August Visitors

This week was a chance to catch up with more visitors. First, my old friend, Bernhard Bluemich, came over in the train from Aachen to spend a night and a couple of days here. My finely honed tourist guide skills were once more served up, along with a rather splendid high table meal at Trinity, where we met up with Robin Carrell, a New Zealander, Professor of Haematology here and also a Fellow of Trinity. Robin took us up to the "combination room" after dinner where the feast continued with cheese, fruit, claret, port and snuff. And yes, Bernhard and I did indeed partake of the snuff box. Meanwhile, as we dined like mediaeval kings, recreational looters smashed windows, burned cars and shops, and generally created mayhem in London and other major metropolitan centres. Such is the life of Professors of Physics! And who says being a scientist is dull?

After dinner Robin took us to the ancient room in the college where Isaac Newton conducted some of his optical experiments, then we walked under the stars on the bowling green outside where Newton was wont to stroll while deep in thought.

Next to visit were Suzanne Fielding from Durham and Meghan Halse from Lyon. Suzanne is a soft matter theorist who has been a regular visitor to my lab, and Meghan was my PhD student number 19, and now a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Lyndon Emsley. By now my tour guiding is extraordinarily professional, a sampling of college courts, halls and chapels, Kings College Chapel of course, strolls across the backs, the old Cavendish Laboratory in Free School Lane, the Eagle pub where Crick and Watson made their DNA announcement, and of course a sample of Trinity High Table, this time lunch, under the watchful eye of Henry the Eighth whose portrait towers over us. I can only describe the impact of taking these two lovely young women to lunch in the midst of the venerable, and on that day ancient, fellowship, as "electrifying".

Today Meghan and Suzanne joined Miang and me on baby-sitting duties with grandsons James and Thomas. In a visit to Homerton College grounds, over the road from the kids' home, Suzanne sampled the water sculpture and encouraged James to do the same. Then Meghan led James on a spirited run across the sports field.

For the next two weeks Miang and I will be in Beijing (ICMRM11) and then Frankfurt (Euromar). At the Euromar meeting Mark Hunter (PhD student number 22) will deliver the Raymond Andrew Prize lecture, for the best Magnetic Resonance PhD in the world for 2010. It would be reasonable to say that I am rather proud of him!