Babe, it must be art

I FEEL, perhaps, that I blogged too soon. No sooner had I said that I was half way out of the dark than my experiment bluntly refused to work again. All conclusions drawn up by that point had to be disregarded and I had to go back to the drawing board, though with genetics on the go, the time pressure was suddenly a lot greater. So, after 471 PCRs, copious gels and a lot of panicking I had nothing, and now my samples were dying. This explains why I spent the entire weekend in the lab, performing emergency genetics in two days on more specimens than the total number I have handled in a year of working on this project. Then I had to catch up with two weeks of work that had become sidelined by all of this chaos. Today, though, I am relaxed, for my endeavours over the weekend have bought me time to find a solution and crack on with my original plan.


During this all, performing often routine tasks on a vast scale, my mind took the liberty to wander. It developed pipe dreams into full obsessions - such as my desire to open a cafe. Oh what fun we will have in inventing dishes, selling cups of tea at no more than 50 pence, a little more for fancy teas in our best china, getting to know our clientele and providing a welcoming environment for local musicians, artists and book clubs. It could even have a small one-screen cinema upstairs, where people can sip warm beverages and admire decent films. We could have film clubs and teach-yourself-Japanese tapes playing in the toilets. I know that running such a business would be tricky, but it seems so appealing at the moment.

No sooner would such a reverie end than another would begin. My generic MP3 player, whom I call Len, resorted to playing songs at random to keep me sane. Suddenly, it started playing the soundtrack to the Animatrix, and so began reminisces of my previous interests and obsessions and how they have changed over the years. There was a time when The Matrix was a huge deal to my friends and I - I even wrote an essay in Spanish on the film for an assignment - and so too were all things techie, computer-based and other stereotypical geeky teenage boy obsessions. My obsessions have changed though. Now I dream of far away lands (often, lets face it, Australia), I rarely have chance to play on the Wii (and am not interested in this PS3 nonsense), I enjoy conjuring up my own fictionalised true life stories, I listen to acoustic music first and foremost and prefer clever, simple films to big blockbusters. This reverie resulted in my telling Len to play something loud to me, and it is because of this that I began singing the first half of Muse's Black Holes and Revelations at the top of my lungs across the entire lab floor. But it was a Sunday, so nobody was around to hear.

I thought of other old obsessions, like Antarctica, Mongolia and a desire to one day learn how to whistle (I am still upset that I cannot). I then found, with some interest, that scientists in Antarctica may soon be able to access an ancient lake in the search for life under the ice. I proposed a pitch to my student newspaper:

"2011 is the International Year of Chemistry, but it could be the year for Biology instead. In Antarctica there is a lake buried beneath the ice. It has been sealed off from the rest of the world for at least 15 million years. In the next few weeks, scientists think they will finally enter the lake, after 20 years of drilling... if life exists down there, it is quite probably entirely novel to human knowledge."
This is a sealed environment unobserved for 15 million years, its entrance the result of immense scientific endeavour; an obsession since the 1970s, a project that has been subject to delays, problems and a 6 year hiatus over concerns that the drill would contaminate whatever lay beneath. All of this in officially the coldest place in the world. Forgive me, I am being melodramatic, but I hope you can see why. The BBC covered the story a week later, claiming: "the team has been drilling non-stop for weeks", which rather struck me as an understatement.

Other obsessions have passed me by and I suppose this is all because I am growing up. My tastes will change; my responsibilities have grown. I have been known to shop in Halfords. Last night I carved a guinea fowl.

Thus ended the reverie. So too does the month of January. The month that started with wine and Wii Fit (followed by champagne, sloe gin and cheese puffs) ended beneath a mound of unsuccessful experiments, my only great discovery being black bacon, a delicious breakfast rasher of bacon cured in treacle. Nothing to do with my work, of course, but a vital addition to our complicated and ever-changing world.