Education, Education, Education

[gnommi]

This William Harvey Day turned out to be the best one yet.

Adam Hart-Davis turned up to give the Schorstein Lecture on "Much Ado About Nothing: The History of The Vaccum in which many things went boom or imploded and much marvelling at his truly traumatic suit was perpetrated. Special mention to his coverage of Brunel's Atmospheric Railway.

The other lectures were all highly entertaining and I actually learned a massive amount. One lady gave a talk that resulted in the unlikely scenario of me understanding the molecular mechanisms of peripheral insulin resistance. Not even 3 years of working in Diabetes and Metabolic Medicine managed that.

The academic procession was the usual rag-tag tale of flapping gowns and our lab (and prosepina, don't think I didn't see you!) pretending to be paparazzi at various clergy and academic luminaries. ("BISHOP! THIS WAY BISHOP, LOOOOOVELY"). The traditional St Luke's Tide church service actually didn't bore the pants off me and I actually can say that I enjoyed a work by Vaughan Williams for once in my life. Dinner was in the Butcher's Hall at Bart's, which has a disturbing number of ceremonial meat cleavers in cases adorning the stairwell and sets of miniature butcher's implements as decorations. We even had after-dinner chocolates in the shape of cow's heads and pigs...

On the late-night train on the way home I was benevolently accosted by a group of drunk young men who insisted that I show us what you got in yer bazooka love. I reluctantly unrolled my poster on TFF expression in the pancreas to find that they were all postgraduate academic medics, one of whom was a specialist in pancreatitis. I actually got more interest in my poster on the train home than at the conference poster session.

Life, as always, continues to be surreal.
Entire sorry story in pictorial format here.