Hospital: routine now

Hospital was almost a distant memory! The last time we had come in for X-raying some cores had been late February, but since we had been to Edinburgh recently, we had a fresh new batch. So it was time to go again!

I loaded up with Jess. The core sections seemed so heavy! And that would become a bit of a challenge: we would have liked to park the van right in front of the core storage, but some pesky jeep was blocking the way. It turned out to be put there by a senior colleague; bad show! But by then we were resigned to get the cores to the car instead of the other way around. And there is quite a steep slope in between. Oh dear. Fortunately it was around five, and many were leaving the office buildings; soon we had three helpers.

When we got to the hospital the next day,and we opened the boxes, all suddenly made sense; so far, we had only been dealing with half core sections! Of the first batch, we had left the archive halves in Liverpool. So these sections really had been twice as heavy as before! It wasn't us. And that meant we had to separate the halve sin the X-ray room, but well, so be it. It doesn't take long!

So soon I'll have another set of X-ray images, and can rummage around looking for more radiocarbon samples. While already half being on the next cruise in my mind!