—by Sam Bladwell, FLEET alum (also see Sam’s alum blog)
After I finished up my postdoc at FLEET, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do, but had budgeted to travel for a bit, and see where the winds took me. I set off overseas, and was travelling through Europe, venturing here and there.
This was in late 2019, early 2020. See where this is going? Things started to get a little odd in Europe at the end of February 2020.
I was stopped at the Albanian border and had my temperature checked by some kind Albania doctors wearing HAZMAT suits. Next on the agenda was Italy, just across the Adriatic Sea, but I was hearing stories about things being a bit serious in the North with a newly minted virus named after a terrible Mexican lager wreaking havoc in Milan. I called a friend in Italy to ask her about whether it was safe to visit Rome, and she responded “Oh, it’s completely fine, only Milan has issues with COVID”.
So I hopped on a ferry and went to Italy. By the time I got to Rome, it was mostly empty of tourists, but the locals were still out enjoying life. It was March, and getting warm, and the pasta and wine dulled any sense of imminent doom enough for me to jump on a train and head north to Florence. My plan was simple, reach Pisa, then cut out the north of Italy, with its killer virus by taking a boat to Corsica, and then on to mainland France.
Florence without tourists is an incredible sight. The streets were empty, the coffee delicious, and architecture stunning. The first night, on the 9th March, I went out to a bar, and quietly sipped a beer, until the serenity of the evening was interrupted by the barman insisting on the News being put on the big screen. I watched, understanding, yet not understanding, as Italy announced a complete lockdown. I was potentially trapped.
The next day I frantically searched for a flight. Every flight to the UK was cancelled and the best I could do was a flight to Paris, with the rather substantial issue that Italy was technically banning anyone from leaving except to ‘go home’. France was not my home. I had an Australian passport, a British residency permit, and, as a result of the virus and the lockdown, a near manic desperation to escape Italy.
The anticipated grilling by Italy officials never eventuated. I suspect they had bigger issues to concern themselves with. More surprising was the French side. On staggering out of the plane at 9pm, I collected my bag, and walked straight onto the Paris metro. I stood, gripping the overhead handrail in the loud carriage which smelt of pee and cigarettes and wondered what on earth was happening in the world.
I spent a week in France. It felt like a twilight zone. The tourist sites were all open and the locals rude and coffee burnt and over extracted to the extent that the only way to make it palatable was to dunk a whole croissant into until the buttery pastry tasted like coffee and the coffee tasted like buttery pastry. I tried to isolate for the first few days, but was convinced by a friend to attend a party, where the host told me how hard it was to cook for everyone. Not that he was a bad chef. He had lost his sense of taste and smell a few days before.
The metaphorical dam burst on the Monday, one week after I’d escaped Italy. My friend fled to Brittany and I booked a Eurostar ticket and trudged on to London where Boris Johnson was declaring that they wouldn’t lock down, but rather face the virus head on. The policy, as it turned out, was as stupid as charging machine gun positions in the first world war. Unlike General Haig, Boris changed course a few days after I arrived, and as in France, and as in Italy, I was locked down.
A few days in the choice had to be made, to return to Australia, or stay on in Europe. Flights were getting expensive, and I thought, as so many of us did at the time, it would only be a few months. I decided to stay and settled into a flat and lockdown life. People clapped nurses. Shops ran out of toilet paper and spaghetti.
And on an April morning I got a call from Springer Nature, to which my immediate response was, “Why are you calling me, I haven’t submitted any papers!”
Of course, in all the COVID excitement of the intervening two months, I had forgotten a brief moment of existential dread in mid February, in Montenegro, that had driven me to submit an application for an editorial position at Nature Communications.
Zoom interviews were followed by Zoom offers then by Zoom training then by Zoom staff meetings then by Zoom Christmas parties. At some stage, my position, initially temporary, became permanent. By May 2022, when I finally went to the office for the first time, I’d done two rounds in the ring with COVID, had three shots of vaccine, and somehow wound up working full time in London editing manuscripts on magnetism and spintronics.
So that’s how I now find myself an editor at Nature, reading papers, rejecting a few, sending others to review, and publishing the finished products.
(Back to Sam’s alumni blog)