Our house in the middle of our street :
Blog readers ! I owe you a big apology... If my blogging has been a little erratic (to say the least) over the past couple of weeks, it is because we’ve finally moved into our new house ! After two temporary homes and a four day stay at a hotel when we were really stuck , we are finally here.

I have to say ‘S’ and I couldn’t have survived it all without the help and support of our wonderful friends:
- ‘F’ who hid all my worldly possessions in a cupboard at the School of Science for four days.
-  ‘K’ who helped us big time on moving day, in spite of her fragile shoulder.
- ‘L’ who drove me to Ikea in her lovely big van so that we didn’t have to sit on the floor.
- ‘M’ who was brave enough to look after ‘S’ and his own two girls to enable said trip to Ikea.
- ‘L’ and ‘E’ our lovely new neighbours who helped us when the front door key wouldn’t work on the first. night.
- ‘S’ my best girl, who has put up with an awful lot of instability during the last three months, without a grumble !

We also had some beautiful and practical moving in presents, including : A rain gauge; a Christmas cactus; a cake stand; a bottle of wine; a cat cup, a fruit bowl, a really individual piece of artwork that brought a tear to my eye, plus an unexpected hamper from my mortgage company... Thanks guys it was all fabulous and helped make our house into a home...

 

Thought you’d like to see a picture of our garden (taken in early January, before we moved in, when it was still frosty)... At the moment it’s a bit of a concrete jungle, but we’ve got big plans ! I’m not sure that the swimming pool  and trampoline that ‘S’ has asked for will fit, but hopefully we can make it a little oasis of ‘chill’ in one way or another ! I know one thing though, some strange force seems to be compelling me to get a banana tree – not sure why, but it seems like the right thing to do !

I should really put a parental advisory for the lyrics on this song, which was originally released in October 2009. It reminds me of friend K’s favourite saying ‘Geologists know what makes the bedrock.’ I’ve chosen it as my record (or should that be MP3, as I’m sure vinyl copies are few and far between) of the week as it will forever remind me of moving day. ‘K’ and I played it over and over, singing along to all the (somewhat questionable) lyrics as we ferried my stuff between F’s secret cupboard at the School of Science and the new house. Enjoy, but I won’t force you to sing along if you don’t want to ! Jerushah X

A challenging week :

 

It was an amazing week, this week – The week I (yes me !) was picked for the University of Greenwich, University Challenge team ! It has been an endless source of amusement not only for myself but also my friends and family... I’ve never really considered myself to be the ‘sharpest tool in the box’ so this has all come as a bit of a surprise – especially when I tell you why I entered it in the first place.

Many moons ago (1983 to be exact), one of our course coordinators appeared on (and won!) University Challenge. I won’t tell you who, as he is a modest sort of chap, but suffice to say he is never allowed to forget this particular achievement due to a group of appreciative students who set up a facebook group in his honour.

When the University Challenge online quiz invitation came a few weeks ago, friend ‘K’ and I speculated about how good it would be in twenty years time if our students were still talking about our outing on University Challenge. There and then we made a pact that we would both go home that night and do the online quiz. Dutifully I completed mine, only to find that friend ‘K’ had abandoned her attempt... However, I received the biggest shock of all when after a second assessment the Students Union invited me to join the team !

Well, Monday rolled around and the four of us (Poor ‘K O’ our current reserve member wasn’t well), assembled outside the ITV studios. We had a agonising wait to be called to meet the producers, only to find that we were to be interviewed together with the Cranfield University team (who were all gorgeous, thin, clever, witty good looking twenty-something postgrads). When asked for our unique selling point we said ‘diversity’ having a good range of subjects between us and a combined age of well over one hundred ! ‘H’ also suggested that the fact that our Greenwich Maritime campus was the only 17th Century building ever to contain an atomic weapon might have some bearing on our selection, but the rest of us were not sure about that ! The interview was followed by a forty question test which was not for the faint hearted.

Yesterday ‘K O’ who could not be present at the studios, had her Skype interview with Irene Daniels, and apparently they will let us know if we have been chosen for the next round by Friday 11th February... Wish us luck !

J’s record of the week :

'Valentine love’
 

by
 

Norman Connors              

             

It used to be that I couldn’t listen to this song without a tear in my eye; it’s so heartrending (all be it in a cheesy 1970’s kind of way).  It was released in 1975 and has guest vocals from the beautiful and talented Jean Carne (look out for a record of the week from her any time soon) !
I wonder why I’ve chosen this song? Has it escaped the notice of the blog readers that it is nearly Valentine’s Day?  All the shops have Valentine’s cards on the stands and the flower racks in the supermarkets are full of red roses. I’ve never seen the film ‘Valentine’s Day’ but I like the idea of an ‘Anti Valentine’s party’ it’s got so commercial these days!  Happy Valentine’s day everyone!  Jerushah X





 

And all because the ladies love : MUD !

Tankerton sampling :

Last Sunday, my lovely mini field assistant ‘S’ and I got up at 5.15am all in the name of science...
And the reason for our early rising ? The time and tide were just right to catch some exposures of 5000 year – 8000 year old soils, peats muds being exposed. We were accompanied by trusty friend ‘K’ and Drs ‘A’ and ‘C’ my research supervisor and programme leader respectively. Plus the very cute daughter of Dr ‘C.’ A budding quaternary scientist if ever I saw one !
We took some cores, but unfortunately the peat was a little bit old for our purposes... There was a fantastic up side though, the extreme low tide has exposed some really cool marine life; bright orange living sponges the size of my hand and the biggest sea anemones I’ve even seen (see photo). Best of all though, Dr ‘C’ noticed a large section of mammoth’s tusk sticking out of the mud

Muddy Medway sampling :

What a week, not one field trip but two ! Wednesday on the River Medway was cold, wet, muddy, potentially dangerous and incredibly good fun !
With Dr ‘A’ and ‘R’ standing on the shoreline, us three ladies ‘L’ ‘K’ and me bravely waded out into the mud to take nine samples and a core along a transect. We did get our samples, but it was rather unpleasant wading up to our thighs in anoxic (stinky and sulphurous) mud. A few times we did get quite stuck, and had to pull each other out, which was a good illustration of why you should never work alone in estuarine conditions!

After we had washed off the mud, changed our clothes and got back to the uni, we were soothed by nice hot drinks, flapjacks and comfy chairs in the Pilkington.
While we were there , ‘K’ noticed that her shoulder was hurting... Later that evening she sent me a text to say that she had dislocated her shoulder as we pulled her out of the mud. I must say, ‘L’ and I felt horrendously guilty, but she was very brave about the whole thing ! Her sling comes off tomorrow...
And all because the ladies love : MUD !

J’s record of the week :

‘Mind blowing
decisions’

by  Heatwave

I was trawling through my collection the other day for something I hadn’t listened to for a while and I remembered this ! Nice sing along lyrics, but its beauty is in the musical arrangement.  In my (humble) opinion it is a genius song of amazing rhythmical complexity ! What do you think is the most amazing thing about it though ?
Listening to it you can visualise some sort of late 70’s disco in Chicago... Tall, suave guys sporting afros and big medallions, and then -   Scratch the record, everyone will gasp when I tell you it was written by a man from Hull ! Yes ! Hull ! Rod Temperton was his name, and as well as playing the keyboards, he was a crucial songwriter in the band. Last year BBC Radio 2 listed this song as part of the ‘Great British’ song book, an acclaim it thoroughly deserves ! Hope you like it as much as I do ! Jerushah x

If you go down to the woods today !

If you go down to (crash through)the
woods today :

Last Saturday four of us went for a walk in the woods...
It wasn’t a normal walk though ! We chose to do a bit of exploring off the beaten track.  First of all (it was lucky we all had our lovely wellies !), we decided to walk up a stream, scrambling over slimy rocks and ducking under low lying branches. Two out of four of us got ‘booties’ as the water overflowed our boots, so then it was squelch, squelch as we walked. After that there was a period of crashing through the bushes, followed by sliding down a muddy bank,  then a high speed run (with maximum splashes!) through a series of big, muddy puddles. Boy was it fun !! I love being a Mum as it gives me the excuse to do all sorts of things that most grown ups wouldn’t get a chance to do ! Not sure how many people of my age would genuinely enjoy getting COVERED in mud though?!!

Twilight update :

Here’s a picture of Twilight, looking so cool, calm and collected. Now she is six months old and officially a ‘teenager kitten’ you think she would be calming down.
‘Butter wouldn’t melt ?’ I hear you ask. Yeah right !

So far this week she has :
- Pulled the curtains down while climbing on them.
- Drunk water from the toilet.
- Climbed the laundry rack.
- Scratched ‘S’ as she got carried away playing.
- Put her paw in a cold cup of tea.

More life in the lab :

This week was a great week in 2011, because I got back in the lab, and apart from fieldwork (that comes next week hopefully) it is the thing I love most about my course.

I finally got my hands on the infamous ‘Hornchurch Core’ that I had been waiting on for quite a while. With the help of my (not at all accident prone) lab buddy ‘K.’ We did some sterling work and put over forty soil samples through the first stage of processing, which involved carefully removing them from each little glass phial and leaving them to soak in glass beakers containing Hydrogen Peroxide.

If you work for the Pilkington Cafe, please don’t read this next bit...
In the course of our scientific research we realised that the wooden coffee stirrers were a perfect fit for this purpose, so if the supplies are running a bit low this week... Only joking - it was nothing to do with us ! Honest guv !

For those of you interested in the ‘science bit,’ the purpose of the Hydrogen Peroxide is to disintegrate any residual organic material, leaving behind only the lovely diatoms ! I will have to leave them in that state until I can get to the lab again on Tuesday, but in the meantime, I might just go and check on them over the weekend to make sure they are ok...

J’s record of the week :      
                                              

‘Annie’s  Song’

by

John Denver

I have an impressive reason for choosing this song as my record of the week. It was chosen because my daughter played her flute in a concert this week (in front of about 200 plus people) and decided  to play Annie’s Song. She had been rehearsing and rehearsing for weeks and all her hard work paid off as it sounded beautiful and went without a hitch ! It was definitely a proud mum moment.
Anyway, just a little bit about the song... At thirty-seven years old, it is a bit older than me and was written as a love song by John Denver for his wife Annie Martell.   Jerushah X

Jerushah's car a great second home !

Feels like I’m living in my car !

It’s funny, I grew up in a very countrified place and lots of romantic ideas about how nice and eco friendly it would be to live in a rural area again.

However, now after living in the deepest darkest depths of deepest darkest Kent for six weeks, I have an entirely different point of view ! The majority of things I need for the masters,  work and my daughter’s school are in Medway and the Enquiry Unit is at Avery Hill. The upshot of this is that currently I seem to spend a huge amount of time in my car to-ing and fro-ing...  I’ve been keeping so many things in my car that it is starting to feel like a second home, and my daughter and I have  eaten at least three meals in the car this week. I’m not sure to believe it myself, but  in the last seven days I spent  over £80 on petrol – so much for my carbon footprint, and I’m supposed to be a climate scientist ! We’ve now got a moving date for the beginning of February to a house on the rural /urban fringe, so hopefully we’ll have the best of both worlds and be able to use public transport occasionally... 

The Ashes  3-1 victory :

Do I need to say anything else really ??!! Fabulous, so few England line-ups have proved their mettle by winning the Ashes both at home and away. I am only sorry that I missed most of it by
1) Moving house just as the Ashes started.
2) Getting only four channels on the TV at my rented cottage.
3) Having an incredible academic workload just before Christmas.
I missed so much of this series that it pains me to think of it ! Still, I did experience extreme elation on hearing news of each result. It was lovely to hear Alastair Cook described as a ‘one man record machine’ by the BBC... He has now entered the realms of the legendary, is an extremely nice bloke (have spoken to him once at Lord’s) and as my friend ‘A’ says ‘no one has a right to be that good looking , except Alastair!’
Andrew Strauss is only of three England captains (Len Hutton and Mike Brearley are the other two) to win Ashes series both home and away.

 

J’s Record of the week :

‘Radio Africa’

by

Latin Quarter


If you’ve read the subsequent part of my blog, you’ll know that I’ve been almost living in my car this week, and depending on my iPod as the main source of entertainment. This morning I shuffled my songs list and this was the song that came up. Perfect !
I first remember ‘Radio Africa’  when it was a hit in 1985. It reached number 19 in the UK charts. I was 11 at the time and had a sneaky habit of listening to a radio (which I used to sneakily tuck under my pillow) late into the night... Glad my mum never found out, as I would have been in big trouble ! Jerushah x

Tez: Living The Dream!

Far flung family :

This week will be a bit sad for me as I will say goodbye to my little brother ‘T’ for about six months. I was very sad not to catch up with him at Christmas...
Mainly because I had a frustratingly bad episode of ‘woman flu !’
I really admire him, as he is one of the few people I know who really, truly follow their dreams.
Since we were kids he has been a professional ‘surf dude.’ Each year he spends six months surfing the Cornish waves, doing a bit of beach lifeguarding and building surfboards to make ends meet, followed by six months of the same in India, Sri Lanka and the Andoman Islands.
When I’m busily working away in my office or lab and the weather is so cold, it always gives me smile to think of ‘T’ surfing on a beach somewhere...
I’m hoping to catch up with him on our last ditch attempt to meet up at Heathrow airport on his way to Chennai, so wish me luck ! Surf’s up dude...

J’s record of the week:

‘Jammin’

By Bob Marley

I received some sad news this week. An old friend of mine, Jim Cogan passed away recently. He was an amazing individual. He was our neighbour when I was growing up and although he had four children of his own, he always welcomed me like an additional member of the family. He was a teacher for over thirty years, then spent his retirement working for an AIDS/HIV charity and various educational outreach programmes. I have one particular childhood memory of a family day out, all of us kids were singing along to the Bob Marley ‘Legend’ album and he tried to get us to define the word ‘Jammin.’ Actually, we had great difficulty and a lot of fun trying and the creation of a lovely memory ! Jerushah X

A faraway Christmas

A Christmas Eve journey:

We were supposed to be staying at my ‘ancestral home’ (a cottage in a tiny out of the way village, clinging to the coast of Cornwall) during Christmas week.  However, my lovely Mum had a few problems earlier on in the month, which meant the letting agency had double booked us with some paying guests... The phrase ‘no room at the inn’ soon sprang to mind as my daughter, Twilight Kitten and myself were already on our way to Cornwall with all of our worldly possessions squashed into my box like, dilapidated car. Poor Mum, she was really upset, but luckily some friends of hers with a spare barn stepped into the breach. It hadn’t been occupied for a while and although it was beautiful, it was soooo cold ! We spent our first night sleeping in our clothes with two hot water bottles and the kitten for initial warmth, followed by : A double duvet; woollen blanket; single duvet; fleece blanket and bedspread! I admit I did let out a few mild expletives during the night, but I did pay for this, as it involved a lengthy explanation of what ‘godforsaken’ meant.
The following morning, things had warmed up a little... My daughter bounced out of bed early to open her presents, while I chose to stay under the bed layers a little bit longer !

Christmas day:

My daughter’s three favourite Christmas presents were her roller skates, ‘Cowboy Woody’ and’ Buzz Lightyear’ characters.  So of course, we had to spend quite a bit of time roller skating... I only wish they had them in my size! My favourite present was the one she gave me, a little gingerbread house tin filled with ‘Lush’ bath bombs.
The highlight of my day was each of us went for a cruise in my step-dad’s open top car, it did nothing to warm me up, but boy did it blow the cobwebs away...
All of my family are vegetarian, so rather than the traditional Christmas dinner we had my mum’s excellent nut roast, plus trimmings – it was heavenly !

The rest of the week?

On Boxing Day we had a bright and breezy walk on the banks of the Helford River in the sunshine, stopping to collect sea glass and a huge scallop shell (with both valves intact) on the shore.  We also found a fisherman’s shed which looked just like the ‘shrieking shack’ from Harry Potter. Our walk was followed by warming drinks at the Shipwright’s Arms.

Hopefully we’ve got a nice evening ahead on the 29^th. We’ll be back in the ‘ancestral home’ by then, plus more family are coming down from London to visit.
Each year we usually have a talent show, everyone has to join in (no exceptions, not even for curmudgeonly octogenarians). There should be nine of us taking part this year. Highlights from previous years include: A knot tying demonstration; re-enactment of a scene from ‘The thief of Bagdad’ and a rendition of ‘Best of both worlds’ by Hannah Montana.
I wonder what will be on the programme this year? Who knows ? Although I reckon ‘S’ and me have got it covered with our duet version of ‘Scarborough Fair.’

 J’s Record of the week:

Rock Lobster

by 

The B-52’s

Rock Lobster, written by Ricky Wilson and Fred Schneider was released in 1979 as part of the B-52’s first album. It had only moderate chart success in the USA, but did manage to reach number one in Canada.
I know it’s not particularly Christmassy, but we did have a fantastic journey down to Cornwall... The majority of which was spent singing along to this song (at full volume), which is a particular favourite of my daughter’s. Some may say she has good music taste, just like her mum!    Jerushah X