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The Patterdale Hall Diaries | True romance
- Published: March 7, 2025
By Chris Wyatt
Feb. 9, 2025
It is steadily around freezing, but has been warm enough for Morris’ car to tear up the drive to the garage and turn it into a plowed field. I contacted Craig McCann and he and his daughter dug out the mud and spread four tons of gravel. They did a fantastic job — prompt, efficient and very professional. I highly recommend him. Now Morris can get the car in the garage without spinning his wheels and spraying mud everywhere.
Today is Superbowl Sunday. Even after 18 years in America, I can’t summon any passion for American football. However, today the Eagles play, and they are my friend’s team, so there will be a gathering to shout at the screen and eat carbohydrates. Exciting times. As I’m not really allowed to eat many carbohydrates, I think I’ll make some chicken skewers with a spicy peanut sauce, lemons, cilantro — that kind of thing. In an ideal world, I’d cook them yakitori-style over fancy Japanese charcoal, or binchotan), but that stuff is not cheap, so I shall fire up the stove and cook them in a cast-iron skillet. I’ve done it before, it works well.
Time to split more wood today. We will get through February with the amount of oak that we have, but then I will be on the hunt for another cord-and-a-half of hardwood.
Feb. 12, 2025
I go to bed very early to read, and consequently I get up very early, too. I love waking in the pre-dawn, enjoying a cup of tea and then washing all the pots from the night before. It’s a comfortable little ritual and the hot water is good for my fingers. It gives me time to plan my day.
Today I need to grade student literature reviews and review some post-approval monitoring of research projects for a semi-annual inspection. While all this sounds a bit tedious, it is actually something I enjoy. The student reviews are often fun to read, and sometimes they catch interesting stuff that I have missed. The post-approval monitoring is important to make sure projects are on track, and that the investigators are taking their job seriously.
Archie will join me in about half an hour. He finds it difficult to wake up these days as I have just put luxurious new linen sheets — pale green and beautiful — on the bed and his wee nest is very comfortable.
Feb. 15, 2025
Fortified with toast, egg, ham and tea; it seems like today will be a good day for indoor chores, writing and staring out of the window. The weather is foul, and it will rain all day.
I survived another 10-degree night out at the Hall, but yet again all our dry wood is gone and the remaining oak is wet from rain. I can dry it over the forced air at home, but I really do need a woodshed; there simply isn’t enough air movement in the garage to keep wood dry. Karen is grumpy because she wants somewhere where she can smoke outside when it is raining, so I may suggest that she puts a chair in the woodshed. However, as I value my life, I probably won’t suggest that. My suggestion that she get an umbrella was met with a fierce stare.
Ever the romantic, I had our taxes done on Valentine’s Day. This was the first year that we actually owed the federal government money; we are going to miss those child tax credits. Time marches on. I think I’ll chat to payroll at work and see if they can withhold a little bit extra each month to offset the fact that my children are no longer children. What fun.
But now I need to think about what is for dinner. Morris works on Saturdays, and so our options are broader, as Bob will eat pretty much anything, and so will Karen and I. Maybe I’ll make a rich and cheesy spinach and mushroom lasagna, then serve it with a green salad or fancy young broccoli. It will probably be broccoli for its fiber content, but it’s always nice to have some salad in the house, even during February.
Cooking is one calming activity that helps pass the time on dreary days. As a scientist in Britain, I would often busily spend the day not understanding anything at all, failing to get reproducible data, breaking things and swearing. I would often do all of this in the dark, as I used light-sensitive chemicals.
In Scotland during the winter, the sun would rise in my rear-view mirror at 9 a.m., I would work in the dark all day and the sun would set at 3:30 p.m. Having failed to get any useful data whatsoever, I would then cook dinner. Wonderful. Even if things went slightly wrong in the kitchen, I would still have something that was tasty and filling. Cooking a lasagna is way more forgiving than whole-cell patch-clamp electrophysiology, especially if you are simultaneously measuring intracellular calcium with fluorescent dyes.
Ultimately, the cooking and the science paid off, and I have several tasty recipes in my head, and the Scottish experiments resulted in a Nature paper that has been cited 900 times.
*Originally from Manchester, England, Chris Wyatt is an associate professor of neuroscience, cell biology and physiology at Wright State University. He has lived in Yellow Springs for 18 years, is married and has two children and an insane Patterdale terrier.
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