Tag: memories

Categories
ice shock nostalgia raves writing

One of those rambling posts about the vagaries of life

I am doing blogging all wrong.

I’ve been reading other people’s blogs and I can see that mine is Not Quite Right.

Well I’m going to do a post that’s more typische. Part rant, part rave, part diary, part confessional.

Rant: Where to start? I’m not much of a ranter over things that don’t directly concern me and over which I have zero control. Not saying there’s anything wrong with ranting, in fact I seem to have voluntarily surrounded myself with people who love a rant; my daughter, my husband, my agent to name only three. Maybe that’s why no ranting. Ranters need to be listened to. And that, it seems, is increasingly my role.

However, I did recently get slightly involved in the age-ranging debate about putting labels like 5+, 7+, 11+ on children’s books, although only in the private e-space of a members-only online writers’ club. But actually, meh. The businesswoman in me dislikes the attempt to stop a perfectly legitimate marketing initiative. Last time I looked publishers sell the books and do the deals. Ifnwhen the sales director at my publishers phones me up and asks me to make sales calls to sell my books to the major chains, then maybe I’ll start to feel I have any place telling her how to run the business.

Rave: Now what I AM is a raver. So many things to enthuse over, so little time. Let’s just divide the things that have recently amused or fascinated me into categories.

TV: All the usual suspects for me: Battlestar Galactica continues to swoop, Lost continues to be gloriously daft-yet-compelling, still laughing over Peep Show’s use of a highly literary reference as a euphemism for erm…well I can’t better it so let’s just say ‘doing a Chesil beach’; reruns of Sex And The City. How I love Samantha. She somehow reminds me of Jessica from Pokemon’s Team Rocket.  And a surprise new addition to my highly selective TV viewing is BBC4’s US import Mad Men – set in 1960’s Madison Avenue and the cutting edge world of advertising. The men are urbane, sexist and wear natty suits; the woman are gorgeous, ambitious, under-appreciated, professionally limited and don’t complain when their bottoms get slapped in the office. Everybody smokes and all these macho men wilt the minute one of these supposedly suborbinate women turns her ravenous gaze upon one of them. You can sense the powerplay just waiting to happen. Ah the good-old-days when a pretty secretary could take a powerful man down. Mostly I enjoy the offices though. They remind me so much of my father’s set up at Mexicana de Cobre. Just good ol’ plain nostalgia.

Reading: I’m very busy writing so haven’t read much lately. I bought some books by Cornelia Funke; Inkheart and Inkspell and some books for younger readers that I’ll read to the little ‘un. I have, however, been enjoying reading The Spectator and New Scientist, which I can manage in bite-size chunks. Two Speccie articles made me laugh out loud today, one by Rod Liddle about the Eurovision Song Contest (it wasn’t political; Eastern Europeans just don’t ‘get’ decent 12-bar blues based pop music), one by Deborah Ross, but then she always makes me laugh. Right-wing intellectuals are so much funnier than left-wing ones. And therefore sexier. I’d have PJ O’Rourke over George Monbiot, any day. But then the left does have Naomi Klein. So maybe it’s gender specific?

Geekchic: Loving my Sony Vegas video editing software. Hey I never said I didn’t have some special interests.

Podcasts: The usual trio of Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s Radio5 movie review show, Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time and the Litopia After Dark podcasts continue to equip me with the knowledge and ideas to do my job.

Music: Performance Channel is screening a Beethoven piano sonata every evening. I caught one while half asleep yesterday. It wasn’t one I knew and being on the verge of sleep was struggling to place it – Brahms? Schubert? Beethoven? It sounded very German and very wonderful. I lay there thinking about Wilhelm Meister and Marienbad and Werther and other ghosts from the past, conversations with my mother.

Diary: Well not much to report here. I have been editing book 2 of Joshua; ICE SHOCK. It’s been hard work but I finally made it through the whole script, having addressed all Editor’s notes. Now I need to write two short new sections and then do a continuity check. But I’ll do a separate post about this. And liasing closely with the publicity department at Scholastic to put things in place for a book tour starting next week. Yay!

Confessional: Well wouldn’t you like to know. I don’t dare to be open about such stuff. Would cause a rare old scandal, no doubt.

Categories
nostalgia

ManU’s Premiership and Champions League Double – I’m faint with joy

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The first time that United won the European Cup was 1968 – when I was too young to appreciate them. By the time I became a fan we were in the Second Division. The dizzing hights of a European Cup win seemed to me, quite unimaginable.

My best friend was a boy called Eoin who lived across the road. One day Eoin’s mum told me about United’s glorious past, and the Munich air crash. Quite clearly I can remember wondering if ever in my lifetime again I’d see a United team of that calibre.

Eoin and I grew up going to United games together – at one stage most home games. When we were 14 Eoin moved to Ireland and I started going to matches with my friend Sally. The best we could hope for in those days was the FA Cup, which we won a very respectable number of times. Sally and I even saw us win once – United 4- Brighton 1 (1983?).

But still the Division One Championship and with it the triumph in Europe – it was always Liverpool or Nottingham Forest, never us.

And then Fergie arrived in town. Eoin sent me a letter once where he lamented that his young daughter should be considered for selection – the team could hardly get worse. Thank goodness in those days they didn’t fire coaches after a couple of poor seasons, and he had a chance to build up the team.

But WHAT drama, what emotion, what an incredible achievement! As I watched the Champions League Final last night I was totally awestruck by the levels of both teams – not that it was the best game of football ever – although it was a fabulous match. But just the levels of fitness, determination, the strength and energy needed to compete at that level; the endurance.

Bad luck Chelsea. Seriously worthy opponents…but it was our night.

Categories
brazil zero moment

Thoughts turn to Book 3

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I’m not trying to make anyone feel jealous. I just want a nice image to look at.

I usually try to avoid going on holiday to hot countries whilst it’s miserable and cold at home – inevitably you return home to spend three weeks going around looking at the grey drabness in disbelief and thinking ‘Why do I have to live here, again?’

I can see I’m going to have to make my list of Great Things About Living In Oxford, England.

Or I can pretend I don’t, continue in denial and write another book set somewhere warm.

Warm and inevitably, rather threatening.

I lay awake in bed at some very late hour this morning thinking about book 3 of Joshua, I had forgotten that in my bedside notebook I’d once written an idea to use a certain song as a symbol (a sort of literary synecdoche, if you want to get clever) for a certain character in the book. But in the work of constructing the plot, I forgot.

Screenwriters often use a visual image – or colour as a symbol. Oranges in “The Godfather” symbolise death; fallen leaves in Alfonso Cuaron’s “Great Expectations” – and also “Y Tu Mama Tambien” symbolize encroaching chaos. The main symbol in ‘Joshua Files’ is the natural body of water – it spells mortal danger for Josh. And characters in Josh’s family are sometimes referred to via a song.

So I’d had this idea to use a song like that…and then totally forgotten. But just as my subconscious mind used to kindly wake me at 3am after a long day in the lab with the reminder that I’d actually thrown my experiment in the bin instead of the freezer…this morning it woke me with this great suggestion for book 3.

I was dreaming about this fox in a garden that suddenly started being very friendly, and then saw it’s cub, even cuter…meanwhile music was playing and I recognised the song as ‘Dream A Little Dream Of Me’. And I remembered that I’d had this idea to use it in book 3, but hadn’t been able to decide how.

Well, the dream gave me the idea…from that came a way to develop what will be probably the most important subplot in the last 3 Joshua books.

When it strikes really full-on like that, inspiration can be very fruitful.

I think I have dengue fever, by the way. I have a slight temperature, headache in an unsual part of my head, and a disastrous stomach…

Categories
fangirling nostalgia

With Deep Anger And Resentment

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I’ve only once been to a booksigning. My favourite authors hardly ever visit Oxford (two of them, never, what with being deceased). When they do it’s probably as an honoured High Table guest at one of the colleges rather than a humble book signing session.

But once, I did have a chance to meet a literary hero, none other than Douglas Adams, author of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”.

I may have mentioned before what a total fangirl I am and always have been. I was actually a member of ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, the HHGTTG fan club, once… (John Lloyd, producer of the original radio show and later, via QI.com, a customer of my IT company, gave me a hug when I told him that!). So when I had my chance to have Douglas Adams (or as he’s known to the fan community, ‘Bop Ad’) actually sign his latest book, I of course included some obscure reference to the BBC radio show. And asked him to sign my copy of ‘So Long And Thanks For All The Fish’ with the words:

With deep anger and resentment.

Well, it won a smile from dear old Bop, who was kept busy all afternoon that day in Blackwell’s.

Categories
nostalgia science

Bioscience Nostalgia

Every so often I get all nostalgic for molecular biology. Ah, they were good days, so much work to do that you hardly had time to think about anything but science.

I found some videos on YouTube which made me smile. This has got nothing to do with Joshua Files, btw, but if you’ve half an interest in science geek humour, and the nostalgic musings of a former scientist then read on…


Here’s the PCR song. It’s from BIO-RAD, the manufacturer of the thermal recycling machine which makes the Polymerase Chain Reaction possible (at least optimal). Lucky BioRad, they had a bright employee named Kary Mullis who when faced with the dilemma that piqued many scientists in the 1980s, didn’t stop thinking. No; he took a long drive up to Marin County (or from…) and thought long and hard about it.

This was the dilemma: We were all using purified enzymes like DNA polymerase to amplify DNA ‘in vitro’ (as in, not in a cell but in a test-tube), but only on a small scale. We weren’t making enough DNA to use in DNA subcloning work or enough to see on a gel with the naked eye. It wasn’t possible.

We all knew that DNA can be replicated simply by melting the two strands, using DNA polymerase to fill in each strand. In theory, if you kept repeating the process 1 molecule would become 2, then 4, 8,16,32,64 etc. But the process of melting the DNA each time would destroy the enzyme. And it was a big hassle to keep swapping the DNA from water baths to ice baths to cycle the process of melting/annealing.

And that’s where most of us stopped thinking.

Kay Mullis, however, remembered that some bacteria exist at high temperatures (e.g. near volcanic vents under the sea), and have heat-stable enzymes. If he could use the DNA polymerase from such a bacteria, it should be possible to invent a machine that would heat-and-cool tubes for the optimum times so that small amounts of DNA could be melted and annealed 20,30,40 times.

And that would seriously amplify the molecules. That would make it possible to eventually detect teeny weeny amounts of DNA.

And so PCR was invented. As an employee Mullis didn’t get rich but he did invent a process that made the lives of all molecular biologists much easier, revolutionised forensic science and paternity suits.

For some reason I only once had a chance to use PCR. In my early days it wasn’t around and later it just wasn’t applicable to what I was researching, until the last month or so. And then I used it to detect a subcloned DNA molecule I’d made the day before. It was the fastest subcloning I ever did and the PCR worked first time, like a dream…and I thought Jeeeez…why wasn’t this around 6 years ago?!