My Ada Lovelace timeline blog

Today, 24 March, don't wonder
whether women do science and technology
today, on Ada Lovelace day, we celebrate
our community by honouring those
who helped us know


I draw a line from a time before
I ever thought of being an engineer,
Vaughan King inspired me
to use learning to support my world
when all else was so chaotic


Then with feminism came
the glorious Women in Manual Trades
like me they'd battled through skillcentres
borne the pain of unfair treatment
and raised wild songs to keep us strong


Peggy Seeger made my anthem
'I'm gonna be an engineer'
and I didn't believe it
until , 27 years later,
I finally became chartered


So now the line goes on
my goddaughter, Alexia, in France,
is studying engineering
an Olympian of maths
and of champagne physics


Today don't wonder whether women
are scientists and engineers
follow Ada Lovelace blogs,
and look around you
we hold up half the sky

LMC24Mar10

Murder in Samarkand

How inconvenient,
our Ambassador in Tashkent has complained,
on behalf of her Majesty, about Uzbeki human rights
about Tajiks boiled alive and their
dubiously wrought confessions
being used in the war on terrorism.

A solution will be found,
Foreign office legal advisers will declare
we are not in contravention
of international law on human rights,
but will reserve their position on
the morality of our complicity in the act.

A reason will be given
for sacking troublesome diplomats.
No question is allowed into the means,
for State-sponsored terror
in this unholy war; truth
is insignificant in their reckoning.

and all this is absolutely necessary
in the interests of democracy,
this re-descent into Tudor barbarity
is meant to convince
the enemies of freedom of
the justice of our cause.

LMC 20 Feb 2010 on listening to David Hare's play "Murder in Samarkand"

Vaughan King, for Ada Lovelace Day

To look at, a classic little old lady.
But she graduated in chemistry
from Cambridge, aged 18
and worked in the early days of Kodak.

Me she taught to persevere,
the value of study and of
adding bay and thyme to stews.
She was my friend.

Taj Mahal

Aged four I had

Its picture on my wall

Cut from some cereal packet

but them forgot that till,

some 46 years later,

my heart stopped,

simply stopped and

missed a beat

as I turned under

its red brick arch and

saw its white jewelled beauty

for the first time

and remembered

My Mother's Garden

The peony's growing on blackened soil
Your gardener's faith is that
you can ignore the rot
and still it will bloom scarlet


the roots are tangled
sometimes I just want to lift and split
bring in clean air,
replant and start afresh

for that I need you to say
sorry for your failures, with no
angry guilt, so I can start
forgiving you, while you're still here

auto-epitaph

I’m gone

And if you can think of me

As always reaching further

Know this

I’ll try and find out

What happens next.

Terry called it

The Collis catastrophic effect

Always taking every experiment

Just one step further

But the outcome

Sometimes worked out right

The best evidence

Of underlying good sense

Breaking surface madness

Is Brian

Whom I recognised, and then just stopped

from slipping through my fingers

And, if going on

To my personal interview

With the silver sickle

Leaves a choice

Can I let go

a final time? You’ll know.

For my cousin

And so my naive cousin, what will you do
when all the bluster of your chosen party
simply doesn't restore your rights
and you find it's the fat cats, not the immigrants
who've taken them all away?

will you then say that, with jobs so scarce
that only men should work
and steal from me, from your wife
and from your daughters what you
now would take out of your neighbours' mouths?

It is after all the classic pattern
for those you are so blindly advocating,
Kitchen, children church their only female role,
is that really the world you really want created
for your own three girls?

And what of your brother
Immigrant himself, on the other side
of the world. Do you believe that he
should be kicked out to leave more room
for native Australians?

Wake up! why do you think the world has fought
to stop the fascists coming here?
Their tinny song of hate is no solution.
They have no answers for this world's
true crises if you pose real questions.

LMC 29 Nov 09