Drop everything and plan to go to the Netherlands

I couldn’t get my mum on the phone. That had happened before. But this time, I then got a message from from my aunt Jose to say she had tried to visit, with an actual appointment, but that she found my mum unwell in bed. She didn’t want any fuss, or anything really, and my aunt had to leave. 

I was wondering whether earlier failed attempts to phone my mum had reflected a similar situation. Would she have felt rubbish and been in bed? Unable to walk to the phone? It would have been a fairly regular occurrence then. But she would never tell me.

At that initial visit, my aunt did what she could and then left. But she came back. And rallied my other aunt Len. Jose is 90 and lives on the other side of the country; Len is the youngest of the (originally 9) siblings and lives in the same town as my mum. Unsurprisingly, as it is their home town.

My mum was just about able to go to the loo, but that was it. So she needed help. And my aunts provided it. And my mum showed no sign of perking up again, and being able to make herself a sandwich, let alone going out to buy sandwich ingredients. Or even go to the door to accept a delivery. Not that she wanted anything to eat.

If you are 86, only lie in bed, and don’t eat, you get weak. It might finish you off. So I spoke with the aunts, and decided to book a flight and come over. Was that convenient with work? No, of course not. My week was chock full of its usual teaching, plus teaching that had had to be moved from my period of jury service. But I only have one mum! And she needed help. So I sent a message to my line manager, sent announcements to all students it affected, and to the people who were on the modules with me. And then I was ready to go. I wanted to see my mum! 

Own the night 2026

Last year I joined the Cybi Striders when they organised a run to draw attention to that many women sometimes feel unsafe when running alone in the dark. And they organised it again this year. And I had had a bit of a weird weekend, and could do with a few friendly faces around me. So I joined again. This time alone; last year Neil had joined me. 

The group was smaller and the weather better. We set off as usual towards Belgian Promenade. Last year we ran around Church Island, but not this time. And they organised it along the main road towards Llanfair, and then up the hill to run the high road back to Porth. Then we went down Penlon. 

Group pic

I caught up with lots of running friends: Emma, Katie, Lauren, Louise, Kevin… the latter was not in the best of health and I wasn’t sure he should be there. But it was good to see him. 

I am sure we did it quicker than last year. And that’s ok! And this time, nobody went to the pub afterwards. Which is also ok. It was nice to stretch my legs a bit, with lovely people, after a weekend with mainly indoorsiness! 

Additional medal rack

When I came home from the Abergele 5 & 10k I couldn’t put my medals on my medal rack anymore (I already have two). It was full! So it was time to add a third one. And it made sense to put it below the main one. 

I did that now. It’s a bit busy! But well, the new rack will have to go somewhere. So here it is now. Space for a fair few additional races! 

No Eryri Marathon

My plan for the Saturday was to support Marathon Eryri. Quite a lot of my fellow Harriers, including Chris, would run it, and I wanted to cheer them on. 

It was not to be. The day before, news reached me that the race had been cancelled. Storm Boelo was making it too tricky. 

Storm Boelo makes himself known 

Thinking about the race had woken up something in me. Should I try to run another marathon? And if yes, why not this one? It is on the road but beautiful, and nearby. What more would you want?

I had already decided I should register for next year. But with this year’s episode cancelled, all runners are transferred to next year. I suppose that means there will barely be any tickets available for other people. I am sure that not everyone who was going to run it this year still wants to do it next year, but probably the majority does.

Chris was disappointed. I can imagine! He had really been preparing for it. And anticipating. We will have to see how he feels about the race next year.

Maybe I get to support next year. And what about a marathon? There is also one in Chester. Not as close by, and not as beautiful, but still quite doable. I might give it a go! If I just make sure to have a few paracetamol at the start, maybe I can make it happen without problems with my IT bands. But I suppose I should go and run 35 km on the road before I register, to see how it feels! It it goes well I can probably do the remaining 7k on race vibes…

No more dissertation proposals

Finally it is done! For many years, I have encouraged our third year students to design their own dissertation topic. Initially, that didn't have an awful lot of uptake. The first four years I never had more than 11 students managing it. That doesn't mean that there were only 11 who tried; there is always a fair number who try but don't succeed. Then two years ago, there were too many tries, so I started the rule that they can only have three attempts. Sometimes students would have their proposal rejected, change one sentence, and then submit it again. And that was just taking up too much time. With the three-attempts rule they had an incentive to thoroughly incorporate all my comments.

Last year that worked well. This year I was just too popular. I had 41 students giving it a go. Altogether, I received 86 proposals. And I approved 25 proposals in the end.
There were 31 students who submitted the proposal before the last week in which I allowed that. Their approval rate was 77%. Ten more students left it until the last week. For them, the success rate was only 20%. They really are warned that it is not a good idea to leave it to the last minute. But what can you do?
 

I will have to reconsider how I do things. Having a look at 86 proposals for a dissertation is just too much. This year it was extra bad as I had to squeeze it in between everything else including jury duty. It is interesting to do; some student come up with really cool projects. But I am only one person, and there are only 24 hours in a day. There is some time to think about this, but something will have to give...

More than one proposal involved sea birds

 

Tutorial Welsh terminology

In the run-up to my jury duty some new commitments ended up in my timetable. I didn't really have time to think too much about them. It was two Welsh language tutorials in our marine fieldwork module, that I had rarely been involved with before. There were four students on the Welsh version of that module. And it would be our new PhD student James, who is a native speaker, and me, doing these. 

Beforehand I tried to figure out if there was anything in particular we needed to cover. No idea! There was quite some interesting vocabulary in the module information on the module website, but other than that, the site contained very little information. It mainly referred to the English language version. Which I didn’t have access to. 

I hoped maybe James knew more. But when he appeared, it turned out he wasn't quite sure about any particular requirements. We had to improvise! We asked if the students (we had three turn up) had requests. We checked they knew where to find technical terms in Welsh. James realised he had access to an old version of the Welsh language website, opened a lecture, and started going through it. Any terms people didn’t know in Welsh? 

 

He also asked the students to translate a few sentences from it into Welsh. And we answered some questions about the practicalities of doing assessments in Welsh.

I think it went ok! I learned the Welsh terms for things like filtration and suspended sediment and suchlike. And the others realised the Welsh word for relationship (be it personal or statistical) has no plural. The atmosphere was good. Maybe we weren’t perfectly prepared but it may not have mattered…

Sunny Llanddwyn trip

The first day after my two weeks of jury duty would actually be a field trip. This was the second one in the series; Dei and Jaco had done the first one without me while I was in court. Normally, the first trip is Llanddwyn, but there had been some logistic reason why they had gone somewhere else. So now the second trip would go there. And it's a lovely location.

There was a complication; timetabling had put a lecture to all MSc students in my diary, at 9 o'clock on the same day. Normally they won't double-book you, but this time they must have missed something. And they couldn't move it. It is difficult to get all MSc students together! So we reached a compromise: Dei would pick up the students on his own, and start without me. Straight after my lecture I would jump into my car and follow. I figured he wouldn't manage to get past the pillow lavas (the first outcrop) before I would appear.

It went as predicted. After my lecture I hot-tailed it to Newborough, parked up, and started walking. Once I got to the beach I could see a group of people in the distance, with one of them in a hi viz jacket. That must be them! They were indeed walking between clumps of pillow lava. And I caught up with them when they had only just started to look at one of them in detail.

Pillow lavas on the beach

Dei dealt with the pillow lavas and the nearby peperite.  Then we went to see some sedimentary rocks that had seen quite some stress; I dealt with these. We had lunch on the next beach along, where there were more heavily  altered rocks. I talked about a clump of limestone, and then we went to the pièce de résistance at the far end of the island: the type location for mélange. That is a spectacular site. 

Then we were done. And in the gorgeous weather, we walked back to the vehicles. Trip done! And it had been very pleasant. We had been lucky!