My family and I saw a hot air balloon yesterday while playing in the park. Turns out ballooning has a long history in Oxford, based on this BBC article about James Sadler:
Balloon fever had struck England 30 years before in 1784 when Sadler had become the first ever Englishman to fly.
Back then, his hot air balloon drifted off from the vast fields by Merton College, Oxford, early on 4 October and rose about 3,600 ft (1097m) in the air.
Further on in the article it mentions:
And such was the lack of information about our skies that some people thought you could use a paddle to row in the sky.
Sadler had been warned he might collide with Heaven, and that sky dragons might come and attack him.
He was so famous that he once went to Cheltenham in 1785 to conduct a balloon flight and the entire town closed.
Unfortunately we couldn’t really see who it was flying the balloon yesterday. To the anonymous pilot (is that what you call someone who flies a balloon?), thank you for brightening up our day. I hope you made it past the sky dragons safely.
I was sitting in the MRI suite the other day, waiting for my research participant to finish his scan, when I heard the two radiographers talking in the background. They were discussing the various supermarkets in the area, with an intensity that came from a deep and thorough knowledge of the topic.
“Sainsbury’s is here, right next to this roundabout.”
“Ah, but surely you would have to pass an Aldi AND a Morrisons to get there.”
Well, not if you go through this road. Plus, there’s also a Tesco nearby!”
“You don’t say…”
“They have the best offers when it comes to…”
On and on the conversation went. My first reaction was to try to tune out the ‘noise’ and return to the article I was reading in The Economist. “I’m just not that good at making small talk,” was what I told myself.
Then I thought: Why do we label conversations like these as ‘small talk’?
I mean, it was obviously important to the people discussing the issue. And yet, exchanging pleasantries, talking about the weather etc. are all lumped together under the category of ‘small talk’, presumably to differentiate them from the real business at hand, the actual ‘important stuff’.
In all honesty though, we often overestimate the importance of distant events in our life, and underestimate the significance of little things around us.
Take the topic of this week’s The Economist, for example, the one that I was holding in my hand:
No doubt, these issues are important to someone. But who am I kidding? What role do I have to play in any of these? Sure, I may know about events happening a thousand miles away, but what use is that if I can’t even give a stranger directions to the nearest supermarket?
My point is that we need to reassess the balance between what we consider to be important vs what seems trivial in our life. Small talk does not necessarily mean idle talk i.e. gossip. Often, they mean more to people than whatever is splashed across the headlines that day.
Silently, I slip my copy of The Economist into my bag. I focus instead on the conversation in the background, which has now evolved into careful inspection of the exact locations of various supermarkets in Google Maps.
In my mind, I slowly begin to memorise the details:
So to get to Sainsbury’s, take the main road north until you come to a T-junction, not the big one, but the one with a rickety fence next to it. Turn right, and keep going until you pass a flock of sheep…
I am halfway through my DPhil and yet I feel like I have only just begun the journey.
In some ways, I wish I can take all that I know now, and go back to the start of my DPhil. Life as a DPhil student was never going to be easy. One aspect that I found particularly difficult was making the transition from thinking like a clinician to thinking like a scientist.
What do I mean by this?
Well, clinicians tend to view something new in terms of whether or not it is useful in clinical practice.
Clinician: You know that exciting new discovery you’ve just made…
Scientist: Yes? (looks up tentatively)
Clinician: Can I use it to help my patients?
Scientist: Well, this discovery is important because it reveals the mechanism of working memory disruption in cerebral small vessel disease.
Clinician: Mmmkayyy, get back to me when you’ve found a way to put it into clinical practice.
Of course, that caricature is only partly true. The gap between the two worlds is smaller than you imagine; more and more people are becoming clinician-scientists.
My own research project involves studying a condition called cerebral small vessel disease and how it affects cognition i.e. the way you think. I really like working in this area because it straddles two different but related fields: experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
The pandemic put a stop to my data collection process, but hopefully in the next few months I will be able to complete this crucial step in my DPhil. Right now, I am writing a review on cerebral small vessel disease as well as working on some voxel-based morphometry analysis of my group’s neuroimaging data. I pray this will all go smoothly inshaAllah.
Changing seasons
In the meantime, the weather is getting warmer, the days are getting longer, and winter is graciously making way for spring. Yesterday morning, I went for a jog at the park next to my house. In the evening, I brought my kids for a walk at the same park. We went to my favourite bench, said hi to the ducks and gangster swans, and stopped to play at the playground.
I’m going to miss these walks for sure when I return to Malaysia.
They are therapeutic despite their simplicity, giving me the priceless opportunity to work through my thoughts in relative solitude. More importantly, they provide me with the opportunity to spend quality time with my kids.
We talk about school and friendship. I explain to my kids the important of looking after nature and the effect of climate change. In return, they educate me on the various Pokémon types and abilities.
Thanks to their dedicated tutoring, I can now say with confidence that my favourite Pokémon are Charizard and Snorlax.
Anyway, if you’ve made it this far, thank you very much for reading. Here are some pictures I took yesterday of the park around sunrise and sunset. Enjoy!
Imran Idris 