Once again, I have failed in my very important mission of actively maintaining a blog. In my defence, I have been away for three weeks this last month, and I am in the middle of moving house, which I have (ridiculously) decided to do amidst a heatwave. The last month has been, however, unbelievably intellectually stimulating and rewarding, so I’m excited to start updating you on that. As I have been on three separate trips, I think I will try and cover them, and my subsequent thoughts, across the next three months, assuming that I learn to keep to a schedule.
So, just when I was starting to get back up this month, the universe has said “no, Amy, not today”, and my aunt died. In fact, I write this blog post on the train back to Southampton to attend her funeral. So I once again have not had the brilliantly productive month I had planned. This means, once again, we have a slightly rogue blog post just on something I’ve been thinking about. Which is, with the local elections coming up, my politics, and how it embodies everything I am, and everything I do.
As an academic who studies past climate change, I spend a lot of time thinking about how environments shift, how societies adapt, and how the smallest changes can ripple outward over centuries. Somewhere along the way, that professional curiosity became something more personal. It began to shape the practical choices I make—how I live, how I move, how I travel.
This month I figured I’d write about something a bit different. Where the previous entry was about framing the big questions (why sea ice matters, and why we should care about its past behaviour etc etc.) this one makes space for the sheer amount of grift that allows me to contribute something meaningful in our attempt to answer those questions. It is about methods, patience, and the uncomfortable (and, in reality, quite boring) reality that much of science happens slowly, incrementally, and largely out of sight.
Finally, a blog post about science! It is rather late, so apologies for that, but it was Christmas and I had parties to attend, cricket to be disappointed by, cheese to eat, and darts to watch. I’m here now-let’s see if it was worth the wait.
I wish this second update was a more cheerful one, filled with exciting adventures and collaborations. That update, however much I long to write it, would not be the truth of this month. The truth of this month, and last month actually (although I wasn’t ready to write about it yet), is far more painful.
I have now been a research fellow at the University of Manchester for twenty-three days. They have been full days: a great deal has happened, and yet they have passed remarkably quickly. Earlier this week, I attended the induction for my fellowship cohort, where it was made clear—gently but unmistakably—that this pace is unlikely to slow. As in most areas of academic life, momentum tends to be self-perpetuating.