Category: past-lives

When we lived in Canada, we spent a lot of time biking. Road biking, mountain biking, a bit of touring, we were always on our bikes (when we weren't in kayaks...). A recent video on PinkBike brought it all back to us. We sat there (me with a little tear in my eye, I have to say)…

My second attempt at a PhD went off rather better than my first. It was all done, dusted and examined in the allotted three years, without too much psychic suffering. Even more remarkable was that, in a period of four years, both my partner Rita and myself finished, wrote up and graduated. Without any domestic bickering at all (well, more or less).

I spent the period from October 1998 until November 2001 as a graduate student in the atmospheric physics department in Oxford. This all started out swimmingly.

For a brief period some years ago, I worked for an engineering firm that did sonar work for the (UK) navy. Many of the people in the company were ex-submariners, who had served both on the Swiftsure/Trafalgar attack boats and on the Vanguard missile boats. These were all pretty solid people, and I remember one in particular who delighted in telling stories about his time working his way up from a "baby sailor" to naval attaché to the British embassy in Washington, D.C. His most amusing tales included a reenactment (with actions) of the joys of carrying soup tureens around crowded submarines, and the entertaining ability of US spy satellites to dip into the atmosphere to take a closer look at interesting sights, like Soviet mini-subs stuck on their motherships in their pens.

A slightly less amusing story revolved around the hubris of submarine commanders. He sent some of us a photograph showing £20 million of towed sonar array snarled up around a mooring buoy, all because the sub commander couldn't be bothered to wait for the divers to help reeling the thing in. A sad navy man with a big beard stood gazing at the pile of expensive spaghetti, looking like he might burst into tears at any moment. Not the navy's finest moment.

Uh-oh. Getting a bit behind on this 30-day challenge. Time for some shorties...

Not really a "past life" as such, but something interesting I did a while ago that was brought back to mind by the Costa Concordia cock-up. I've not spent a lot of time on big ships, indeed until 2007, I think the only larger vessels I'd been on were ferries, cross-Channel or around the Greek islands.

In April 2007 though, I went to Canada for a big trip, mostly to visit some potential future places to live and work and to attend a workshop at the Banff International Research Station. I flew out to Vancouver, took a ferry to Vancouver Island where I visited UVic (ended up working there for a couple of years afterwards), then travelled east by train. I made it as far east as Halifax, Nova Scotia, all by train. That was a pretty cool experience in itself, but I'd had a wacky idea for how to get home from Canada to the UK. It's possible to book passage on container ships under some circumstances, which I decided to do. It's a tricky process, not super cheap, and the logistics of making the rendezvous with the ship turned out to be a bit more "interesting" than I expected.

I've been very lucky so far in my life, and have had many opportunities to work and study in interesting places. I'm not sure I've made the best use of those opportunities -- there's much that feels unfinished or that didn't quite work out the way I'd hoped it would -- but these "past lives" have given me a lot of experience working in different fields, living in different places, hanging out with different kinds of people.

Blogging is inherently self-indulgent: you have to assume that someone out there is interested in reading your maunderings. (Not really. Honestly, I do this for my own amusement.) The ultimate in self-indulgence has to be autobiographical blogging and reminiscing, where some old fart bends everyone's ear about the "good old days". Anyway, since this is for my own amusement and for a bit of writing practice, I don't really care. I'm going to be brazenly self-indulgent and start writing "Past Lives" articles to see if I can dredge up any interesting memories.