Don’t hate, donate
Posted by cathannabel in Politics on April 8, 2013
Be the society Thatcher said didn’t exist…
I won’t rejoice in anyone’s death. The best response to Thatcher is, as Alex Higgins says here, to be the society that she said didn’t exist. Don’t hate, donate.
The Original Modern
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor, The City, W G Sebald on April 3, 2013
by Brian Rosa, PhD candidate in Geography
Manchester is a city of superlatives: it was the prototypical “shock city” of the Industrial Revolution, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx’s model for everything that was abhorrent in the industrial capitalist city, and one of the birthplaces of the labor and women’s suffrage movements. In its heyday, Manchester was depicted in literature of Engels, Alexis de Toqueville and later the paintings of L.S.
Michel Butor – interview in Telerama
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor on March 16, 2013
Pierre ALECHINSKY & les plans de Paris (& Cherbourg)
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor, The City, Visual Art on March 15, 2013
Comme je me renseigne sur Alechinsky, sa vie son œuvre, je finis par trouver des dessins sur plans - de Paris (ça me revient : "tu sais Alechinsky, il a utilisé des cartes comme support, ça devrait t'intéresser"). Je sélectionne ici les arrondissements que je connais mieux.
L'arrondissement de ma naissance.
L'arrondissement du Lycée.
L'arrondissement de l'université.
Je trouve aussi ces impressions de Cherbourg.
Reflections on the 24 Hour Inspire
Posted by cathannabel in Events on March 6, 2013
How can I capture that 24 hours of inspiration that we shared last week? I don’t want to forget anything, or anyone, who made it what it was. I don’t want the sense of possibilities, of beginnings, of connections to be dulled by the everyday concerns that have had to now re-enter our lives. I don’t want the elation to ebb away, because what happened really, profoundly, matters. It has to be the start of something, and I believe it can be.
What follows is not a coherent account of the event – I’m not sure that I could provide that – but various sources that, taken together, I believe give a sense of what it was about, in all its rich variety. I’ve drawn this from my own opening and closing words at the event, from emails, tweets, other bloggers. There will be lots more to come, and whilst we want to continue celebrating and enjoying the event itself, we want to start asking where we go from here. What’s next?
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These are edited versions of my opening and closing words at the 24 Hour Inspire.
17.00 Thursday 28 February
Good evening everyone, and welcome to the 24 Hour Inspire, 24 hours of lectures presented by the charity Inspiration for Life, of which I am the Chair. This event has been made possible by the generosity and enthusiasm of colleagues in all parts of the University, not just our speakers but also the buskers who’ll be entertaining you in the foyer, the wonderful people who’ve baked cakes for us to sell, the University services which have been made available to us without cost, and all the volunteers who will be here throughout the event to make sure it all runs smoothly.
Inspiration for Life was set up by Dr Tim Richardson, when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer last June, to promote lifelong learning and the public understanding of science, and to raise funds for cancer charities. This is our first major event – when we started planning it we hoped that Tim would still be with us, but sadly he died on 5 February. His family, friends and colleagues want this event to be a tribute to him, and a celebration of his life.
You may recall that back in November 2011, Tim did 24 hours of lectures solo, to raise funds for Children in Need. Tim’s heroic achievement is the inspiration for tonight’s event. Tonight we have 42 speakers, from across and beyond the University presenting a wonderfully diverse range of talks, going through the night and up to 5 pm tomorrow. We’re raising funds for two charities in particular, Weston Park Hospital Cancer Charity and Rotherham Hospice:
https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/inspirationforlife
http://www.justgiving.com/forTimRichardson
17.00 Friday 1 March
It’s been an amazing 24 hours. We’ve raised funds for our charities, and we’ll be announcing the totals early next week. The 24HrInspire hashtag has been all over the twittersphere, and the buzz has reached far further afield than we could ever have imagined – an email from Iran reached me last night, from someone who was a PhD in Sheffield, and who read about the event on the University website. He translated this into Persian and has been circulating and web-blogging it amongst his colleagues and friends. I won’t read his email in full, as I don’t think I could do so without losing it [see below for the full text] – but just one short quote: ‘When I imagine that in the middle of the night people have been gathered in the Hicks Building and sharing their ideas about various subjects, I believe that Dr Richardson’s dream to inspire people has come true’.
How wonderful that someone who wasn’t even here could sum up what’s happened so perfectly. We’ve been entertained, informed and moved, we’ve eaten a lot of cake, and we’ve seen some eminent physicists in their pyjamas. What more could you ask? I think I can speak for everyone and say that we’ve been inspired.
As I said at the beginning – 24 hours ago, when I was a lot more coherent than I’m able to be now, as well as more fragrant, probably – this has all been for Tim. Inspiration for Life is his vision, and we will do everything we can to make it a reality. He would have loved it all – the talks and the music, and above all the sense of the University not just as an institution or an organisation, but as a community coming together to do something wonderful. This is just the start, and we will go on to do all sorts of things in the future, and in everything we do, we’ll be raising a glass to Tim, to say thanks, to say cheers, to say hello.
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Blog by Chris Sexton, Director of Corporate Information & Computing Services, who gave the event tremendous support throughout
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Storify Twitter feed from the #24HrInspire hashtag (thanks to Chris Sexton)
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Email from Iran, 28 February 2013
Dear Catherine,
I have been PhD Student at the University of Sheffield from 2003 to 2006. I saw the news about 24 hours of nonstop lectures on the University Website, which I believe is being held right now. I wish I was there to attend this inspiring event. However, my thought is with you all in Hicks Building, one of the first buildings that I visited at the university during my study time and I have a very clear picture of it in my mind.
Although I am not there at this moment, I have done a very small contribution to this event by translating the news of this remarkable event into Persian and sending it to a number of mailing lists in Iran and uploading it on a weblog to share this story with my colleagues and friends here.I believe what Dr. Richardson has done is a wonderful and profoundly inspirational initiative, which I am sure will be a source of hope and courage for many people for a very long time. When I imagine that in the middle of the night people have been gathered in the Hicks Building and sharing their ideas about various subjects, I believe that Dr. Richardson’s dream to inspire people has come true.
Yazdan Mansourian, PhD, Associate Professor
Related articles
- Inspiration for Life (cathannabel.wordpress.com)
- The 24 Hour Inspire! (cathannabel.wordpress.com)
The 24 Hour Inspire!
Posted by cathannabel in Events, Science on February 23, 2013
The 24 Hour Inspire!
24 hours of lectures in celebration of Dr Tim Richardson
Thursday 28 February-Friday 1 March
Hicks Building, Lecture Theatre 1
University of Sheffield, Hounsfield Road, Sheffield S3 7RH
Tickets on the door, minimum £1 per lecture or £5 for the full programme. Refreshments on sale throughout the event. Inspiration for Life raises funds for Weston Park Hospital Cancer Charity and local hospices (Rotherham, St Luke’s and Bluebell Wood).
For more information, please visit our website, http://www.inspirationforlife.co.uk.
Email: cath@inspirationforlife.co.uk Twitter: @inspirationfor2
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Inspiration-for-Life/
THURSDAY 28 FEBRUARY
17.00-18.00 Introduction – Catherine Annabel, Chair of Inspiration for Life
Is Science Magic? – Professor Richard Jones, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Research & Innovation and Professor Tony Ryan, OBE, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Faculty of Science
New science and technology can seem like magic – but how deeply do the connections go? New sciences like nano-technology and synthetic biology promise magical possibilities, like invisibility cloaks, shape-shifting objects that make themselves, and miniature robot surgeons to cure all our diseases. Can science, like the promise of magic, solve all our problems and realise our dreams? Or are we in danger of waiting around for magical answers to problems like climate change and sustainable energy rather than doing the hard work of solving our problems with the tools we have? This discussion between Tony Ryan and Richard Jones will explore some new science that looks like magic, but is very real, as well as finding some unexpected historical connections between the worlds of science and magic.
18.00-18.30 The End is Nigh: Impact Probabilities and Risk – Dr Simon Goodwin, Reader in Astrophysics
How often are we hit by asteroids? What risks are associated with impacts from space and what can we do about them?
18.30-19.00 Hope for the Innocent? – Professor Claire McGourlay, Innocence Project & Freelaw Manager, School of Law
A small insight into miscarriages of justice in the UK and the inspirational work that students do across the country in helping to give hope to innocent people.
19.00-19.30 Future Gas Turbine Technology -Dr Jamie McGourlay, Partnership Manager, Rolls Royce plc
Jamie McGourlay is the Rolls-Royce Partnership Manager with the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) of the University of Sheffield, an environment literally at the cutting edge in the development of high-value manufacturing technologies. His presentation will look at the current to future challenges involved in the design, manufacture and operation of the world’s best gas turbine technology.
19.30-20.00 Though We Fail, Our Truths Prosper: John Lilburne (1614-1657) and the slow victory of human rights
Professor Mike Braddick, Professor of History, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Faculty of Arts & Humanities John Lilburne was a radical campaigner for the rights of the ‘freeborn Englishman’ during the English civil war and revolution. He was on trial for his life three times, and in prison or exile for most of his adult life. Despite these ordeals, his central political ideas are now taken for granted, and many of his specific suggestions have become central to our constitution. They have also had a liberating influence around the world. I will give a brief account of his life and ideas, how he came to have them, and how his political tactics have provided a model for later radicals. It is a dramatic and inspiring vindication of his famous claim that despite the apparent failure and suffering he experienced, the truths for which he was campaigning would, in the end, win out: ‘though we fail, our truths prosper’.
20.00-20.30 Searching for the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider -Professor Dan Tovey, Professor of Particle Physics
On 4 July 2012 the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the CERN Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of a new particle believed to be the long sought-after Higgs boson. This talk will describe the background to the discovery and how it was made, and explain its significance for fundamental physics and our understanding of the universe at the smallest and largest scales.
20.30-21.30 Beyond Dentistry: On The Mouth, Kissing and Love – Dr Karen Harvey, Senior Lecturer in Cultural History/Academic in Residence at Bank Street Arts, and Dr Barry Gibson, Senior Lecturer in Medical Sociology, School of Clinical Dentistry
The meanings given to the mouth have changed over time. Our modern dental rituals might be part of a longer ‘de-spiritualisation’ of the body. In the end, though, let’s not forget kissing and love …
21.30-22.00 This is not a Lecture. Stories of Wellbeing – Professor Brendan Stone, Professor of Social Engagement and the Humanities
This talk will tell stories of personal journeys, journeys which have been deeply informed by the storied lives of others. The journey of the self may be to seek meaning, affirmation, peace, or connection, but is often diverted or abandoned when illness or trouble strike. How can we retrace our steps and take up our route again at such moments of loss?
22.00-22.30 From Bones to Bridges – Gaining Strength from Structure – Dr Matthew Gilbert, Reader in Civil & Structural Engineering
Why might the internal structure of bones be of interest to the designers of buildings and bridges? How does the layout of elements in a structure affect its strength? And how can we identify layouts with the ‘best’ properties?
22.30-23.00 The Big Bang Theory of Lifelong Learning (in which Sheldon teaches Penny Physics) – Dr Willy Kitchen, Director of Learning and Teaching, Institute for Lifelong Learning
In this brief talk, I will offer up some of the essential ingredients necessary to inspire lifelong learning, drawing upon my own experiences of working with a wide range of adults returning to learning after a significant break from education. As a jumping off point for my discussions, I will be offering Sheldon some feedback on the approach he takes to teaching Penny Physics.
23.00-23.30 The EU’s Fight against Cancer – Professor Tammy Hervey, Jean Monnet Professor of European Union Law, School of Law
The European Union is a trade organisation, concerned with creating markets and economic development. For a long time, it had no formal powers to develop health policies of any sort, and even now, its powers are limited. And yet the EU has contributed to the fight against cancer in numerous ways, including using policies, resources, and laws. This lecture will explain the history of the EU’s fight against cancer, and outline what more could be done in the future.
23.30-00.30 Taking up the Ghost – Professor Vanessa Toulmin, Director of National Fairground Archive, and Head of Cultural Engagement
From Robertsons’s fantasamagoria in the 1790s to the modern day theatrical horror promenade show, the staging of haunted attractions as popular entertainment has been part of our history for many years. This paper seeks to look at three historical entertainment concepts which incorporate or use as their basis the uncanny, the supernatural and sensory deprivation, incorporating technological practices from the magic lantern, photographer and the cinematograph to demonstrate how the haunted illusion works in popular entertainment.
FRIDAY 1 MARCH
00.30-01.00 The Blues of Physics - Dr Ed Daw, Senior Lecturer in Particle Physics & Astrophysics
Physics can be a great and wonderful joy. And it can also give you the Blues. Fortunately I was given the Blues independently of being given Physics, so when the latter drives me bananas, the former can step in and keep me slightly insane. Please come to my ‘lecture’ and listen to my attempts to keep myself slightly, and joyfully, off-kilter.
01.00-01.30 Deep Sky Astronomy and Astrophysics – Professor Paul Crowther, Professor of Astrophysics
I will present astronomical images of star clusters, nebulae, galaxies obtained with large ground-based telescopes (ESOs Very Large Telescope) and space-telescopes (Hubble, Spitzer, Herschel) together with an explanation of the astrophysics behind these inspirational and beautiful images.
01.30-02.00 Light of Life – Dr Ashley Cadby, Lecturer in Soft Matter Physics
Humans and nature both use light for a variety of reasons. In this talk I will take some specific examples from nature and show how, given several hundred million years, evolution has perfected the control of light to perform some remarkable feats of engineering.
02.00-02.30 How to Make the Perfect Cuppa – Dr Matthew Mears, Lecturer, Department of Physics & Astronomy
Not all physics research is serious and swamped in mathematics! Tim firmly believed that you should have fun and explore the field away from the expected route, a philosophy I have enjoyed following. In this talk I will discuss what happens when a) a physicist starts crossing subject boundaries in strange directions, and b) he gets fed up with his brew going cold.
02.30-03.30 A Beginners Guide to Nano – Professor Mark Geoghegan, Professor of Soft Matter Physics
This presentation will cover the origins and applications of nanotechnology. A working definition for nanotechnology will be presented with examples from various areas of technology where nano might be used. In particular, I shall discuss how nanotechnology might find an important role in solving the great issues facing us in the 21st century. You will be encouraged to consider what these might be. Fears about unleashing this technology on mankind will be discussed, and we shall consider, by comparing the physics of the macroscale with physics of the nanoscale, why impending apocalypse is not going to happen.
03.30-04.00 Pet calves: The science of drumming - Professor Nigel Clarke, Professor of Condensed Matter Theory, Head of Physics & Astronomy
Drums are probably the oldest of musical instruments, and their basic form has changed little over the centuries. In the 1950s a major revolution took place with the introduction of the synthetic drumhead, which very quickly gained universal acceptance, replacing calfskin and other animal skins, as the material of choice. This was driven not by musical benefits but by pragmatism. We will look at the science behind drums and drum-skins, including the way in which drums vibrate, the pitchless nature of many drums, the implications for tuning and the relative merits of synthetic and natural drum-skins.
04.00-05.00 The Origin of Mass – Dr Stathes Paganis, Reader in Particle Physics
What are we made of? What is mass? Einstein tells us that mass is energy: E=mc^2. Basic physics tells us that the mass of our body comes from the chemical elements that make us, water for example. Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen and these are made of protons, neutrons and electrons spinning around them. How deep do we have to look for the answer? The talk presents a travel to the origins of matter and explains how experiments show that mass is not due to the Higgs boson but due to quantum mechanical energy stored in protons and neutrons one millionth of a second after the Big Bang.
05.00-05.30 Red Wine and Tea: Short tales about Astringency – Dr Patrick Fairclough, Reader in Polymer Chemistry
I will wander, often aimlessly, through ideas around how your mouth senses changes not in taste but in viscosity (thickness). How this leads to ideas behind the science of astringency, and how the tannin in tea and red wine induces these changes. Astringency is poorly understood with conflicting views from taste experts, physicists, biologists, industrial scientists and “marketeers”. This will clearly require me to drink red wine during a lecture, something that I often felt the need to do.
05.30-06.30 Elena Under Her Skin – Professor Elena Rodriguez-Falcon, Professor of Enterprise & Engineering Education, Department of Mechanical Engineering
What happens when people see past the front cover of your life? Are you still able to have a happy, successful and rewarding work/life experience? Does one achieve despite or because of our mixture of experiences and attributes? Elena will use her life as a point of conversation with the audience and reflect on various aspects of diversity in the workplace such as religion, sexuality, nationality and gender.
06.30-07.00 Inspiration, Risk and the Politics of Fear – Professor Matthew Flinders, Professor of Parliamentary Government & Governance, Department of Politics
A reflection on the nature of life and politics in the twenty-first century. This will include a discussion of hyper-democracy and the politics of fear in order to carve out a new approach to understanding the limits and possibilities of democratic politics.
07.00-07.30 Gas Sensing Biscuits and Other Research by ‘Team Tim’ – Dr Alan Dunbar, Lecturer in Energy, Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering
Some of the work published by Dr Tim Richardson’s research group ‘Team Tim’ will be presented. This involved developing gas sensors which change colour upon exposure to volatile organic gases. This talk will gently introduce the porphyrin molecules used in these gas sensors and explain why they are sometimes described as being like biscuits.
07.30-08.00 Soaps, Bubbles and Cells – Dr Andrew Parnell, Research Associate, Department of Physics & Astronomy
The talk and demonstrations will highlight the amazing properties of soap molecules and how very similar structures make up the walls of our cells and ultimately help to construct the complex compartments essential for biological life.
08.00-08.30 Health Informatics: Opportunities and Challenges in the 21st Century – Professor Peter Bath, Professor of Health Informatics, Information School
Health Informatics concerns the use of digital information and digital technologies in health and medical care to improve health and well-being among patients and the public. This lecture will examine some of the exciting opportunities and challenges in this fast-moving field. It will draw on recent research undertaken to examine the use of NHS Direct by older people and will discuss the implications of this for the new 111 service.
08.30-09.00 Infinity! – Dr Paul Mitchener, Lecturer in Mathematics, School of Mathematics & Statistics
The plan is to talk about what infinity means mathematically. This will include a precise definition, which leads to the surprising idea that there is more than one type of infinity.
09.00-09.30 We are all living in a Bose-Einstein Condensate… made of Higgs Bosons – Professor Sir Keith Burnett, Vice-Chancellor
What is this Higgs Boson? What does it tell us about the nature of the Universe? Using familiar examples, I will tell you what Bosons are, how they condense and explain the origin of mass in the Universe.
09.30-10.00 Four Candles? Or was it Fork Handles? – Marie Kinsey, Senior University Teacher, Director of Teaching and Curriculum Development, Department of Journalism
Communication is a two way process. There’s endless scope for accidental misunderstandings, miscommunication and just getting things plain wrong. What can you do to help make sure your message gets across loud and clear?
10.00-10.30 A Brief History of the Universe – Professor Carsten van de Bruck, School of Mathematics & Statistics
I will review our current understanding of the history of the universe. But more importantly I will let you know what we don’t know. Many puzzles need to be solved before we have a full understanding of how we got here.
10.30-11.00 Science, Art and Human Rights – Professor Aurora Plomer, Professor of Law and Bioethics, School of Law
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states that “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” I will talk about what the drafters meant then and what the right means now.
11.00-12.00 Seeing the World – a talk for primary school children – Professor David Mowbray, Department of Physics & Astronomy
The talk will look at some of the properties of light. It will cover how we see things in the world around us and the uses of light. Colours will also be investigated. There are a number of demonstrations which the children help with.
12.00-12.30 Birds, Poetry and Music - Professor Rachel Falconer, Professor of English Literature, University of Lausanne
This talk provides an introduction to contemporary nature writing, with a focus on poetry written about birds. It touches on the long history of poets’ fascination with birds, explores some of the links of this tradition with music about birds, and presents a detailed look at three short poems by contemporary British poets.
12.30-13.00 The Human Body: an Anatomist’s View – Professor Alistair Warren, Professor of Biomedical Science, Director of Learning & Teaching, Faculty of Science
Art, science, medicine, literature and ethics. All of these subjects and many others have their own perspectives on Anatomy. These have changed dramatically over the years; I aim to give a personal view of what it means to be an Anatomist in the 21st century.
13.00-13.30 Is Anybody Out There? Intelligent Life in the Galaxy – Dr Susan Cartwright, Senior Lecturer in Particle Physics & Astrophysics
Are there other intelligent technological species out there, or are humans rare (or even unique)? I will examine a number of arguments that technological civilisations are rare.
13.30-14.00 Prejudice and Self-Knowledge – Professor Jenny Saul, Professor of Philosophy, Head of Philosophy Department
Psychologists have shown that the overwhelming majority of people harbour unconscious race, sex and other biases. In this talk I explore how this threatens our knowledge both of ourselves and of many other things.
14.00-14.30 Sources – Dr Chamu Kuppuswamy, Lecturer in Law, Café Scientifique Organiser
In this lecture I want to discuss the tension between traditional and modern sources of law. This is a big point of debate in international law in the context of devising new regimes for the protection of our intellectual resource and heritage. In the 21st century where intellectual property is central to economic and social growth and prosperity, this arena of contestation has an impact on our everyday experience of music, books, dance, medicine, sculpture, health, etc. Culture and identity are being shaped through these battles for supremacy. In an effort to look inwardly at the notion of sources, and why it is important to us, I venture into sources and truth, probing the subjective and objective how this is viewed in Indian philosophy. Chamu is an international lawyer with special interests in intellectual property, a keen student of Vedantic Hinduism and enthusiast for all forms of enquiry including the scientific.
14.30-15.00 Living Matter – Professor Ramin Golestanian, Professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, Oxford University
The large and important and very much discussed question is: How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?’. This sentence, which was written by Erwin Schroedinger on the 1st page of chapter 1 of his visionary 1944 book, What is Life?, describes a notion that is still as illusive today as it was back then. I will highlight some of the marvellous and complex physical properties of living systems, and try to put them in context using ideas from physics and chemistry.
15.00-15.30 Darwin and Sexual Selection – Professor Tim Birkhead, Professor of Zoology, Department of Animal & Plant Sciences
The male Argentine Lake Duck has the most extraordinary genitalia of any bird. The Harlequin Duck by comparison is extremely modestly endowed. Why should such differences exist? After all a phallus is a phallus, and on on the face of it, all serve the same purpose, so why such extraordinary variation? This type of question has intrigued and perplexed biologists and non-biologists alike for centuries. The answer was a long time coming. Not until the revolution in evolutionary ideas, and a century after Darwin, was the truth revealed.
15.30-16.00 Studying the Muse: The Psychology of Creative Inspiration – Dr Kamal Birdi, Senior Lecturer in Occupational Psychology, Institute of Work Psychology
Have you ever wondered where great ideas come from? In this lecture, we’ll look at different psychological perspectives on answering this question, from experiments on romantic impulses to creating machines that make up stories!
16.00-17.00 Catalytic clothing - Professor Tony Ryan OBE & Professor Helen Storey MBE
The speakers will be wearing the world’s first air-purifying jeans, embedded with the technology that we hope will be applied in the laundry process so you too can purify our air. Catalytic Clothing explores the potential for clothing and textiles to purify the air we breathe. Artist and designer Helen Storey (London College of Fashion) and chemist Tony Ryan (University of Sheffield) have been working together to explore how nanotechnology can eliminate harmful pollutants that cause health problems and contribute to climate change. We will explore how nanotechnology can be used to solve an everyday problem. It has been seen by millions of people, and there is a great demand. Of course there are still technical problems to solve, but the the biggest problem in getting it to market is getting past the marketeers. This is a truly altruistic product – but to make it happen might need a new business model.
Finale
Inspiration for Life
Posted by cathannabel in Personal on February 20, 2013
For the last eight years, I’ve been lucky enough to know this bloke called Tim. He was a colleague, and a friend. Each time he passed my office he’d put his head round the door and offer some truly awful joke, or a greeting in French, Spanish or Latin (or some mix of the three). Occasionally, just a rude noise. He made me laugh, but he was also one of the people I knew I could turn to for support, if I needed it. He was warm, generous, open and positive. Tim was a physicist, an artist (his work regularly featured at the Physics & Astronomy Art Exhibition – idiosyncratic semi-abstract paintings, and an installation involving apples at various stages of decay), a poet and a writer (as will be evident when his diary is published shortly), a musician, a gardener and passionate lover of the natural world – and above all a communicator.
Tim had terminal cancer. He was diagnosed back in June, and told that as the cancer has spread to his liver there wasn’t any chance to operate. Chemo could give him a bit of extra time. Tim reckoned he could beat the odds, that the time estimate the doctors gave was skewed both by the desire to not give false hope, and by the inclusion in the statistics of those whose life expectancy was already shortened by old age or other frailties. He found, along with despair and grief, a way of living in the world more intensely:
I’m looking at everything differently with a renewed intensity and concentration, as if to draw out of every image all the information I’ve never ‘seen’ before. The deep colour of the leaves of trees, the vivid green of grass, the happy laughs of children playing, the clinking of tea cups in a café accompanying the chat and the laughter. I remember that I am still part of this world and no tumour is going to defeat me without a fight. I’m sad, yet I’m happy; I’m angry yet I’m calm and I’m scared yet I’m brave for this new challenge that lays ahead.
When we heard of Tim’s diagnosis we had to think about how to tell people. Because it wasn’t just me whose life was enhanced by Tim being part of it, it was everyone in the department, staff and students. And Tim was adamant that the students who were about to graduate, all of whom he’d looked after during their first year at University, mustn’t have their celebration spoiled by this news. Some already knew he was ill, and already feared the outcome, and we had to tell them that it was pretty much as bad as it could be. Students came back in September to find that he was no longer in the department, that he wouldn’t be returning. That was hard, and there were tears. As the news spread, people have wanted to do something, to show their love and gratitude.
Initially this was expressed through messages of support for Tim and his family – it wasn’t easy to see what else we could actually do. The impetus to do something more, something different, came, of course, from Tim. On the day he was told that the cancer was terminal, he said that he’d been keeping a diary and wanted to use it in some way to help other people. The obvious thing was to publish it to raise funds for the specialist cancer services that he and so many other people rely on – and we will. But Tim’s vision went far beyond that. As first year tutor and PhD supervisor, Tim supported and inspired generations of students in Physics & Astronomy. And he wanted that to continue – to encourage people to believe in themselves, and to carry on learning throughout their lives, to revel in the possibilities that life holds.
So we set up a charity, called Inspiration for Life. Tim wasn’t sure about the title, didn’t think it was catchy enough. We were sure. The title sums up everything that we hope to do, and more than that, it sums up the impact Tim has had on so many of us. We’re working towards our first big event, 24 hours of lectures, on a host of topics, from physicists, philosophers, zoologists, historians, psychologists, lawyers and more. We’ve got musicians who’ll be busking around the building through the night, and people across the University baking biscuits and cakes to sell. And the wonderful thing is that we haven’t had to beg or cajole people to do this. The response – from speakers, and bakers, from students and staff – has been so enthusiastic, so generous, that it’s often moved me to tears. It’s going to be amazing, I know that.
The only thing is, Tim won’t be there. We knew he was unlikely to be well enough to attend, but we did hold on, for as long as we could, to the hope that he would be able to enjoy it vicariously, to watch the recordings afterwards and see the funds mount up for the causes we want to support.
But Tim slipped away on 5 February, after several weeks when it was clear his strength was failing. He died at home, with his family around him, as he had wished.
He didn’t beat the odds, as he’d hoped he would. But he’s in our hearts, in our memories. He’s made such a difference, touched so many people’s lives, given them, yes, inspiration. That’s been evident in the messages since he died, so many expressions of loss and grief, but also so many heartfelt thanks, so many debts of gratitude, and so much love, for him and for his family in their heartbreak.
From all of us, who’ve been privileged to have had you as part of our lives, thank you Tim.
Atque in perpetuum frater ave atque vale.
http://www.justgiving.com/forTimRichardson
http://www.inspirationforlife.co.uk
And, brother, for all time, hail and farewell (Catullus, 61-54 BC)
