Phew - I'm glad I got that out. Science... the gateway to the media... an arena populated entirely (according to urban legend) by terminally constipated, reticent geeks who can't write, yes?
Wrong, there appears to be quite a revolution in science writing, taking off, I suspect, mostly down to the hard work and determination of a select group of journalists who secretly hate science but don't think that their writing is good enough to be published in anything else and, oh by the way, I've got a science degree don't you know... (even though I hated my subject from the first term and fervently wished I'd done media studies instead even though I know (because my mother told me) that that is no way to secure a good job. Now I know I can't face a career in science but all I've got is a science degree rather than the media studies one which, although utterly useless, might at least have led to three years of interesting study rather than three years (or four as they probably failed one of them) propping up my college bar, drowning myself in the heady world of student journalism, or beer, or more likely both, in order to forget how shit my subject is, before scraping a perfunctory 2:2. (This has the unexpected benefit of freeing them from doing proper science anyway because noone will take them for a graduate consultancy job without a first. So instead they embark on that much longed for media career anyway but try to use science as the buy in clause. Bastards.) Glad I got that off my chest. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I'm not going to do that. Even if I have (sort of) got a science degree. Although not really in a real science. More kind of pootling around with a trowel, pretending that because you've learnt a bit of anatomy and physiology and can name nearly any primate on sight (although for some taxa only after you've shot it and boiled all its soft and squidgy bits away), this absconds you from the fact that most of your university career was spent sitting in a lecture theatre learning about the marriage rituals of the Barasana rather than in a lab, to the extent that you don't even own a white coat. I am noticing that I tend to talk about other people in the first person and myself in the second. This blog will now be suspended for a while whilst I go and get therapy. Toodle pip! The Renegade Nurse.