I had a quick look at the list of participants and saw many names I recognized. I suspect many of them were taking a short break from work too. The list was long, so it was a good turnout, virtually speaking. At least some of the closest family members were able to be there, at Westminster College in Cambridge, to pay tribute. The Astronomy Royal, Lord Rees, was also present and he gave a characteristically eloquent eulogy.

Not being of the Christian faith I didn’t participate in the prayers, but as the coffin was carried out at the end for the committal I found myself saying out loud “Goodbye, John”. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank John’s family, especially Elizabeth, for giving me this chance to say goodbye.

UPDATE: An obituary of John, written by Michael Rown-Robinson, is now available online on the Guardian website.

 

 

4 Comments »

Garden Variety

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags , , , on October 10, 2020 by telescoper

The modest investment I made in bird feeders when I moved into my new house in Maynooth has paid a considerable dividend in terms of entertainment. As well as a number of starlings and sparrows, I have quite a variety of more exotic species. The other morning, while I was drinking my coffee while looking into the garden before leaving for work, I saw a robin, a great tit, a blue tit, a chaffinch, and (I think) a hedge warbler*. And that was all just in the space of 10 minutes or so.

The show was then brought to a sudden end by the arrival of two jackdaws who scared everything else off and then tried to wreck the nut feeder.

I went outside and chased them away. I have nothing against the jackdaws – they’re actually rather amusing – but I won’t have vandalism in my garden.

The hedge warbler (or dunnock or hedge sparrow, although it’s not a sparrow) is not particularly rare in Ireland but is extremely shy and never gives you a long time to look at it. I’m pretty sure the bird I saw was one, though it was gone in a flash.

The local robin, by contrast, is not shy. I see him very frequently. I think it’s male because of the very bright red of his chest colour; females of the species tend to have colours that look slightly washed out. Male or female this one is very well nourished. In fact it’s so plump as to be almost spherical.

Anyway, all these birds (including the jackdaws) are passerine species, defined by the shape of their feet: they all have three toes pointing forward and one pointing backwards. The order Passeriformes includes perching birds of all kinds, from sparrows and finches to crows and a lot more besides. In fact over half the known bird species belong to this order.

9 Comments »

Thirty Years On

Posted in Biographical, LGBTQ+ with tags , on October 9, 2020 by telescoper

Every now and then I use this blog to mark a personal anniversary, but I’m a bit late with this one. It was on October 1st 1990 that I started work at what was then Queen Mary & Westfield College of the University of London on Mile End Road. Here’s my staff ID card which, for some reason, I have kept for over thirty years.

I was to work there until the end of 1998, after which I moved to Nottingham.

My position came about because I had applied unsuccessfully for a permanent lectureship at QMW, but this was a kind of consolation prize. I had strong personal reasons for wanting to move to London at that time and was very happy with the outcome. I only had two years’ postdoc experience at the time and wasn’t sufficiently experienced for a permanent job so wasn’t surprised that I didn’t get it. In fact it went to Mike Thompson, who sadly passed away a couple of years ago.

The job I moved for was a five year fixed-term position that was a mixture of a postdoctoral research fellowship and a temporary lectureship in the ratio 30:70 so I had a teaching load that was lighter than that of a lecturer but heavier than that of a postdoc. As the card indicates I was in the School of Mathematical Sciences and because my research interests including a statistical component, I mainly taught statistics. In fact, the first course I lectured was on Time Series Analysis, which was to a mixed class of mathematics and statistics students. A couple of years into this position I applied for and was awarded an Advanced Fellowship from the (then) Science & Engineering Research Council, which meant that QMW got me for nothing for 5 years and my reward for that was a permanent position at the end of the fellowship.

For some reason – probably because the terms of employment were a little complicated – I kept the correspondence about the job. In particular I note that my starting salary was a princely £14,148 per annum (including £1,767 london weighting). That’s about what a PhD student’s stipend is these days!

I look back on my time at Queen Mary with great fondness. I learnt a huge amount not only from my boss, Ian Roxburgh, who had managed to set up the job in the first place and was very clever at things like that thanks to his somewhat Machiavellian nature.

When I visited QMW to talk informally to Ian about the job, he asked me why I wanted to move to London. “Do you have a girlfriend here?” he inquired. I said “no”. “A boyfriend, then?” he responded. I wasn’t sure whether he meant it as a joke, and thought it was a bit inappropriate, but didn’t hesitate in saying “yes” in response. I wondered whether this would cause any issues but it didn’t. Being openly gay didn’t cause me any problems there at all, in fact.

P. S. Here is the staff list on the letterhead of my appointment letter. An illustrious collection, though the gender balance could have been better. All by now have either retired or moved to other institutions, though I have stayed in touch with several of them through the RAS Club.

2 Comments »

Lost and Found!

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth on October 5, 2020 by telescoper

Here’s another post that demonstrates that I’m getting even more absent-minded in my old age.

On Friday I lost my phone. I was pretty sure I had it with me when I went to work but couldn’t find it when I was getting ready to leave for home. I hadn’t actually used it while I was at work on Friday so I convinced myself that I’d left it at home. I was wrong.

I was a bit worried that the delivery people on Saturday might assume I wasn’t in when they couldn’t contact me by the number I gave them, but they did turn up and all was well.

As soon as I got back to work this morning, I tried to retrace all the steps I’d taken on Friday in the hope of finding the missing item, but without joy. Just before leaving the office to give my lecture at 11am, increasingly worried, I emailed security to ask if anyone had handed in a phone. It was I thought a last resort.

When I got back to the office I found to my great relief an emailed reply saying that a phone matching the description I’d given had indeed been handed into them. It had been found by a cleaner in the John Hume Building (in which I gave a lecture on Friday).

I went straight over to the security lodge and proved that it was my phone, which was easy because it has fingerprint recognition. When I’d done that I was asked to sign for it and was reunited with my phone (which was undamaged). As I turned to leave I asked where it had been found. The answer left me a bit. shocked. It was found in the lecture theatre I’d been teaching in… in the waste bin!

I gave a lecture on Friday in the John Hume building but can’t really understand how my phone ended up in the bin. I remember seeing a bin near the desk at the front, so I guess I must have accidentally knocked it off the bench while trying to set up the camera.

Above all though I realised just how lucky I had been. I reckon 99 times out of 100 the cleaner would have just emptied the bin without further thought. This time, though, perhaps because there was nothing else in the in it (as the lecture theatres are largely empty these days), the cleaner spotted it and did the right thing. Had the bin been full of other rubbish it would probably not have been seen.

Losing my phone would have been hugely inconvenient on top of all the other causes of stress these days so I’m very glad I’ve got it back.

All’s well that ends well.

6 Comments »

Week Ending

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Maynooth on October 3, 2020 by telescoper

It’s the Saturday after a very tough week. At least I’ve got an excuse for lounging about at home because I’m waiting for a new bed to be delivered. Since I moved into my new house I’ve been sleeping in a single bed, in what will be the spare room, but when the bigger bed arrives I’ll be able to move into the main bedroom.

Last week was a tough one at work. Switching teaching online at short notice was only part of it. The building work that started late still isn’t finished so I’ve got more disruption from that to look forward to when I return to the Department on Monday.

I did at least get through the first week of online teaching. The newly installed Panopto system (which we used when I was in Cardiff) works very well, although the cameras are a bit limited. This system can webcast a lecture as well as recording it to be viewed later. I always assumed most students would watch the lectures after the event but as it turned out a majority actually viewed them live.

The sudden switch to online teaching was designed to restrict the number of students travelling to and from the University but nobody seems to have thought very much about those actually living on campus. In the case of Maynooth University that includes a sizeable fraction of first-year students whose first experience of university life is much poorer than in a normal year. I feel very sorry for this cohort but I suppose circumstances made this inevitable.

The official University line, as explained in an email (inevitably) sent out to Department Heads on Friday evening), is that teaching will be online at least until Study Week ( the week beginning 26th October). I think it’s overwhelmingly probable that we teach like this for the entire semester and there is a good chance that it will be the entire academic year. I think it would benefit us all, staff and students, if this decision were made now. There is no end in sight to Covid-19 and there is no point in pretending otherwise.

Update: the bed arrived this afternoon. It required “some self assembly”: though not on the scale of IKEA furniture that was quite hard work because the frame parts are very heavy. It’s done now though and I’m looking forward to sleeping in it tonight.

7 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »