Category: nostalgia

& memories

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nostalgia

Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat

I first read this, one of my favourite children’s books, when I was about seven after seeing it on the TV show ‘Jackanory’. After just a chapter or two, I remember thinking that I MUST HAVE IT! I hassled my mother until she went to buy it from a bookshop. That must have been a marathon mithering session because we were too poor (or my stepfather too mean? who knows) to actually buy books. I owned fewer than twenty books by the time I was 12. But the library just wouldn’t do for this book. With a fierce desire, I wanted to own this one.

Tonight, I’ll be reading the final chapter to our little five-year old daughter. It’s the first long book we’ve read with her – until now we were mainly reading the wonderful picture books by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. But my beloved baby brother Michael remembered how much I loved this book and sent it to our daughter last Christmas. So I thought we’d try it out, to see if she was ready for a long narrative – and she is.

She’s very excited about bedtime tonight, to see how things work out for Gobbolino. Me, I’m watering at the mouth at the possibilities this opens up. “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe” is next – she adores the film. Then perhaps “The Robber Hotzenplotz”.

It’s all lovely. Our older daughter didn’t share my tastes in books – adventure stories. She was bored by most of the long books I tried to read to her, until we discovered Jackie Wilson. But our younger one is dying to be read Harry Potter. I think we’ll give that just a couple more years, for maximum impact.

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getting published jaguar's realm Joshua Files nostalgia other books science writing

My New Editing Regime…and Memories of Subcloning


The publisher and I have agreed a deadline for Joshua bk 1 v3.0. I’m deep in the process of writing Jaguar though, and can’t let the momentum go. So I try to work on Jaguar in the morning at my desk, take a two-hour break to refresh and then it’s on with the editing, which seems to require a different skillset as far as I can tell.

Thank goodness for editors. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Mine is probably going to save me from being a laughing stock, if nothing else – hopefully a lot else but you can’t predict these things.

I like to take my manuscript out for little walks. I can’t be bothered going all the way to the Bod this time around – I’m only spending 2 hours a day on it, what with the Jaguar writing taking up all my morning brain activity. So I’ve been going to Summertown.

The above photo is taken of my set-up at the Summertown Wine Cafe, a bijoux little joint on South Parade which makes the best coffee in Summertown (there are many Italian coffee machines in Summertown, but few baristas who have a clue how to use them). Sadly however, they charge a small fortune for savoury food – best to stick to cake, I’m trying to avoid blimpdom so that’s out.

Blah, blah, blah. Nothin of consequence in this entry sadly. I’m just writing something to have to test in a new way to do an RSS feed. If you read this, you’ve just participated in an experiment.

Do you feel used?

I kind of miss doing experiments. Somewhere in the back of my mind is the niggling feeling that a PROPER day’s work is what I used to pull off at the height of my keenness as a graduate student…a long day in the lab which ends with a successfully identified new DNA subclone to use in a lovely biological experiment.

‘Subcloning’ is a way of starting with a widgey little bit of DNA that is no use to anyone and two days later having bucketloads (as much as a milligram!) of the stuff that you can use to do biological experiments in tissue culture cells or even in unsuspecting fluffy creatures. (Some journals are so fussy that you can’t get published unless your results are in a live organism.)

You insert a piece of experimental DNA into a ‘vector’ of usually bacterial or yeast DNA which has the ability massively to replicate it. Then you can grow the ‘bugs’ in a 500ml culture overnight and in the morning extract enough DNA to ‘transfect’ cells which allow you to test the properties of your experimental DNA. The tricky bit is that when you try to stick your experimental DNA to the vector DNA, only a small fraction will combine to give you the subclone. The rest will just be vector DNA that sticks back to itself.

When I were a lass we used to pick at least 24 bacterial colonies in the hope that 2 or 3 would have the subclone. It could take up to a whole day, a day spent ‘doing minipreps’, as we used to call it. Sometimes you had to use radioactivity and horrible, ooky, gloopy, neurotoxic polyacrylamide gel to help identify the subclone.

(Any molecular biologists reading this, bright young things with your PCR, your DNA synthesisers and sequencing machines…it’s all very easy now, I’ll bet.)

But! Throughout most of career as a molecular biologist I noticed that although I was a good little scientist and picked my 24-48 colonies everytime I wanted to find a correctly subclone, more often than not, colony 1 (the first I picked with a sterile toothpick) actually had the subclone. i.e. I didn’t need colonies 2-24 and all the effort in ‘working them up’ was not actually essential.

Other people in my lab noticed this too. It turns out that in maths the number 1 is disproportionately represented (there’s some rule and it’s used as a way to detect fraud), well, in molecular biology this seems true too.

Don’t think we let that observation go to waste, either. Towards the end of my time in the lab, I would often just pick a colony right off, inoculate my 500ml flask and grow up the bugs without testing whether they had the subcloned DNA in them. It saved a whole day! Of course I tested a sample before I used it to transfect my tissue culture cells. Well, duh.

If you didn’t understand a thing I wrote in the last few paras, tell me. R1X did, so I have tried to rewrite it so that it makes sense.

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nostalgia

How to be thin – don’t eat enough

Well it’s all downhill for me, intellectually speaking. I’m experiencing a strange symptom of what is probably an early-onset form of dementia. It’s this: I’ve completely lost the ability to guesstimate how much pasta to cook to feed a family of four.

I used to be an overestimater, if anything. I figured that extra was always good, because you could always make tomorrow’s lunch. But now through no intentional action of mine, I’m an underestimator. When I cook pasta – which is something I cook at least three times a week – even though they all howl with disappointment. Not just that it’s pasta (boo!) but that there’s not enough. They’re always still hungry.

It reminded me of when I was growing up. We were never, ever given meals that left us feeling satisfied. My stepfather had grown up during the post-war rationing period and believed in small portions. (It was different in Mexico, obviously, where you could eat until you popped and proud relatives would stand by going ‘Look how well she eats!’)

But I was stick-thin until I was about 20, so this not-eating-enough thing clearly has something going for it. I’m sticking to the underestimating and telling my family to be glad of going to bed hungry. I try to fool them by heaping salad on top so they don’t notice the pitiful serving of pasta underneath. When they complain, I growl, “S’more than I used to get, so think on!”
They don’t listen though, these kids. They head for the cupboard and eat big spoonfuls of peanut butter.

P.S. No-one suggest using a balance, please. Weighing ingredients is for cissies who can’t cook in anything but a properly-equipped kitchen. That’s not the way I was taught Domestic Science by Mrs Blackwell. It’s acceptable to weigh amounts for confectionary and high-end baking – say French pastries – but nothing else.

The principle can transfer to some aspects of laboratory work. I speak as one who even learned to make tissue culture medium and bacterial growth broths by flicking out The Right Amount, who added DNA and restriction enzymes in amounts we referred to in the lab as A Smidgeon, A Wodge and A S***load. (a s***load was 10 microlitres, just to give you the scale)

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nostalgia

Pokemon Revisited

I’ve got a real soft spot for Pokemon. Oh, I don’t keep up with it now. Where are they…Johto? Probably far beyond that. But I remember being addicted to the first few seasons. I even remember being bitterly disappointed at the lameness of Pokemon – The Movie. Our eldest daughter (now fourteen) collected trading cards (the excitement of her first Charizard!)and stickers, all the Gameboy games, had the soundtrack and everything.

Time was, I even knew part of the Poke-Rap. I reckon I watched every episode of the first two seasons with my eldest girl. That’s over 100 episodes!

So today, when our little one (aged 5) asked to hear the Jigglypuff song and wanted to hug a cuddly Pikachu she found in her mountain of inherited soft toys. I felt a stab of nostalgia for:

  • Squirtle and Jigglypuff
  • Any episode featuring the childhood memories of James of Team Rocket – especially the one where he is going to be married off and ends up cross-dressing – again
  • The brilliantly kitschy songs in the first two seasons

I remember one of our accountants back then sitting in a pub with me and chuntering over the phenomenon. “It’ll all blow over, won’t it,” he said. “Like Beanie Babies?” “I don’t know,” I told him. “It’s got a richly detailed world and story. It could have longevity.”

Well, it may not be the worldwide phenomenon it was years ago, but as far as I’m aware, it’s still going pretty strong. And from the way our five-year old went to bed singing the Jigglypuff song to herself tonight, I think we may be in for a major revisitation of Pokemon round our way.

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nostalgia

I am becoming an airhead with the attention span of a five-year old

Actually, my five-year old daughter has a longer attention span than me.

Sometimes I wonder what on earth has become of me. I used to listen to Bach and Mozart and Palestrina and sing in choirs and have a season ticket to the orchestra and read a book a month at least, as well as a bunch of scientific papers, watch TV for hours at a stretch and have dinner parties where people tried to make intelligent conversation.

Well, stuff all that. Now it’s work, family and salsa.

My friend Nathan has the same issue. We did the middle-aged stuff in our twenties and now we live for our nights out on the town. My friend Dr. Rebecca too, who won the Gibbs prize for Biochemistry in our year at Uni – she’s out dancing 3 or 4 times a week, hooking up with Cuban hotties and whatnot…

I can’t watch TV for more than 30 mins without having to get up and see who’s on MSN. I prefer simultaneously to chat to my cousins on MSN, read blogs and post to my own, and watch Youtube videos than to watch TV. (I KNOW!!! What the heck?!)

And…gah…I haven’t finished reading a novel for ages. I can still read non-fiction, just.

I probably need a brain scan. I think the pod people have got me.

But you know what? I feel like Tom in that Tom&Jerry cartoon where Tom inherits a million dollars, on condition that he does no harm to a living creature, EVEN A MOUSE, and after struggling to restrain himself, he gives in and goes back to persecuting Jerry, saying “I’m throwing away a million dollars…BUT I’M HAPPY!”

Now. Who’s on MSN…?