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.