Elective: Week 5 (Week 4 continued)

Prologue to this entry: I apologise sincerely for how long it's taken me to finally drop this entry. I ended up having an awful lot on my plate, as will become painfully obvious soon. On that note, on with The Blog where we'll be continuing from my weekend in Zurich where I managed to forget for a few days about the impending homelessness. 

After some more top-class hospitality from Kenji, Anna, and Miles, I got on a clean, efficient train back to the comparatively gritty Geneva (it's not even slightly gritty, this is purely comparative). This was Sunday.

I had been told on Friday, when I was walked in on by the managers of the flat, that I was to call them on Monday to discuss what was happening next. I (correctly) assumed this meant that I would have to leave, but it was, at the time of my return to Geneva, uncertain. Nonetheless, I decided I needed to find somewhere else to stay, and as a CERN collaborator, I was able to book into the CERN hostel in Saint-Genis Pouilly, over the border in France. It wasn't particularly close to my lab, at an hour and a half commute, but it compared very favourably to any private accommodation in Switzerland, purely by not costing ~5x10²⁰ CHF per night. It would do, for a temporary solution. This was my plan and I was sticking to it. 

That was, until a colleague told me that they had got ill and were going into quarantine until they got Covid test results back, and I would have to as well. Hello panic, my old friend. 

I quickly looked through all the conditions of entry for the CERN hostel, Airbnb, and a few hotels in Ferney-Voltaire, and found that they, sensibly, would not let anyone check in who had been in close contact with a suspected covid-sufferer still awaiting a test. I didn't want to impose myself on any friends lest I bring the plague to their door. I had become the ultimate white elephant: a covid-ambiguous sans-domicile-fixe. I knew I had about 24 hours before my colleague's covid test result came back, and if it was positive, my best-laid plans had been reduced to buying a hammock from Decathlon and camping in the Haute Chaîne du Jura Nature Reserve. Sure, it'd be an adventure, but I still had scientific work to do and this was just such a distraction.

Yeah yeah yeah I get it I'm not welcome

After a tense, disturbed Sunday night's sleep, I finally had The Phonecall on Monday morning which confirmed that I did indeed have to leave the flat. Hours of tense pacing, interspersed with visits to the camping section of Decathlon's website were eventually curtailed by a message saying that all was well. I had no specific reason to believe that I had covid. A deep breath of fresh air to my probably-uninfected lungs. I was moving 3km away to France.

This ended up being my home for approximately 3 days, and apart from the long journey from there to the lab meaning some earlier mornings, it was absolutely a-OK. I knew I wasn't going to stay there for the remaining two weeks of my time in Geneva since, while not cheap, it still cost a fair amount and I am continuing to pay rent in Cambridge while I'm here. Luckily, I had another friend from undergrad willing to let me stay at hers. Honestly, the University of Manchester's physics department sends a ridiculous number of people to CERN.

On the way out of my a-OK room at the CERN Saint-Genis Hostel

As far as work is concerned, this week was mostly dedicated to trying to make head or tail of some results which a PhD student in the team had taken earlier this year. I spent an awful long time scratching my head, looking at graphs and trying to explain why they were not more different than they were. I wish I could share these, but they're still somewhat unpublished, so I'll leave you with some gamma spectra so you can get the full experience that I had: looking at a squiggly line and trying, in vain, to extract meaning from it.

Courtesy of physics.stackexchange.com. OK this is Caesium-137, and not the Xenon-131m I was working with, but do you really care?

The week, and my productivity, had definitely taken a hit from my release into the wild, but things were starting to look up, since I had a confirmed place to stay, with the bonus of great views of Mont Blanc (when clouds allowed). I had a mercifully uneventful weekend, including a trip to a bouldering centre in Saint Genis, after not having been bouldering since pre-lockdown. Things seemed to be looking up. For now.

Meyrin's Soviet architecture: the pot of gold at the end of the very short rainbow