The Man with No Time

I've just got back from a long weekend spent with some of my best friends. It's been almost a year since I left St Andrews, but I still miss the people that I met, and the friends that I made while I was there. I've been able to catch up with some of them sporadically via conferences (for the astronomers) and competitions (for the lifesavers), but time's always a bit short and it's not really the best way of spending time with your friends. (Credit: David Brown) As a rule the St Andrews Seacows are pretty bad at organising themselves to do anything, but we finally managed to arrange a weekend away for as many people as we could get. Options were limited for places with enough space to sleep all of us, but my friend Ella's parents were away for the weekend, so we all traipsed down to Sandwich, on the Kent coast, for four days. Well, some of us for four days, others for less than that owing to prior commitments. Even with the dates planned nearly three...

So a new job, in a familiar department, at a university I know well, and in a city I lived in for three years. I've been there a week, so what could be more sensible than taking a week off to go to a conference! Ah, the life of a researcher. In fairness, I hadn't been to a conference for quite some time. I missed out on the large meeting in Canada that many of my colleagues went to, so my last one had been NAM in St Andrews . So after traveling down to London last weekend for Proms in the Park , I stayed on to attend the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) 2013 at UCL. EPSC is a bit broader in scope than many of the conferences I go to, as it mostly focuses on Solar system planetary science, with a bit of exploration thrown in. Exoplanets are a relatively recent addition to the lineup, and for this year were mostly present in a dynamics/atmospheres capacity. The EPSC 2013 logo is rather spectacular. (Credit: isar.cnrs-orleans.fr)

I'm spending this week in London for a conference, so my girlfriend and I thought that we'd take the chance to spend the weekend in the capital too. It was a good chance to catch up with some friends, and to do something that I've wanted to do for a few years - the BBC Proms in the Park. The Last Night of the Proms, Hyde Park style. (Credit: David Brown)

This week has been a busy one for astronomy here in St Andrews. Not because of any goings on at work, but because there's been a big conference in town! Several hundred astronomers descended on our little corner of Fife for the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting (NAM). The 2013 edition (dubbed 'St NAMdrews' by some witty folk) finished off yesterday, and it's been an enjoyable week.

The weekend just gone saw me travelling to a different country. - well, technically anyway. I was in Belfast with a couple of others visiting one of my best friends, Hannah, who moved there in September to start her degree in medicine. I've been to Belfast only once before. Four years ago I went there for a PhD interview, and despite being very busy I did get a bit of a tour of the place from one of the members of staff. Returning was an interesting experience; I got to see parts of the city that I missed out on the last time around, and see the many changes that have happened since that first trip. Samson. Or Goliath. One of the two cranes that was part of the main shipyard in Belfast. The two of them are actually listed structures! (Credit: David Brown)