Memories of CERN

Six and a half years ago, I arrived in Switzerland to do a work placement with the exhibitions team at CERN as part of my MSc in Science Communication. It followed hard on the heels of producing a play in London – the last night was Saturday; on Sunday I flew from London City Airport to Geneva, me white as a sheet with terror, to start a job for which I had almost no qualification, in a new country where I spoke almost none of the language(s), on Monday morning at 9am.

My memory is shocking – experiences do not live on in my brain to be faithfully recalled like a film (or even radio) documentary of my life. No, they melt away, or melt together, or merge with dreams and imagined conversations. But mostly, they melt away, leaving me with a world-view shaped by my experiences but unrooted and unreferenced to the events that gave it this shape.

My CERN diary

It would make sense, then, for me to keep a diary. I have tried a few times, and it has never quite stuck. But when I was at CERN, I kept this diary and I’ve been reading it tonight and I’m ever so glad for it. I wrote in it often at first and, naturally for me, the entries tail off towards the end of my time there, although there are a couple of bonus entries from when I was back in the UK.

Some excerpts from August 2005 are below – apologies if they are excruciatingly dull (did I use that phrase in my last post as well?). I’m mining them for any nuggets I can transfer into the Discreet Dictionary – the first original entries for quite some time.

ABC…qv

The original version of my Discreet Dictionary

I have begun the second stage of uploading the Discreet Dictionary. It involves going back through the entries from A to Z adding links to the cross-references. It is a pleasant exercise as I get to revisit some of the earlier entries and, if appropriate, retweet them for those following the Dictionary, given that I only started tweeting the Dictionary at around P.

Today I have updated entries from A to C, replacing the (q.v.) tags with links. Highlights you may not have looked at before include Alchemy and Cow, although I personally love the stark lack of context of Autumn: “Autumn is the correct season for the king’s hair and teeth to fall out.”

While tracking progress during the first phase, I would post here with a heading derived from the entries I had uploaded in the intervening time. That feels less appropriate for the second phase, so instead, I am going to share the notebooks in which I made the original notes that form the basis of the Dictionary. It may be monumentally boring, even off-putting, for you readers, so we shall see how it goes.

Words to Yours

I’m cheating a little bit. I finished loading up the last batch of initial definitions for the Discreet Dictionary yesterday, but I have scheduled them for this morning, so it would look as though I was working up to the last few hours of 2011 to get them all done in time. Equally, I have written this post in advance, to chime with the passing of one year into the next. Happy New Year, by the way.

Life is very full just at the moment. If I have one regret from 2011, it is that I haven’t taken enough time over the posts on this blog. Seldom have I thought in advance what I was going to write, and rarer still are the occasions on which I have taken the time to structure what I have written and to try and make it more than a splurge of idle thoughts. So if I have one resolution for 2012, it is to make a little bit of time for more forethought to go into this blog.

I’ve enjoyed the titles for posts on this blog coming from the batches of words defined in the Discreet Dictionary – often they have resonated with events and given me at least the semblance of a topic to concentrate on. That won’t happen in 2012 – or not as often – so I really will have to plan more.

It will not be easy – hence the need for a resolution rather than a decision, perhaps? But I will try.

Also, more pictures in 2012.

Yours
Michael

Waiting to Witch

Queen Iris

We are in that strange holding time between Christmas and New Year. My workplace is closed all this week, Edie’s nursery is closed, Iris is too young for social appointments and Sophie is chewing her nails off desperate to escape the solemn duties of childcare and festive familial commitments. We are waiting for 2012.

We have clocked up three big Christmas meals so far: dinner on Christmas Eve in Cambridge, lunch on Boxing Day in London, and lunch on 29 Dec in Essex (see left). Not bad going. Each has been very special, in its own particular way.

I have published the penultimate swathe of definitions in the Discreet Dictionary for 2011. My favourite from this batch is Witch, which was written in relation to an adaptation of The Little Mermaid that I was involved with maybe ten years ago. I think it was part of the stage directions, describing the character who takes the Mermaid’s tail and voice: “Pockets, empty then full, empty then full. Fluids frothing forth, foul liquors caged in ice. The witch has the capacity to drown your sorrows; to drown you.”

Tuition fees to Void

Christmas is nearly here!

It’s been a few weeks since I posted here. A lot has been going on and I have hardly even turned on my computer in that time. However, a few discreet definitions have made it into the Dictionary, so that’s ok. I wrote my definition of Tuition fees several years ago but it still seems relevant.

Anyway, I reckon there are two more batches of the first swathe of definitions to upload, and they should be done by the end of the year. This means I can start 2012 with a new plan to generate content.

In the meantime, I have been busy in the day job, so you might like to check out my writing on the Wellcome Trust blog as well.

Time to Truth

At face value, a rather grandiose set of definitions have wheedled their way into the Discreet Dictionary over the last week or so, but in truth, Trains are among their number, so it’s not all existential navel-gazing….

A few bonus musings on Time, however:

Sunday to Thursday

Though I do not quite manage to write a definition a day, this week I have written definitions for Sunday and Thursday in the Discreet Dictionary, plus five words in between, alphabetically.

Having broached the Ts, I fear I am too fast approaching a point at which my notebooks run dry and I will be forced to rely on my present day wits to come up with new definitions. It has been fun transcribing the collected literary detritus of my mind to the web – I’m sure it will be equally fun to actually have to pay attention, to be creative, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to be original again.

Strategy to Success

[A.S. There are a lot of S's in the Discreet Dictionary. More now than previously. If you're almost tempted to go browsing, I recommend you start with Suburbs, the Discreet 'definition' for which quotes from a beautiful book, The Age of Wire and String, by Ben Marcus.]

Net Net contribution

It has been two weeks or more since my last post here and I am no longer going to apologise for such lacunae in my writing. However, it has got me to thinking about whether I will ever be a ‘net Net contributor’.

I lurk, mostly, on Twitter and blogs. My own blog here is inherently solipsistic (well no, but I like the word; it is actually merely introspective) and my other blog, which has a pitiful four subscribers, has potential to be ‘social’ but I am not ‘marketing’ it because I am not sure it is precisely what I want and I am antipathetic to the concept of ‘work in progress’, despite every blog being essentially exactly that.

A snowball, not an ammo dump

My preferred approach to the web is to follow those random trails that come from following a link that a creditable source (ie a friend, acquaintance or admired intelligence) suggests. If the target is pleasing, I will browse it, looking for another diverting link to somewhere else. And so on.

Stars to Story

In loving memory’s decay

Two headstones

On an unexpectedly beautiful autumn’s day, I took a walk through Abney Park Cemetery, the “first wholly non-denominational garden cemetery in Europe”.

I was recently reminded of a curious evening I spent in this cemetery doing a two-hour performance of Collagen in ten minutes, a piece I made with Jeremy Hardingham which was performed only twice.

So I decided to walk through the cemetery today and was taken with how many signs of decay – beyond the obvious – there were. I took some pictures (see below).

Listen to this…

After giving our talks to the shortlisted writers for the Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize on Wednesday, the lovely Stephen Curry and I had a little chat about science writing in the Guardian’s in-house studio. The resulting conversation is included in the latest Guardian Science Weekly podcast (the science writing prize is the final item, starting around 25′, and Stephen and I pop up around 30′).

It’s my first ever media ‘appearance’ (other than articles ghost-written for other people)! Not sure it’ll prove to be the first of many; much fun, though….