I have had a successful week at work, and my course continues to go well. I have arranged with David James to discuss a possible increase of my hours on Thursday morning (he needs someone to do press releases and related work, the question being can I convince him that this justifies giving me four full days work per week). At 9:00 I will be setting of for Norwich Pride.
On the Sunday morning I set off early again (in this case my chief concern being the possible length of wait for a bus), and arrived at the event with lots of time to spare. Not even inadvertently heading to the wrong room for my first meeting caused much of a problem.
I thoroughly enjoyed all the meetings I attended on this day, which included three science based meetings. Paul McGarr was very good on Darwin, Engels & the evolution of modern humans. The chief point of disagreement between Darwin and Engels was on whether bipedalism or large brains came first (Engels thought bipedalism, Darwin large brains), on which matter Engels was ultimately proven correct. Jill Chanter’s meeting on genetics saw me using my IT skills, but unfortunately when the computer went into hibernation during the talk, it turned out to be password protected and therefore I could not retrieve that situation.
My third and fourth meetings of the day were very much campaign-based, featuring Sinead Kennedy, Mary Phillips and Marianne Owens on abortion rights, and then Karen Reissman and Louise Irvine on the NHS. For the evening I reverted to science, in the form of Amy Gilligan on Is Science Neutral? The answer is no – who pays the piper calls the tune. For the first time we (Trevor and I) got to our accommodation before midnight, and neither of us stayed awake long. Trevor was setting of early for an appointment in Lincolnshire where he lives, while the rest of us were all also leaving that accommodation on Monday morning, although two of our number were staying another night at a community centre as they were going to the After Party.
As usual I have some photos…
aspiblog 