My signature dish turned out worse than cat vomit

Something is going wrong with my cooking. It is not brilliant at the best of times but in the last few days it's reached a new low. I am visiting my mum in Northern Ireland and normally she is more than happy for me to take over the cooking duties. This visit, she's grown more wary of the dishes served up. Even meals that I normally produce regularly, mistake free, are failing in dramatic form. For example, I make a make a meat kebab that usually goes down a treat. Despite loads of onions, coriander, mince, egg, seasoning this kebab came out like small wooden brown logs/turds, so dried they made a ringing noise when hit against the plate. My vegetable soup, I mean how does one mess that up? lasted an embarrassingly long time and I could see my mother found the green tasteless mush  a mighty challenge. But it was my quinoa that outdid all of the above. I got the recipe from a friend in Malta and it has always been easy to make and much appreciated by guests and family. This visit I watched family members push the stuff around their plates with obvious reluctance. My brother refused to eat any of it and my brave mother tried to consume a few tiny spoonfuls. I was feeling overly sensitive, when my cousin arrived that evening for surprise visit, and I challenged her with “Del,  if you love me you eat it!” Not even a cousin’s love held up under her inspection of the dish. I ended up eating gallons of stuff myself and then upended the remaining quantity for the birds outside. A week later I spotted this on the path, exactly where I had thrown it. My brother pointed out that the birds will eat his cat’s vomit (he has five) but they will not tackle my quinoa!

Making Failure An Art Form - or falling with style

I have come to momentous moment in my life. At this stage, when there are no longer children around to focus on it is time to examine oneself with clarity.  To see where I have come from, where exactly I am now and hopefully to look forward to the path ahead. It is a eureka moment indeed to reflect on life. What one has achieved, or hasn’t.  What choices lead to which results. It looks a bit like an underground tube station map. There are main lines along which one has spent a disproportionate amount of energy and time. Then, there are the numerous dead ends. Lines that seem to beckon appealingly but end nowhere. Here are a few.

My unproductive knitting hobby. I never managed to finish single item. I even had a knitting machine with which I wrestled but produced nothing of value.  Looking back at primary school we had to knit a cushion cover. It took an entire year. Those were the days when the whole class would sit obediently knitting in complete silence for an hour a day. Educationalists would hold their heads in outrage at the waste of time it entailed.  The lack of academic content. Question the learning objectives and value of skills acquired. Point out the demanded silence was a form of abuse against talkative young eager minds. But if I'm honest I enjoyed knitting more than almost all my other classes.  There was a meditative silent stillness in the room. Just a click click of needles. You knew the task. The method was straightforward and when you returned to your work you could see visible progress each day. It achieved something. Your brain could find a stillness in the moment.  In the year, I almost finished my cushion cover. My tendency to knit tighter and tighter until the needles could barely get through the stitches meant I had a lot of ripping out and re-doing to do. My cushion cover which started almost a foot wide gradually narrowed down to 2/3 of its original width. This was disappointing but accepted as part of the journey. The knitting class became a metaphor for the rest of life. Sometimes you make a pigs ear out of things and have to go back to fix it. It's okay you get better each time you repeat something. Spotting a slip earlier rather than later helps. Missing a single stitch is not an option. You have to keep each and every one to have success. Don't waste time comparing your cushion cover with others. You'll be devastated by how far ahead they’ve got and what nicer colours they’ve chosen.  

My failed martial arts ability. Fuelled by movies I was convinced that I could get my black belt and go through life confident in every situation. It did make me fitter but I got no further than the yellow belt. That is not something one can boast or swagger about.  The kata were wonderful. I would go to an empty gym near my home and put on a cassette player (yes, that far back) and do the karate moves hypnotically until it felt as meditative as the knitting. I did not like spar fighting. It involves being punched and kicked and I was fearful of both. For some reason I was usually paired with a curly haired tough looking girl who would fight arms flailing like a paddle steamer round and round. It was impossible to block those blows as we been taught in karate and so I'd spend an inordinate amount of the fight running backwards around the mat. Fortunately, she wasn’t fit and usually ran out of steam before she could do me much harm. I learnt a lot. I do not like to be hurt and did not enjoy hurting others. So it was worth all the years of classes and is a somewhat valuable dead-end.

My inability to lose weight. I have kept diaries almost all my life and at the top from the very earliest I have recorded my weight in stones and pounds with despair. I look back at those weights with longing and wonder why on earth I obsessed about it.  If I knew then what I know now, I would have chilled out about being 10 stone. Now I dream of being under 11 stone. Elderly aunts used to say I had big bones, it drove me mad as an adolescent. I reckoned there were big dinosaur girls like me and other tiny fragile girls. I with my big bones obviously belong to the former group. These tiny birdlike aunts belonged to the latter category. I often broke things, handles off doors, cups, even windows and was terrified I might injure these elderly visitors with their matchstick arms, legs and necks. But they were tougher then they seemed and made me feel guilty and awkward. When today, I look at magazine covers of slim women staring out with razor cheekbones at slender bodies, I realise that such shapes are more appreciated than my broader lines. As a tall,sturdy, Yorkshire police woman friend of mine once moaned “if I'm reincarnated, I'm coming back as one of those butterfly women whose cases others have to carry!”  While there is genuine despair at the yearly expansion of quantity, regarding fat, perversely I'm infinitely grateful for being able to haul heavy gas cylinders up flights of stairs. After all quality (strength) trumps quantity (of fat content) every time.

My last dead end is an inner critical voice.   This strident voice has been heard echoing  through the decades. “You'll never pass, achieve or amount to anything!” How many initiatives died a death under the whithering machine gun of its cutting comments. Instead of pressing on to finish that knitting, get that black-belt or lose that weight I succumbed to that sneering tone of derision from within and gave up. If someone else voiced such hurtful jibes I'd respond with righteous contempt. But when that voice comes from deep inside your own brain your heart goes out of any enterprise. So having reflected on the past with clarity, my eureka moment was finding out that every path and turn has been plagued by an unnecessarily negative companion. As a dear friend Eleni announced when she returned from a weeks holiday in Paris with her husband. “He spent the whole time complaining about the price of coffee, bread, train tickets, taxis and the hotel room. As we walked down the Champs-Elysees, he whined about missing his own bed!”  She decided that this was the last holiday she would ever go with him. When I tried to remonstrate with her she became more emphatic.  “I mean it, if he's going to heaven I'm choosing hell. If he is going to Hell then I better be in heaven. In fact, heaven is going anywhere where he is not.” Her exasperation was excessive but she made a point that resonates.  So on careful reflection I’ve decided to be equally callous with my inner critic.  It is not a voice of humility nor does it provide an analytical perspective. It has to go! How to shut it up, is the tricky thing? At least, the direction ahead is clear. I'm excited about the future that could be mine, if like a stubborn nose polyp, this useless vocal appendage can be excised at last. 

DRAGGING MY ENTRAILS BEHIND ME

It was crazy really my being here in Brussels. Once, I had been a scientist but had no justification as masquerading as one now.   Twenty years of child rearing, part-time education stuff all did not serve to keep the physics I once knew fresh and updated. Escaping to a Greek island for almost a decade, now felt ridiculously arty and unforgivable.  The only reason I was here at all was due to legislation recently passed requiring all EU funding panels to have 40% women at least.  Scrambling to find enough female physicists my application had wound its way through because of mutual desperation. They were destitute of women physicists and I was eager to earn money. It was marriage of necessity not love.  Both parties were worldly wise and cynical about the whole seedy affair. My goal was to do the job. Sit on a science funding panel and make decisions as to which application got EU backing.  With luck I could return home unscarred and financially better off.  It is a little known fact that when you live on an island in the Mediterranean and get employed in northern times even a part-time salary is rich pickings compare to locals earnings.  I had managed to pull of my first session as an independent science adviser for the EU in Brussels two years previously and did what was expected despite my misgivings so that made the whole trip this time less crazy. Not wanting to fall victim to the rip-off prices of Brussels hotels I stayed not in the luxury hotel complexes but a dire section of Brussels in a real armpit of a hotel.  It felt tricky but with a bit of luck I felt I could do this once again.

Administrators Rule the world

EU funding in the science field is decided by panels of independent science advisers who come from all over Europe to consult together as to the worth of online applications for funding.  Having had a chance, at home, to mark these applications online against the grading criteria set up by the EU funding regulations this week in Brussels was about us reaching agreement in panels of three members face-to-face. We may have been using the same criterion but, human nature being diverse, scientists in the room can have endless takes on the benefits of proposals. At times I felt strangely heartened as many of my intuitive feelings about proposals seems spot-on.  For example, one excellent applicant seemed well-qualified had superb references, international experience in impressive labs, but I queried the fact that with all these periods in state of the art research establishments the applicant had never built on or maintained any relationships with the previous research groups. To me I smelt a rat.  He was either as odd as can be or quite deeply unpleasant neither of which characteristics is worthy of funding for yet another expensive research study abroad. The goal was to send good minds abroad to a 4 star research establishment so that they could bring their excellence back into the EU.  Sending a brilliant but socially handicapped one would be a waste of limited resources. If he hadn't got on with the group in CERN, Tokyo or Copenhagen odds were he would also fall out with the Americans. Given that I did use this all from an application written by the guy it pleased me no end when my colleagues on the panel who knew the applicant bore out my initial misgivings. I told myself that even if my physics was rusty my intuition had not atrophied and was surprisingly spot on. My confidence grew when on the third day I went through another application.  I spotted beneath the wording on computer simulation activities in the project that this person actually was going to China and intended running a nuclear power plant in critical mode to test the strength of the computer model he had designed.  I had a meeting with the French nuclear physicist a fellow panel member who was convinced the whole project was merely a software simulation. After two hours of poring over the proposed he started cursing in French as he realised this applicant actually wanted funding from the EU to deliberately run a real nuclear reactor into critical mode. He'd obviously already got permission from the Chinese authorities to use one of their plants. The two of us informed the ethical committee of our anxiety and moral issues with this plan which we both felt should and could never be EU funded. That evening as I made my way through the grubby hotel lobby I felt like Clint Eastwood when he’s saved the day.  Fool, fool!  Little did I know the humiliation that was only a day or two away.

Dragging my entrails behind me

Each group in Brussels has a team of administrators who have grown in influence and number, seeing to their needs, directing events, providing training etc  These bureaucrats are seriously worried that scientists will get them into trouble.  So having learned from past disasters think of new more complicated hoops to protect themselves from complaints/criticism or litigation. With each year the list of requirements grew ever more onerous.  This particular year they had decided that when submitting the final reports we should not mention any names of people involved.  Obviously, there was too much chance of someone saying “Charlie has not enough experience.”  When perhaps the applicants name was Charlene.  Such mistakes suggest to the applicant that a complete idiot has read their time consuming thirty page application form and make them question the EU’s ability to make coherent and fair decisions.  Equally unforgivable is not naming the research group correctly, either the one the applicant comes from or the place where they wish to travel to.  So all names of research venues had to be eliminated as well.  Given that previous reports had claimed that certain qualifications were not sufficient to justify funding no mention of qualifications, geographical or institutional should be included either.  Projects themselves should not be mentioned in final reports either because a report mentioning spin coupling is a worthy direction to fund could inadvertently show that the report writer had no notion of the actual project intent.  So there you have it the final report on each applicant had to consist of vague statements that stayed clear of science/activity/applicant/research purpose or place/qualifications/names of referees etc.  So bland and uniform did these final documents become that I could not even identify which original project there were detailing.  That may seem entirely reasonable to you but in the world of physics the landscape is sufficiently small that internationally and good physicist in the field will know by name the good research groups and what they specialize in.  Leaders in various fields will be known for their strengths and weaknesses much as football supporters will tell you the names of players on various teams.  I know no footballers names nor physicists.  I am blissfully ignorant of research teams and so when it came to the final plenary session I came to it ill prepared and virtually illiterate.  The previous plenary a couple of years before had only dwelt on the top twenty projects which would receive funding and since none of the projects I had been involved in had reached this stage it seemed I could relax.  We were instructed  to get rid of our papers and notes on the applications.  So I had shredded all my painstaking background research into the quality of publications, research groups etc  Because I knew nothing I had to do a lot more digging to find information.  Once all this was disposed off the only thing we were asked to keep was our final reports that would be sent to participants.  These vague stripped reports meant nothing to me and as I sat there with only these bland musings on my lap I felt the beginning of fear.  Last time only the top funded projects were picked out at random for the experts to speak to as to why they awarded funding to this project.  But the bureaucrats had the last laugh, they had changed the format and projects both passed and rejected were pulled at random from the mix and experts would have to defend/explain their decision.  I remember looking around in distress as one by one projects were called out and experts got their feet to eloquently explain what the project was about and its strengths and weaknesses.  Sweat broke out on my brow as I carefully examined the bland stripped moronic reports about my projects on my lap.  With no name whatsoever there was nothing to distinguish one from another.  I wanted to scream and sank lower in my chair as expert after expert got to their feet and elaborated on their projects.  Shit! shit! Shit!  I write these three times because three times my projects were picked at random and three times I rose to my feet among my peers and stood like an Irish version of Mr Bean describing that work of art as a large painting. 

The humiliation even as I write this comes back to haunt me and I blush in memory of that fateful afternoon.  I returned home humiliated beyond words and am reasonably sure my name is recorded and retold in physics circles and throughout Europe as the independent science adviser who could not remember one solitary fact about any of her projects for which she was responsible.  That might as I checked out of my dismal hotel it was with a deep inner conviction that I deserved such a zombie landscape.  In the words of Buzz Light Year, “One minute you are a superhero and the next you are supping down Darjeeling” and feeling an utter moron!