Ouvrir la Creativite

As regular readers with know i have been lacking the blog-writing spark recently. The same has also applied to my photography. I haven't taken many photographs in the last six months. I haven't done anything with those I have taken, bar the few posted in here, and I haven't known why. Phases, lack of inspiration, other things taking your attention, call it what you will. I don't want to force what will come naturally given time. Maybe I have been being all scientific and not needing my arty side... or the art is focused on learning a language. Je ne sais pas!

Today there was a spark of life, wandering along the quayside this morning I spotted several potential 'kodak-moments' to coin a strawberry (frais, phrase....!) from a friend. Not having my camera with me I could do little at the time, but had the opportunity to come back later and with a little pushing decided to head back into town after lunch and see if anything caught my eye. It wasn't going to cost me anything other than time and was worth a wander.

Cathedral major, the sight greeting everyone entering the docks, but not the grandest cathedral in the city

I have wondered if the light in Marseille, being very bright, is putting me off taking photos. Again I don't know, but I decided today to experiment with black and white for a bit. Normally I am a take-it-in-colour-and-I-can-make-it-B&W-later-if-I-want sort of person, but today I didn't care. A few of my images from today should accompany this post. After a while the sun was dropping in the sky and there were a few clouds about and I started taking a few more colour pictures interspersed with the black and white. All in all nothing special, but better than I have been doing and I was quite enjoying being out in the golden hour by the end.

What have you done to my city?

Three statues inside the main arch of Cathedral major

Finally the Mistral is blowing strongly at the moment, preventing the planning diving, so I may have a poddle (pottering-wandering-toddle) tomorrow and see if i can find some moody seas and pretty scenes. Maybe the spark is back for a bit. If I can just shift the backlog of images too.....

Concurrent thinking?

What drives the need to blog? Why blog? What is your reason for blogging or reading blogs?

I suspect that the requirement comes from a need to record things, to write them down, to share. So does that go hand in hand with writing a diary or take the place of it? For me arriving in Marseille was a huge step and the need to write, to record and to to tell people about what I was doing was there. The result was both a diary and multiple blog posts. So why now when I am becoming more settled has the diary dried up and the posts died away? Do I not need to tell people about what I am doing any more? or are there other outlets? Here I seem to be talking to friends online and on the telephone more often. I don't know if this has gone hand in hand with the decline, but this is possible. Just as likely though, is that I have relaxed and so the need for an outlet is not there any more..

Despite the apparent relaxation I am not just drifting along, oh no! In the past week I have undertaken six dives in the sea, my first in France. I have gone deeper than I have ever been, been onto my first wreck (and inside it!), past some stunning scenery (and this is after diving in the Red Sea earlier in the year) and seen my first Seahorse in the wild. Little Nudibranches (search for images to see why!) are getting my attention and the more time I spend down there the more I want to do more! The result is that I am eulogising into my dive log and telling people about what I have been seeing, in French and in English, the former to a certain extent! But they haven't yielded diary entries and this blog is the first for a while.

The mind is a strange thing and inexplicable.

And with that I shall depart trailing a line of ascending bubbles as I head to the next beautiful dive site for another 73 centimes (64p)/minute dive. Its worth it, come and join me!

Gelatinous sampling

As many of you will know I have the luck, or possibly the bad luck(!). to study jellyfish. Among my studies today I came across a quote which I couldn't leave hidden away in the article. I thought it might describe some of the fun and challenges that I go through to find out more about my chosen organisms.

"As Richard Harbison is fond of stating, sampling with plankton nets is akin to flying over London with a grappling hook. You might pick up hats and umbrellas and a few tree branches, but you can only speculate as to where hats belong, and what umbrellas are good for."
Haddock, 2004, A golden age of gelata: past and future research on planktonic ctenophores and cnidarians. Hydrobiologia 530/531: 549-556.

As you might expect, much of my practical research into jellies has been with the ubiquitous plankton net. It is used for its convenience, and often because we are meant to be sampling something more suited to the net, but you are always left scratching your head and wondering what else was in the water and avoided the net.

I hope your work is just as enjoyable as mine and has a smaller element of chance associated with it!
Bonne Chance!

Monsieur ou Organisme?

While trying to book accommodation for a few nights I was faced with a form asking for my civilite (or title as the English would normally say). The options were:

Monsieur

Madame

Mademoiselle

Organisme

No choice of Docteur, but I think I certainly qualify as an organism....

Bonne journee Monsieur et Madames,
A bientot,
Organisme Martin

Essentials of Marseille

Well as you might have guessed the blogging has lapsed as other things have taken control of my new life. On the accommodation front I spent a week in a hostel in town with a night in a hotel because the hostel was booked. By the end I was glad to move out of a room that I shared with people and got woken at night into a single room in an international hall of residence which is where I am now. The postgrads who live here are a generally quiet and friendly bunch. There isn’t the sociableness that the hostel provided but I can spend more time cooking in the evenings and relaxing. There are downsides though, not having wifi and the internet really cuts down your options when you are in a new place and generally alone. Life is difficult certainly. However there has been a particular person who translated for me initially and has been a good companion in the evenings. Unfortunately she leaves at the end of this week. Hopefully other people will continue to fulfil the role...

Marseille as a place can be summed up in a few lines for me. This may be true for many urban areas too, but new for me.

1)      Cosmopolitan, multiple races and origins of the people. This makes for little communes and centres of population.

2)      The Calanques - the national park on the outskirts of the city divides the city from the natural coastline, in contrast to the urbanised section around the city itself. The Calanques become infested by people at the weekend and bank holiday and lose much of their dry, limestone, charm at this point. You can get away from people but it is a lot harder and less appealing than Snowdonia for instance..

3)      The Urban Commute. I am still staggered how it can take anything from 35 mins to an hour to go about 6km to the campus each day. Relying on two metro lines and a bus route there are numerous combinations which can save a few minutes here or there, but despite going against the main commuter flow it takes an age! Maybe this should be a good time for reading and relaxing, but it certainly makes it harder to stay late in the office…

4)      Commercial centres. I was told that Marseille has over 300 commercial centres. This seems to be true, every so often there is a cluster of shops, a bakery, a tabac, and various others on a couple of street corners. It is just as if a small village had been enclosed in the city, but they are much closer together than British villages or even estates. It does mean that will very little planning you can pick up a baguette or croissant almost anywhere you are..

5)      Finally I have to say the traffic. Stationary or moving, car or motorbike, there is an awful lot of vehicles on the roads. There is a good system for regular bike rental, but not enough people use them as far as I see. The Metro, trams and buses run well too and at times appears close to capacity, but the cars outnumber them.

On this last point. Is it possible to do without a car in Marseille? In the city, yes definitely. But as an outdoor person, I am less sure. I am wondering how long the abilities of the city to satisfy me are going to last. I guess day trips into the surrounding towns may also do an exploratory job too, but to get to the places in between or in the wilds, difficult. Again this is something I need to explore. How easy is it to rent a vehicle to come and go as I please?

One thing at a time, I need to find permanent accommodation first and make a choice about how long a commute I am willing to make. Maybe for a better place to stay, that is furnished the commute will have to remain. Difficult choices to be made. The job is enjoyable, now I just need to settle myself for the evenings and weekends. 

Where next?

Holidays are coming...
For you and for me
For one, the Mountains
For the other, the sea

Why have a British holiday
When Greece you could go?
It really depends if you need
The sun or the snow!

(c) Martin Lilley 15/3/10

With the submission of my PhD I have been lacking the rhyming touch, this one above was written a while ago. Still I would much prefer to be relaxed and not rhyming than working too hard and needing an outlet to my thoughts.

So with submission comes the prospect of what to do next. Thankfully for the moment I can sit back and relax, enjoy my working holiday and gradually come to terms with the future. None-the-less in a couple of months I will know if i have achieved my doctorate and be contemplating jobs. So what does an out of work Marine Biologist do? Do i look for science jobs, for marine jobs, for voluntary jobs?, for anything?

Personally the choice has to come between an academic post and a commercial one.. While voluntary and taking a break from science are attractive they certainly can't be long-term aims. So..., to continue at university and pursue post-doctoral positions or look for something more applied.

Currently I am looking towards the commercial aspect mainly because I don't feel that the university environment has enough funding to support a practical person and hence the need to move on somewhere else. Alternatively I could change the way I work to adapt to the university environment.. but for the present I don't feel that is a worthwhile option. All in all I am currently planning which companies to apply to with my CV and see if they show any interest. Some have suitable roles going on a 'until they are filled' basis, while others suggest that speculative CVs will be put on file until such time as they are looking for a suitable candidate.

All in all I don't know what the future holds, but I'm sure it will be interesting.

Thought for Today

Far from the maddening crowd
All alone, high on a Cloud
Sitting, thinking, watching it all
Don't upset the balance, 'else you'll fall.

Forget the future, the past has gone,
Today is the thing, live it in song.
Enjoy the present, while you can,
Tomorrow's a new chapter, in our life-span.

(c) Martin Lilley 18/4/10