Author: chrisadmin

It’s three years, well to about the nearest month, since I put a post up here: Being an artisan researcher. It does feel timely to review that, but for me it is increasingly about holding a sense of hope and of any personal sense I can do anything of value in a world that seems increasingly disgusting and makes me despair of our species and our societies.

Thats a brutally grim start though it captures my struggles with despair that have become more challenging these last three years.

Let’s hold onto humour when we can. That recognition of my identity three years ago has an echo of this:

MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Oh, really? So when I say: Nicole bring me my slippers and fetch my nightcap,” is that prose?

PHILOSOPHY MASTER: Most clearly.

MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Well, what do you know about that! These forty years now I’ve been speaking in prose without knowing it!

—Molière, The Bourgeois Gentleman, 1670 courtesy of thehumanist.com here.

[I confess I was about to misattribute that to Mrs. Malaprop but had a qualm and checked. Hooray for humour, humourists and caring about attribution!]

So for forty years I think I was writing prose, research prose, mostly not very good prose as far as literary style goes. I also realise I was becoming an artisan[al] researcher and for years I didn’t realise it. I was amused, when I got the correct quote there, to discover that it was a philosophy master who reassured M. Jourdain of his sophistication. It was a great colleague in my brief time in Roehampton University, Edith Steffen who became a kindly philosophy teacher to me. She enabled me to overcome my fears of the words “philosophy” and “epistemology” and that helped me reflect about what kind of researcher I thought I was. She must have started me on that track about ten years ago now (wow, that has flown, or perhaps, wow, I’m a slow learner … but thanks Edith!)

So three years on from my belated epiphany, where I am with this identity? Well, I am no longer at Roehampton who seemed pretty happy to let my honorary chair there slip away last year! However, I’m still very happily holding the same honour in UDLA: the Universidad de Las Américas, Quito, Ecuador and very grateful to them. I am grateful for their support, which underwrites the CORE web site and I am grateful for the freedom they allow me, and above for the very productive and creative collaborations with Professor Clara Paz there and with a number of her colleagues, students and ex-students.

So I am artisanal but still connected into an institution though, perhaps tellingly, an institution where I can’t even speak the language beyond ordering a coffee. At the same time, I continue to live half the year in France where my language skills are better but never going to rival my English.

Do those geographical locations link with being “artisanal”? I think they do as there’s something about that perhaps trendy word “liminality”: I seem to locate myself on or across edges, boundaries and this goes for research/academic organisations, at least UK ones, and for research/academic cultures too.

In fact, my “location” in UDLA is only on the internet now, via Emeetings and many Emails as my determination now to “stay on the ground” to reduce my horrible lifetime carbon footprint means I made my last, of two, physical visit there last year. Sad not to go again to such a wonderful country and people but again this is part of my own moral stance I guess.

This positioning myself on edges, across some boundaries helps me another dear moral principle for me: that I make my own decisions and choices, own them and try to explain them but don’t, if I think it’s wrong, just do what I am told to do or what other people are doing.

World politics seem to me to have worsened horribly in the last three years and I see independence of thinking being brutally attacked in the USA, but clearly for the world, by the new president and his minions. As with so many dictators, aspiring, petty or terrifyingly powerful, president Trump argues that he is defending “freedom”. I think that touches my and my chosen position.

I grew up, from as early as I could really understand it, to be apalled by human history of dictatorships and the things done under them, particularly the history of Nazism and other fascisms in WW-II and I know this is one thing that has driven me to my liminality and my artisanal position: I am desperate not to be told how to research, what to do, what to produce as I see that desperation, that determination, as how I escape being just another person who would have put people on trains to the concentration camps or lived alongside the camps.

I don’t think that “desperate” is too strong a word there, feeling pushed to do things I believe are wrong elicits a near physical nausea. I also fear my own certainties turning me into a bully though I am not as desperate about that as I am about being reduced to a cog, a subroutine in some global program.

When it comes to encouraging others to listen to how I see things I am pretty mistrustful of slipping over into telling people how to think unless it’s within a “this is why” thread. That’s not desperate, it doesn’t make me nauseous, but over the last ten years it has made me increasingly uncomfortable teach within institutions that seem to me to lost real wishes to encourage learning, so I’ve largely stopped doing talks.

But I see my idea of, my seeking of, independence as totally different from the way that Trump, Musk, Trust, Badenoch and other libertarians speak of freedom, independence, liberty. For me this is about the reality that my mind, for all I protect its independence, is only a mind with meaning if it’s a mind in connectedness.

I couldn’t think without language that I was given by my parents, teachers and so many others. I couldn’t write code without other languages: without the people who created the computer languages I have used. I wouldn’t have a clue about statistics had I not had a brilliant maths teacher at “tech. college” when I was 17/18 (sadly I’m almost as bad at maths and programming as I am at human languages); she gave me a platform that meant I could then learn statistics. And I’ve learned that from so many others who have developed, taught me that. I think I’ve had at most five formal lessons in statistics over my life so that learning has been almost entirely through their textbooks, papers stats package support in manuals, books and now generally in the stats packages themselves.

In summary, I only think in interconnectedness, interconnectedness that goes back for millenia historically and living interconnectedness through my life so far of working with others. A few years ago now with Edith, currently particularly with Clara, but, with such good fortune, with many others.

I try to repay a bit of the debt I have for all of that glorious input by production: that’s what we researchers are supposed to do: to produce research output. however, increasingly I try to make sure that my own product is freely available. Eat your hearts out Elon, Donald and your sad friends with your protection of “freedom”: I will think, continue to learn and be taught about gender, about sexuality, about culture, inequity and all the things you are suppressing. I will be lucky enough to have those real freedoms of interdependence as much as I like. I think in the years I have left, no matter how much damage you do, I will be lucky enough to hold onto that freedom.

I will continue to produce papers in peer-reviewed journals though I am increasingly wary of the way that most of these journals are owned by a small number of academic publishing companies whose commitment to the creation of creative webs of work seems blatantly secondary to their commitment to turning a profit for owners and shareholders.

Luckily again for me, my artisanal products are things that just need me to maintain (quite a complicated) couple of internet servers (many thanks Mythic Beasts for your commitment to open source software, human relatedness and reliability). As an artisan who believes that real research is about creating networks of shared thinking and information, not about counts of papers published in the best journals I try to expand these artisanal products.

• A glossary of terms used in therapy research. This started as, and still is, a glossary covering many terms in the OMbook but now contains many terms not in the book.
• My Rblog: this is a mix of illustrations of how I do some things in R, a few non-R geeky things but also a lot of expanded exploration of terms and issues that couldn’t be summarised in glossary entry.
• A collection of interactive online applications written using shiny.psyctc.org. So far they are all ones I wrote but that may change.
  • A package of R functions: CECPfuns designed to be as easy for non-R, non-geeks to use and aimed at therapy practitioners crunching their own data (rare I would guess), people crunching data for services and researchers.

Where will I be in three years’ time? Who knows, watch this erratic blog to find out!!

Text and images all mine (header image is from Kelburn, see Ieuan’s first public sculpture). As ever, all released under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.

Created 7.i.25.

About three months since my last post here. Perhaps that’s good timing.

I am in Avignon at the moment where I saw this rather bizarre set of messages on a wall.

“Defense d’afficher” so perhaps I shouldn’t post anything at all?! And what about that first, overlain line? I do like seeing oddities. Here’s another from Avignon. Could be a selfie?

I’m here because I’m trying to be a little bit useful to daughter, S, as she tries to finish her own PhD while also looking after her son A, who had his first birthday here yesterday. She’s doing this while also helping her partner and A’s father who is working on his own PhD in the archives here (and in Marseille and Dignes-les-bains).

It makes an interesting start to the year and pivots me back to January 2024 which started expecting A’s arrival and was then pretty scary as S was so ill and on IV antibiotics for much of the month.

Politics

That brought back memories of my roughly 30 months of hospital medicine 1981-1983/4. The NHS and healthcare may have made huge technological progress in some areas since then but what struck me repeatedly was how desperately underfunded and less humane, less relational, everything is now. How did we as a nation get ourselves in this mess? Of course I blame a sequence of politicans but I also feel my own profession of medicine has been pathetically complicit. Has it been complicit through the sense of powerlessness that the single state funding design, which I so respect, gives the politicians such power? Not just that. I am sure it has also shared with the politicians the willingness to foreground the technological and treat all the humans in these necessarily huge and complex systems as mere cogs, subroutines in the big, distributed, program.

But that’s probably taking me back to things that I have been struggling with way back before 2024. They should get posted elsewhere when I get my thoughts more in order. Suffice for now to say that theme continued through 2024 when I needed the NHS myself. It’s also been true pretty much every time anyone else I know has needed the NHS.

Of course the NHS is just one example, the issues are threaded through all the political horrors of 2024: we have to stop subjugating ourselves to the idea of the “strong leaders” and of individualism. A few days ago, looking more hopefully to 2025, I came across this piece: Americans are taught FDR was the hero of the Great Depression. For one historian, that’s erasure. I really like the argument. It’s a short book review and recommend a look.

A year of two halves

2024 for me was divided roughly in two by a mostly work trip to Latin America in June, hence the header selfie. A return to wonders in Ecuador and then first (and for me last) trips on to Chile and to Costa Rica were pretty successful in work terms I think, though I was definitely not at my best psychologically. The trip introduced me to many wonderful people and a mind blowing amount of pre-Columban art and artefacts. Throughout my career (or should that be careers?) I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had encounters both with hugely impressive colleagues, lovely people, and also for all the other experiences I’ve been able to have that the my diversifying career allowed me.

Thoughout 2024 there were many changes for our nuclear and extended families. It sometimes felt that A’s arrival was of a baby bursting from the waters and sending waves out in all directions. (Think Boticelli’s Venus mutated through Roy Lichtenstein perhaps, oops, sorry, madness poking through?!) That’s not fair to A, many, many of the changes were not to do with his so welcome arrival at all!

That’s all important work in progress as we all get older and not necessarily wiser (I am trying!) nor necessarily more grown up (yes, I’m absolutely not up for that!) So back to Avignon curiosities …

Those glorious faces are actually stacked on top of each other. I think that’s a selfie again but with me in slightly calmer mode and I like the suggestion of fruits to come. (Mind you, I’ve never been able to grow that sort of facial flowerings.)

2025

So what about 2025? Through 2024 I have been trying to make a lot of changes, but trying to do them a bit more gently and the meta-aim is less of the self-imposed imperatives, fewer of those “musts” and “shoulds” and more trying to find ways that are softer and catch gravitational and interpersonal flows in the world.

Physically, I have accepted that my skiing days are over. Back in February, as I skied for the last time, my body warned me it did me incredibly well for 66/67 years but can no longer be trusted. That was followed by serious back trouble for the first ime in my life in July. Fortunately the worst of that seems over and has taught me things that I simply have to accept that I can and cannot do. The skiing side is sad but realistic and overall it’s been a reminder to try to cherish my body’s generally loyal services but to respect it with more exercise but exercise in a new mode without the old idea that the muscles, joints and bones will just do what I want, a spirit of greater tolerance when it remind me of the limits!

There are parallels in the psychological realm to the physical/physiological and I’ve been reviewing my work. If you are interested in the gory details, I did try to make them make some sense in my last work post of 2024: https://www.psyctc.org/psyctc/2024/12/07/what-have-i-done-in-2024/.

Yes, I do know there is much more to anyone’s psyche than work. However, as someone who hasn’t really worked for the money for eight years now, but who still works well over a 40 hour week, I would be a self-deluding idiot not to recognise that work is a huge and central part of my self and isn’t going away. When I am achieving work things I feel good!

I think the thinking does mean that 2025 is going to be quite a pivotal year. I want to shift the bulk of the work I do from clearing old projects and move to the things that I really want to achieve. Those things generally have roots in thinking that I started sometimes even before my first ward days so they often go back 40 years. Some I have been playing with, sometimes doing a bit on over that time, however, almost none of them ever got solid lumps of time. Some of them do have links with my disgust with so much of the way the UK, global north, hm, global, social and political world seems so tragically misguided, destructive (see the start of this above!)

I have no illusions that these projects that I am finally going to be a bit more courageous about, that I am finally going to give more time, are earth shattering. I know they won’t dent any of our political, sociological madness. However, I’ll be sad if I snuff it or lose sufficient cognitive capacity to still work and I haven’t at least tried to take some of them through to some sorts of fruition.

Best foot forward Christopher: “adelante” (“onwards”: family of origin joke!)

Ieuan is our son, previously known as “tnp” here. He’s a versatile person currently doing work in the film industry, making jewellery (here on Instagroan) and he has completed his first sculpture back in the summer. That was one of a small collection of commissions for the “Never Ending Glen” art trail which is part of the annual Kelburn music festival: https://www.kelburngardenparty.com/.

Back in the summer we, the nuclear family, assembled to join the opening walk up the Glen that reveals the sculptures. Sadly for me, I’d done something to pinch both a nerve and a nerve root (collective agreement of self, lovely A&E SHO in Glasgow and equally lovely osteopath in Dalry, near Kelburn!) That meant that even with two sticks I simply couldn’t get to the walk and had to give up about 200m from the car park. That did get me into a wonderful few hours in the double decker bus/bar at the festival and the on the edge of the first music festival I’ve been to since about 1979. However, that’s a completely different story.

Fortunately, with the osteopath’s exercises, the nerve mess has resolved and I’m walking pretty normally again and back last week, 6/9/24 to be precise, Ieuan took me back to Kelburn. We laughed at the memories of him rescuing me by steering me into the bus and could head up the trail. Here’s the stately home from the start of the walk. As with all the images here, clicking on them should get you the full sized images.

You can read more about the house here: https://www.kelburnestate.com/ and here: https://www.exploringgb.co.uk/blog/kelburn-castle-scotland. This zooms in a bit more on the graffiti.

But back to the sculpture. It’s a mobile suspended over the pool of the waterfall at the head of the glen walk and partly inspired by Alexander Calder’s mobiles. Ieuan and I share Calder amongst our superheroes. Here are a couple more of my images. You should be able to click on them to get full sized images.

And this …

But being a mobile, ‘photos don’t really do it justice nor capture what for me is one of its glories: how it fits the setting so well. As you can see with the next few vimeo hosted videos, I am no cinematographer for all that my camera tries to allow me to get motion as well as stills.

There are some other sculptures and constructions in the glen and one particularly that I loved but I think I shouldn’t really be putting images of other people’s work here without their permission so just a few images of nature’s work from our walk back from the waterfall, pool and his sculpture. Click on the image to get the gallery in full size and be able to click through them.

My Email list

I have an Email list that I am starting to use to tell people when I created new posts, pages, images, galleries etc. here on this site. Do sign up here if you’d like to get those messages. Never more than one a month and probably rather less often than that!

Copyright formalities

Created 11.ix.24. Author, and images: CE, all licenced under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.

I think this belongs here, not on my personal research site. It comes out of a longstanding wrestle with “what am I?” and particularly “am I doing enough?” Though I’ve been ambivalent about labels like “doctor”, “psychiatrist” and pretty much rejected “scientist” for all its rhetorical overload, mostly I’ve accepted “researcher” as a part of my identity since about 1983. If I dig back even into my adolescence, that aspiration was there. Thinking even further back, probably from age about seven or eight, wandering across the fields across the cattle grid from where we lived in Kenilworth, I think the fascination and curiosity about how things are was there.

In about 1987 I suspect, I started to see my drive as a researcher as the question: How do we know, or think we know, what we think we do? I think the first time I put it “out there” would have been 1995 when I think I put it in my first web site (some bits of text from then are probably still in my research site.)

I have stuck with that drive. The biggest proportion of my research papers come within the CORE (Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation) system/project. (As with everything I’ve done, CORE was co-developed, see history on the site.) CORE has grown into a pretty large body of things, mostly good things of which I’m proud. However, I do worry about how it can feed into much that is wrong with 21st Century research, higher education, health care, the NHS and therapies so it’s not a simple glow of pleasure I get looking at it.

What else have I done? Well, a rather weird spread which I won’t dive into now but the most recent thing is that I have finally managed, with my better half Jo-anne Carlyle, has been to co-write a book (“Outcome measures and evaluation in counselling and psychotherapy“). I am really proud of that and particularly that we have tried to steer a tricky course aiming the book for practitioners not theorists while not dodging so much that is wrong with current “outcome measurement”.

So I have been reflecting on this history and on where I’m going in the work years I hope I have left and things came together a couple of weeks ago with a little epiphany (I do like the idea of an epiphany, not least ‘cos it’s interesting to separate it from the old psychiatric definitions of “autochthonous delusions”, but let’s skip that for now). The thought that seemed to come out of nowhere (oh autochthony!) was:

Christopher: you’re an artisan researcher! Hm, or maybe you’re even failing to be that, but that’s probably what you are rather than being a more “successful”, clubbable researcher.

(Yes, I rarely have epiphanic ideas that don’t have a sting in the tail!)

Since that funny moment I’ve been turning the idea over and feel a need to put it “out [t]here”: hence this post.

I think this “artisan position” reflects my mistrust of so much I see in that list above: “21st Century research, higher education, health care, the NHS and therapies”. These have been my worlds since I went to university. They’ve been the clubs I joined, but always in my Groucho Marxist way: “I wouldn’t be a member of any club that would have me!” I now feel more ambivalent about them than ever it did. I think they have willingly adopted industrialised, 21st Century toxic capitalist, dehumanising, uncaring ways within my working lifetime.

When in 1975 I went to Cambridge (ooh, very prestitigious; ooh very second generational for me as it happened) to start medical training I dived in, passionately, enthusiastically, believing that at last I was really going to be encouraged to think, helped to think well, enabled to link with many others wanting that.

Of course for me there some mistrust was already there about the elitism, the tolerance of really, really shoddy thinking (yes, even out there in the fens!); the indifference to politics, to wealth differentials, the sexism, racism and so many other ingrained hatreds. However, there was much that was joy: new fields to wander in and think. Back in the 70s there was still something anarchic both in the world of higher education and of the NHS when I joined that as a very wet behind the ears medical student. These were worlds where, provided you didn’t do something very stupid and ticked enough boxes (yes, and I started with white, male, “indigenous” Brit, straight, not completely stupid) you could survive and, if you worked hard then you had a lot of freedom particularly about what you might think, say (cautiously) and perhaps even get time to research.

The down side of that for society was that if you ticked enough of the boxes (public school?) and if you were never going to ask any difficult questions about the ways of the world, the university or the NHS then probably you didn’t even have to work very hard: you had a job for life.

Anyway, I worked, mostly very hard, and I tried to work out what niche would suit me best and, where I found good enough niches (see my CV!), I was given a lot of freedom, I think I earned it. However, come, say 2009 I started to realise that both the research world, and particularly the world of research in the NHS, had been industrialised, commercialised, commoditised and was now managed, not with respect for practitioners nor really for new ideas or for the healthcare needs of the population. I was now managed too often with rank stupidity by managers and directors above me (one of them recently asked to link with me on LinkedIn: they always were lacking awareness of self or other!) The whole club was now to be managed as a hierarchical monolith of acquiescence to the layers above until, now, in the UK, your hierarchy ends with Boris Johnson and the nasty bunch he has around him.

I was slow to recognise the changes: stupidly so. However, ever since then I can see that I have been finding my way to the edges, finding smaller and smaller niches but managing to minimise any loss of autonomy, any erosion of my moral compass or my curiosity.

So now I realise that I’m an artisan researcher, probably always have been, and I’m proud of it. Enough (for now) already!!

Why that header image? Well it shows one niche I cut myself recently and something of the artisanal in the satisfaction I felt wielding the shovel. Now it looks like this:

It did go through this:

And it had one intermediate excavation after that snowfall. Niches don’t last for ever but neither do humans! Onwards.

Created 20.iii.22.

Created 13.ii.22.

I’ve written about icicles here before Icicles, snow and freedom. That was back in December 2019, before we knew coronavirus was about to hit us and the icicles in question were linked in with some not very well written musings about freedom. I see that, despite a global pandemic, my mind returns to similar themes. However, tonight I’ll make this mostly about the icicles and their life cycles.

I was amused when I arrived here with J, back on 31.i.22, to find this outside the windows at the end of the corridor, just outside our apartment. As ever, click on this to get the full sized image.

It’s an icicle, or ice, stalagmite and I’m not aware of ever having seen one before. It reminded us of Indian lingam and turning to my beloved Wikipedia for that link took me to the amazing Shiva lingam of the Amarnath temple which is a bit bigger than this one (about 12 cm high!) but still an ice stalagmite lingam. That one has an annual pilgrimage, and terrorists killing pilgrims so perhaps I should be happy that my own little ice lingam stalagmite is small.

It was a shock to read my post of over two years ago and find that my fascination with the physics of icicles is little changed and that the formations are very similar. Hm, perhaps it’s not very surprising that neither has changed! Anyway, one thing I have realised this time around is that I have two very distinct sets of icicles up here: the ones straight ahead out of the main window, facing (roughly) north, and the ones hanging off the balcony above on the side of the living room to the right of that window, over the terrace we share with three other apartments. Because the first ones get I think less than an hour of direct sun in the morning, and are in effect on a cold cliff of concrete, they can and do survive days and in winter they can die by becoming too big to carry their own weight, or because someone comes and knocks them off to prevent them falling and killing someone.

By contrast the ones facing the terrace get direct sun for most of the day if there is direct sun. Even more importantly for their life expectancies, they hang off over a wall of the brown wood facing of our apartment which catches the sun and gets frankly hot if there is little or no cloud. That must create a strong upward convection current of warm air sweeping up and around the icicles … and melting them rapidly. Here are three images of the corpses (and some smaller lingams/stalagmites).

I particularly liked this defiant but doomed fellow.

I think that’s an icicle that has turned a near perfect 180 degrees as it fell leaving its former lower tail sticking up from the snow around it … until it will, inexorably succumb. (I will check on it tomorrow but I’m sure it will have gone, not started to accreted falling drops to itself to become another lingam: it’s not sufficiently directly below a drippy point.)

Here though is the corpse of the largest icicle that had grown over some days outside the main window. It fell with a bang that startled both of us onto the balcony below.

Hard to tell from that ‘photo (and it was cold and hard enough leaning out to get that!) but that’s several kilos of ice half immured in the snow a good three metres below.

And here’s one last icicle corpse form, or perhaps it’s a way ice stalagmites start. I call these “ice jellyfish”. They happen when ice/water is on the tiles on the terrace edge. I suspect they start with a fallen icicle and drips following it as the tile is just getting above zero centrigrade.

So that’s it, no musings on freedoms and the sad state of the world, nor of the sad state of, and life cycles, of my musings tonight. I’ll just leave you with a gallery of icicles.

And a couple of views beyond swinging left to right, across the valley, Mont Blanc in the distance, Mont St. Jacques just across our little tributory valley and the Sommet de Bellecote.

Created 25.x.21

There was a particularly glorious cloud formation over Mont Blanc yesterday evening (24.x.21) (usual: should open up if you click to see each of the five images full size).

The last couple of weeks I have felt very preoccupied with returning to the UK as J & I agreed I should come back a few weeks earlier than we had thought I would. So much has been going wrong back in the UK that it’s felt increasingly unfair to be up here. Somehow that cloud, and trying to capture it, felt part of the leaving process.

I never really get the colours and the intensity and richness of the evening light up here in my ‘photos (though some are much better than others … those will do!) For once I am cross-referencing this to the timelapse video of the day (https://vimeo.com/638414814). Have a look at the last 30 seconds of that to see that cloud forming and disappearing. I will really miss the beauty and the peace living up here: the stillness and quiet. At weekends particularly I can stand out on the terrace and look at the views and hear nothing but the breeze for minutes on end until a plane overhead or a car below intrude … but even they are quiet generally!

I will miss the last stages of the larches turning to brown and dropping all their needles and the first real snow arriving (though I would probably have gone back before it really starts to build for the ski season, even on our original plan).

It’s definitely moving to winter. The header image is of the first ice I’ve seen. That was late morning on my final walk down to Plagne Centre for this year. For some reason it took me back to memories of walking and birdwatching in the fields around Leamington in my adolescence. I’ve always loved the shapes that ice forms on puddles: it’s no simple process of phase change is it?

A few blog posts back, hm, the 4th of September, I wrote about my almost constant wish to be more productive: I could do with a purple patch and an ex-student teased me about outdoing catholics for guilt. Pedant that I am, I think it’s more puritan than catholic but what do I know about religion?! I’ve been amused in the last few weeks to see how the rosebay willow herb slabs of purple have turned to grey that at times catches the sun to create patches of silver. This does do it justice but it amuses me that it’s part of the patch I used in the images in that earlier post.

I have continued to want to achieve more, and to feel I can do something more about our destruction of the planet but I have managed to accept that I’m getting work done, if not all I would want, and that I am living a fairly low impact life. That’ll have to do for now.

And I’m just going to sign off from the Alps for this year with a collection of images from that last walk. This starts with my exit steps (they really are a bit like temporary steps down from a ship to a little boat pulling alongside), then more shots of this extraordinary place. Then the shift from the brutalist concrete to the trees via one shot of the meadow the cows chewed pretty much to the ground a week or two back in their brief transhumance co-habitation with me up here. There’s Mont Blanc way away in the background in the last shot.

By magic (or was it J fixing things?!) I do have this waiting for me in West Norwood when I get back…

I’ll have missed Seven Samurai, probably my favourite film of all time … but I have probably seen it seven times at least. The galleries and museums in London are open again and I get to catch up with 3D people. Onwards!

One last image. Moon in the morning over the top of the Les envers lift last week (another one to click on to get it in full).