Sunday Sept 3
Hooray! I now have a verified place to work (bench) and write (office). But before filling you on these glad events, let me call your attention to the “subscribe” button down in the lower right corner of the page. By signing up, you will get an email whenever a new Lab Fab post drops. You can follow every twist. Thank you.
As mentioned in the last post, I had hopes of planting my flag on bench and desk at the get go (i.e., Tuesday). But no, things were not yet sorted. The office (Fig. 1) I am allowed to use belongs to a prof called Nigel Maxted. He is off-campus mostly and he was asked whether he might allow a stranger to camp below the towering stacks of his books and papers. He graciously said yes but communication took a few days. The white bin in the middle of the room catches neither balled-up drafts nor candy wrappers: the container catches water leaking down from the ceiling. The leak is slow and fortuitously over the middle of the room, rather than over desks or shelves. I don’t mind. But I did think it prudent to empty the accumulated half-a-foot or so of water. I did not check a sample through a microscope; I might have missed a few protists hitherto unknown to science. Oh well.
And likewise the bench (Fig. 2), putatively belonging to someone with no plans for benchwork anytime soon, needed to be confirmed as usable. But even had permissions been clear Tuesday, I faced a further problem. Swipe access. It turns out that the corridors of the Bioscience building require a key card swipe every few feet. Well, I exaggerate. The point is that the labs moonlight as corridors; to go from one part of the plant science area to another (say, from my new office to Florian’s) requires passing through one lab after another and thus requires swiping (left or right!) several times. Really impossible to do anything without an active card: My card was dead as a forgotten phone.
Thursday afternoon, the doors to the venue finally opened. I got a key to Prof Maxted’s office and my card awoke. I scrubbed down the bench and moved bits around to gain some leg room, space in a drawer, and a spot to set up the imaging microscope. I located chemicals that I would need to make growth medium, all but two of them anyway.
A good beginning, if a brief one. Friday would have seen me making said solutions but in fact Laura and I had a real holiday: trip to London to see Guys and Dolls at the Bridge Theatre. I had bought tickets in April, as soon as I had read rave reviews in the Guardian. Down for two nights, we took in the V & A and National Gallery too. At the latter, we saw the mural by Paula Rego called Crivelli’s Garden, a repainting of a famous renaissance altarpiece. The Rego was stunning and well worth a trip to London all by itself. Nevertheless, Guys and Dolls rollicked and pulsed, living up to the great American musical and perhaps surpassing.