Whatever it takes to make two-dimensional snowflakes of carbon, the National Graphene Institute sure seems to need to keep things cold. Deliveries of liquid nitrogen are a regular sight on my walking route onto campus.
I have never seen snow falling anywhere as early in a year as 17th October, but Iceland lived up to its name this morning and duly delivered, as my first flight home returned me to Keflavik. This seems even to have caught Icelanders unaware, seeing as it caused my second flight to be delayed two hours while we waited, seemingly endlessly, for the wings of our aircraft to be de-iced (“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking…. We are eighth in the queue for de-icing…. [45 minutes later] We are sixth in the queue….”). But I did get home in the end.
The heady feeling of freedom engendered by three days in a row out of Hebden was decisively brought to an end. I had to work — which means, these days, staying at home (it is now over three months since I was last on campus on March 8th). And it was cold, too: cold enough to put the heater on, anyway. In the background, Lego guy turns his back in disgust at this lack of moral fibre.
As someone who grew up in the South but now has firmly settled in the North, I do have a certain sympathy for some of the anti-Southern sniping which takes place up here and which is often deserved. However, on this occasion the reason the papers are all saying how crap the weather is in the South, and not mentioning the North, is not some innate metropolitan bias: it’s simply that at the moment the South (being closer to the very cold air settled over Europe) is having bad weather, and we’re not.
Having said all that, there was a deep, damp chill in the air today; these dogs were not the only ones wrapped up against the cold as the kids walked to school.
Being 42 