Author: chrisadmin

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.

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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.

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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).

Created 3.x.21

Back on Monday I was walking down to Plagne Centre to get some food for the week. The view above is about halfway there where the track, or the piste as it is in the ski season, turns a corner and you can see Plagne Centre below. A slope rises very sharply on the right hand side of the track, out of that image and as I’d come to the corner I had noticed for the first time that that steep slope had a number of small young conifers. I noticed them because they had a range of paler greens and almost yellow needles that were catching the sun ahead. I sort of half thought of stopping to try to take ‘photos of them but decided to leg it on.

That’s a bit of a story of my life up here. I think of that corner as “bird corner” as there are some mature conifers to the left of the track and above the slope on the right there’s a thicket of shrubs and smaller conifers and there’s often quite a bit of bird noise here and I know I’ve seen a number of species without identifying them properly. I suspect there are goldcrests or firecrests which are pretty special, there are also some warblers in summer I think and at least one thrush species which I don’t otherwise see up here. However, legging it up and down to the SPAR I don’t take binoculars or the camera and I guess I always feel I should be getting back to work. However, I have registered the little area as one a target for my “new life” when I get to that! What the “new life” thing means is that I will make enough time in the week to go out with binoculars and perhaps the camera but with time, enough of it to just sit still for as long as necessary to feel that I’ve started to understand what species, mainly birds but the odd marmot perhaps and perhaps also to get to identify the trees not just call them “conifers” and to recognise more of the flora and butterflies. So this is a “good corner”! (Click to get it full size.)

There were a couple of years (I think it was a couple, I’m not actually sure, when I used to spend hours with two mates on Saturdays and Sundays walking around the countryside near Leamington Spa where we lived. We each had our binoculars and Pete and Kim were generally more savvy about nature that me, I remember Pete was very good at identifying birds by ear and Kim was good at butterflies and moths but we were all three mainly there for the bird life. We were also all three good at going ages in total silence and at sitting and standing pretty still for good enough periods for things to stop avoiding us. I know that creating that sort of still, observant, time in my weeks would be good so the “new life”, as so often, has a bit of a return to an “older life”.

Anyway, I came up by the lower track partly to avoid the worst of the smell from the liberal donation of cow pats back up the upper track nearer Aime 2000. As I walked back up I mentally kicked myself for not having at least stopped and tried to take usable ‘photos of the little trees clinging to the very loose soil on the steep slope. I wanted to share them so I doubled back (finding a little path I didn’t know was there connecting the two tracks) and here you are.

They’re not great ‘photos but I think they do convey both the light colours of needles that had caught the low sun and my attention on the way down and I think they also give a sense of that slope. I was having to pick my footing very carefully on the slope: the soil seems only a very thin and friable inch at most and liable to slip away under you feet have you sliding ignominiously back down to the track. I felt amused and impressed by the tenacity of the little proto trees and wonder how many will survive.

Which brings me to the more grim punchline here. Yesterday I finally put the keyboard aside for 40 minutes and watched Climate change: Europe’s melting glaciers | DW Documentary. It has beautiful sequences of the Alps and, though none of Savoie (it’s by a German documentary company and is mostly in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Slovenia) they feel so familiar. However, the message is grim: that none of the glaciers are likely to be up here by the end of the century unless our politicians really do address CO2 and methane and climate change, unless we all force them to do that and change our ways of life. Perhaps it’s aridity, despite scary flash storms, and “forest” fires that will threaten these young trees more than the challenges of clinging onto, into, that slope. Do watch the video. The voice over is, to my ear, American but the young people who form the narrative theme are from many countries and it’s right they should be as, as Save the Children have just pointed out, it’s children and particularly children from poorer countries (not the ones creating the problem) who will suffer most from climate change. I was lucky to have my countryside in my young teens. What will future generations have?

An odd spin off, linking with a bit of my work at the moment: on the documentary you get to see the subtitles in what I think is Bahasa Indonesia. Climate change is a global issue.

Created 25.ix.21

It’s worth watching through three minutes and 35 seconds of the timelapse video for today to see this through a different lens.

I get along OK without alcohol on weekdays up here but this visit we’ve evolved a pattern of “sharing” drink at at least one point over the weekend partly because a lot of tough stuff has been happening around J and tnp and S and other friends back in the UK. I celebrated the switch from work to this by filling a glass of red wine and taking the three paces back to the keyboard I raised the glass around the compass to many people I work with happily around the world and to friends (mostly in UK but some of my work colleagues further afield have become great friends as well as great colleagues.

So, cheers and thanks to all. (Ouch, it’s 23:40 for goodness sake, hm, where did the last hour go? … OK, I have been working a bit later than usual as J is having a meal with friends and will check in later.)

This morning opened with a lot of haze in the air creating what photographers call “atmospheric perspective”: where you can see what’s further away and what’s nearer by the blurring and desaturation of colours the further away things are. Of course, overlap perspective up in the mountains mean you can be very wrong about how far away things are but never about what’s in front of what! However, this “atmospheric perspective” is a part of the glory of the views up here that I love. So let’s have that header image from this morning again. (As usual, click to get the full image.)

Looking a bit to the side got this.

And in between the air seemed clearer and Mont Blanc had one of its hats on.

An hour or so later the haze had burnt away by the rising sun and I took my morning coffee out onto the terrace and was lucky enough to coincide with a Golden Eagle circling around. It seemed hardly to move its wings at all but moved fast in wide circles, lovely to follow with binoculars but too far and too fast for any attempt to film it with the camera. It reminded me that walking back up from the shops on Monday I had heard a raptor cry and for a moment, breathing heavily up the slope, I thought how that sound is such a TV and film sound track cliché (I sometimes joke about doing a PhD on the use and abuse of bird calls and cries in film and TV). I looked up and there was one Golden Eagle flapping slowly and heading off towards the valley. I looked around and there were two more, not following the first, who was the one doing all the crying. That’s the second time recently I’ve seen three together so I assume it’s a parental couple and a first year young one. All three were flapping, slowly, seemingly heavily, but moving fast. The contrast with the one this morning in flight style was marked but I imagine that warmth this morning was creating a lot of lift so the same bird (species anyway) could fly equally fast seemingly with no effort at all. These are real joys for me up here.

Then it was back to work, not writing R code very well (it comes and goes!) meanwhile the day outside darkened and the idea of sunbathing while having lunch disappeared. However, at one point I looked round the monitor to catch a rainbow, so here it is. Happy hunting for the pot of gold, I think it’s near Plagne Village!

In many ways it’s been a very tough year, not to do with living up here, nor much, luckily for me/us, to do with cv-19. Sadly a lot of that has come on or worsened since June when I did come up here so this post is counting my blessings and thanking colleagues and friends.

[Stage direction: protagonist raises glass again, same glass, little reduced, and salutes the world solemnly looking utterly mad! NO bird cries should be added, it’s mad enough as it is.]

Created 19.ix.21

I could hear dripping as I woke up and sure enough everything above was snow coated with even a thin coat on the rails of the terrace and the slopes around us. Here were the views looking to out on “my” side of the terrace. As ever, click on them to get the full image.

And this was another of my amused juxtapositions of the snow covered peaks beyond the very Aime 2000 mix of concrete slaps and wooden railing.

Walking to the other side of the terrace was equally good:

An hour later the sun had burned the cloud cover away and the snow was melting fast. This is a sweep of images from both sides of the terrace.

And finally, with crummy stability and smoothness of panning and zoomin, you can have the sound of the cows browsing their way through the “button run” slope below me.

This, well the snow mainly, but the cows too in all their smelly, noisy indifference to things, is so much of why I’m here!