Nine Lives: Transcripts
Martin
[audio description: Mild threat makes itself known to our minds, then our bodies. The low growl. The lingering, seeping feeling. An unlocatable tingling. Rowing through a silver sea, a metallic taste lurks on the tongue, a shale beach looms but is never quite fully in view. Hope chops around in the water. Fear is a constant rustling, a slithering snake. Waves warp. Then–a sudden save, three assured chords; minor, curious, expectant. We have the permission to shake off a skin, grasping a sudden clear thought moving toward what we want, toward the shore. Resolve. Shivers from the welcome heat and a simple riff.]
Stories of humans being attacked by sharks have always fascinated me. I used to spend a lot of time imagining on this blue carpet in my bedroom. That image of the shark being underneath me haunted me and scared me, but thrilled me at the same time. The sort of hunting shark that feeds on the surface, which means that it always attacks from below and its prey often doesn't know that it's there. Then, all of a sudden, when it wants the prey, it rises quickly from below and snatches it.
When it started emerging, and, you know, we didn't really have all the details of what the disease was... so it was too scary to leave the house. There was difficulties about (coughs) Okay, well, excuse me...there was difficulties about, like, being outdoors. So it just became a kind of lockdown indoors for me. And the outdoors was one that was just this space that was swimming and teaming with virus.
I have cystic fibrosis so COVID would be really bad for me.
It's a disease of the secretory glands. You're over producing different things, particularly mucus. The mucus, instead of being a kind of lubrication, becomes thicker, stickier and blocks organs. So that's when most of the vital organs will do things like cough up blood, and that happens fairly regularly. Your breathing becomes really difficult and you just have to sort of spend time in hospital or just time resting because it's kind of exhausting to just do everyday activities.
So an average life expectancy, of someone who was born when I was, was about 30 years old. I've already kind of outlived that life expectancy.
Whether you’re thinking about it or not, it's there in the body. Like the shark in the ocean is always swimming there underneath, and you might not even know that it's passed underneath you, but it could do. And at a certain point it can rise to the surface and take you.This creature and this disease and the kind of jaws of death...literal jaws of death in both instances...and you don't even see it coming. So many contradictions of beauty and danger and risk and death.
About two weeks ago I went into Tesco’s and the bright, shiny lights of Tesco’s was so beautiful, which is a stupid thing to say. But, you know, walking through the fruit and veg, past the packets of crisps, all of a sudden became an absolute thrill. But in the back of the head, this thing or something is still lurking in the air, there’s something still lurking in people and I start looking at people thinking, ‘God, do they have COVID? Do they have COVID?’ and somebody coughs and you go, ‘Ooh!’, you know, and you feel your body tense up. And I see that happening to everybody around me, because of course I'm walking around the streets and around the shops coughing my little lungs out constantly and always have, cause of CF. And I think, okay, I've got to make myself a jumper saying, you know, “I HAVE CF NOT CV” or something. You know, cystic fibrosis, not COVID...the cough- I always have this cough! Something, I need like some sort of...thing. So people don't freak out around me.
Divya
[audio description: Immediately a crescendo into a rich galaxy; a landscape in motion with rises and falls. Spacious, mysterious, deep blue. Move closer. Are we certain it exists? A gushing feeling from all directions, a slow wave falling on a shore. Piano keys roam without direction. A tide of emotion, not certain what this is but move through, move closer. Searching. Now breathe–underwater. Now layered, these worlds. Float at their centre. Water surrounds the body. Air too. This building feeling, life from afar. A diver exploring. A wave above. Contemplate the weight of it. Water swirls and heavy falls a realisation: it’s clearer from here.]
One of the species that I work with is this really large animal that's a deep blue, and all its fins are slightly blunt. In India, we see these fish moving through the waters seasonally, and every time we see one, we feel really lucky because they're not found in these waters throughout the year.
You typically can't see it until it's almost under you, because it's the same deep blue as the sea. It's only once it rises up slowly into the surface that you can actually see the animal, and it moves slowly through the surface water because it's trying to suck in all the plankton that it can get.
They are the biggest fish in the sea.
Historically, a shark would be the top predator in the ocean, but in recent times things have really changed. For a shark it's now full of noise, full of pollution, full of nets. Even when fishermen are not actually fishing there are all these discarded nets that are called ghost nets that are picking sharks up, uh, from the ocean. When they can't swim anymore, when they are trapped in the net, they can't breathe. And so they just suffocate and die. So a shark's world now is just filled with threat.
I was really drawn to sharks because they are wildlife. They are these animals that are associated with so many emotions for us, but at the same time, there are people who live in India who only consider sharks as food. So they are this cross between wildlife and food resources. And we don't exactly know where they stand. That's something that's really interesting to me.
I work a lot with fishermen and I try to see the world through their eyes. For them, their fishery is not just about sharks. It's about the entirety of what they're catching. And so when people go up to them and tell them that they have to particularly save sharks, or save dolphins, or whatever, they often don't understand how people can compartmentalise the world in this way.
Sharks don't recognise international boundaries and borders, and so certainly we ought to be operating at a global scale, but I think many of the conservation initiatives are at local or micro scales. Certainly there is a big scale mismatch. It's always great to see fishermen coming up with solutions for management and species conservation on their own, and being able to use indigenous ideas and replicate them across different scales would be a great way to move forward.
Lucianne
[audio description: Wake up. Vibrations over a plain. A synthetic buzzing too, out of this world. Animal calls? Injections of warmth. Thunder breaks. The wings of crickets rub together. Lucianne’s tone is philosophical, then rational. An expansive field and a humming. An rainforest creature, or a voice caught in the stratosphere? We shift from hard ground to an imagined land. The seconds pass through hope to dread and back again. Like a hall of mirrors, a sense of infinity, and a troubling question: how to find a way out?]
I find it really helpful to have a sense of scale. Being able to understand myself as part of a much larger ecosystem, and then that ecosystem as one tiny, tiny part of the universe, helps me really appreciate the world around me. And it helps me appreciate also the ways in which this planet does support and sustain life.
I can look at the way that a leaf floats on Lake Michigan during a storm, or when the water is very frothy, or even just when it's very calm and I can think about all the reasons that that leaf moves in the way that it does, or what creates the waves. Or on a very still day here, when the weather is not bad, why there are still waves in the lake, and what that means for winds and currents that are very far, that I can't experience.
I can appreciate the moon as just being a beautiful object. And I can also think about how the shadows that I see on the moon are created by mountains.
To me, the discovery that Earth is one of probably billions and billions of planets out in our galaxy alone has been the most transformative discovery.
Back, say, 30 years ago, we knew of a couple of hundred planets around other stars, most of them were very different from Earth. Most of them were much more similar to Jupiter or Saturn. The kinds of places that we don't think of as being potentially able to host life. And now, over the past decade plus, due largely to a mission that I worked on- NASA's Kepler Mission- we know of thousands and thousands of planets that are similar, at least in size, to Earth. We still have a lot of open questions about whether those places are like Earth in any sort of meaningful sense, or whether they have life on them. We don't know those things yet. But we know just from the thousands that were discovered with Kepler that there must be billions more out there.
You know, now, just on a personal level, when I look up at the night sky I think of all of the stars that I can see as hosting at least one, maybe more planets that I'm not able to see. That sort of fills the sky with a hidden possibility to me that I might have hoped for, say, fifteen years ago. But now I know it to actually be the case. You know, a decade is not that long for such transformative change
Human presence in space might make certain kinds of exploration easier, or would allow us to answer more complex questions. You know, I certainly don't begrudge my friends who are astronauts or who are about to become astronauts for their wanting to go and be in space. But I do think that, unfortunately, a lot of the impulses that have backing right now come from a sort of colonial impulse extended to space that I don't find very inspiring.
Space kind of occupies this liminal territory, where there are fictional ideas about going to space that are also things that people are actually thinking of as plans for going to space. These are often infused with value systems and the ways in which we think we would like to live on earth. You know, the way people envision for example, the presence of law enforcement in space. For me, I really find that space, even as an imaginative realm, has a great deal of potential to open up people's thinking about what is possible here on Earth. Because if you can think about something that seems radically different, better by some definition of better, for space, then you could also imagine creating it here on Earth, but often people are very hesitant to do so because earth is full of systems that humans have already built. Not all of those systems work well. Some of those systems are quite broken or function in oppressive ways that are by design. I think that when we think about space, it's easier to imagine freer futures than it is, here on Earth.
Lisa & Elliot
[audio description: Sat at home on a wet day, spring birds outside. Restless. Rain on the ground, pipes drip and wind rushes down a street into the garden. A break of silence like a shock. A passenger in the back of a car and the indicator clicks, clicks in the rain. Heavier now and damp inside, it patters on the windscreens, breath on the windows, the engine revs, we accelerate and rumble over ground. Dark in here. Cool air cuts across the hood of the vehicle. Slowly, orchestral horns dissolve all tension. The engine dies down. Calm now and a clearing, some room for introspection, for the big question. The indicator knowingly clicks back in to that same wet day, spring birds outside. A man and a woman couple together in a kitchen, nothing special but their voices hold that simple, joyful state: to be home, to feel loved.]
Lisa: We took all the ivy off of this fence around the garden. The ivy had eaten away at the fence, so the fence, basically, was being held up by our bins. So it wasn't really acting how it was meant to act- as a boundary. As a fence. So we decided that we wanted to build a brick wall.
Elliot: A sweatbox is a bus that will carry you from prison to court, or from court to prison, or from a police station to court. So anytime you're basically under the control of the state. My experience was riding sweatboxes many times between different establishments. Prisons, courts, police stations. And, you know, when you're locked in a sweatbox, it’s much like being locked in a prison cell, but, you know, you’re on wheels in a tiny space. There's nothing around you. Everything's kind of, you know, built so you can't hurt yourself. You're in a small cubicle with a glass door and a small tinted window next to you, and they’re designed so that people can't see in. Obviously when you get high profile cases at the Old Bailey and stuff, the last thing they want is for press or members of the public to take photos through these windows. So they are one way tinted windows that you can't see into, but we can see out of.
I remember coming back from Blackfriars Crown Court after getting sentenced and driving up the Old Kent Road in Peckham. There was all these kids on a wall waiting for a bus, their school bus. And as we came past in the sweatbox, me and my co-defendants, you know, it slowed down and we were all in our little cubicles inside the sweatbox, looking out of the tinted windows, over at these kids. And we stopped in traffic. The kids were looking up at us and they’ve all done this symbol with their hand, like a bird symbol, which, you know, basically is slang for ‘do your bird’, or ‘do your time’. Basically them recognising that we existed. And, uh, that was nice because up until that point in the whole journey, it had just been us driving through London and nobody looking at us. They’re really, really weird in-between places. You know, you're in the control of the state, you're in prison, which is kind of an in-between place anyway. And the sweatbox is just the in-between place of the in-between places. You know, you've got the police station- you’re in-between being free and being in prison. You’ve got the court where you’re in-between getting nicked and going to prison, or you know, getting sentenced or whatever. You’ve got the prison where you’re in-between being free and not being free...all these in-between places and the sweatbox kind of connects them all together. It’s like the missing piece of the puzzle. And it’s a bus ride, at the end of the day. How many bus rides have you taken that you don’t enjoy? I’ve probably taken a few more than that.
You know what? I got out of prison in 2019 and it’s been nice to come out and have a lockdown and have Lisa as my cellmate. We’re at home, in a house...because we used to speak about that as a joke, you know. If we were banged up together, how it would be. And in a weird way it has kind of happened, you know…
Lisa: Oh, I used to dream about it. I'd be like, ‘If they let me into prison for one…’, I wouldn't care who else was around, I’d be in there.
Elliot: So you can imagine when Boris Johnson announced, you know, that the country was going into lockdown and me and Lisa had to be locked in the house together essentially...we were like, ‘Ah, brilliant!‘
Lisa: We know how much...you know, everything that's going on in the world...you know. But we just wanted to be together.
Elliot: One of the lads who was working on our wall, he had a similar background to me, with the drives to the prison and stuff. I'm in construction myself at the moment, as well. So yeah, there’s walls in our house, we were building it and thinking about the wall being built, going up, the people involved in it. And to us, you know, it was quite an important experience for us. To anyone else, it might just be a garden wall.
Lisa: Yeah. I used to circle the prison walls and I used to touch the walls. I used to look at the trees, their shadows reflecting on the walls and think about who built those walls. Like, what kind of people would build a prison wall? And just circling the prison made me feel like I was closer to Elliot. And now we're within our own brick wall. You see, I know it's just a little wall on the side of the house, but we've just found ourselves sat looking at it, staring at it. And it's not too high. We still have a good view. We can still say hello to the neighbours. We’re not cut off. But we decided to build a wall, or get some people to come and build a wall. And the wall is built and we like it. It’s ours. Simple.
Daniel
[audio description: One, two. A steady hand lands at a piano and lays two keys down. The first reverberates, the second follows. One, two. Solitary, tender. Let’s test the water. Fresh, sparse. A flight of birds. A door opening to release them. Let them in. The first taste of a day is echoed in nature, in the spreading of wings as they come to life and then a response: two strings. One, two. Here’s an idea with all the space of the day around it. I am here. Are you? Hello? Good morning. A second hand lands at the top piano keys. It flutters and explores the ground around. Layers of light. One, two. A gentle buzz, waking alone, delight at winter sun, bugs over a field. Hover with them and then back we come, the familiar and meditative: one, two.]
I was given the opportunity to spend 75 days in silent solitary retreat. The community walked me down to this cabin with a propane heater, a bed and the meditation cushion. I would get up, probably around daybreak, you know, 5 or 6am. It was winter when I started, I would kind of move my body a little bit- it was very cold. So I had to kind of like muster the will to get out of bed. And then I would get out of bed and I would move my body a little bit, drink some hot water, and then I would start sitting. I would start meditating. I started being with myself.
I feel like I have a much deeper connection to the birds on this land and the trees. I feel like I know them because I saw them every day during this period of time. I know what they go through as they come to life. They feel like my friends in a way they didn't before. I went into the retreat a day after the World Health Organisation declared a global pandemic. Things hadn't completely fallen apart because, you know, there was still food coming, so supply lines were intact. But I didn't really have any sense of, like, where we were at collectively. I didn't know if it had, like, kind of passed us by, more or less, or if it was, you know, the early days of like a Mad Max kind of thing.
I still have this, a way to sit down on a cushion and be pretty reliably, like, feel good. And that just makes me pretty happy and resilient and kind of like...wishless...and able to show up for other people without needing them to be a particular way. It's a kind of like, um, non-linear process that over time you go deeper. And so day to day, it's unclear. Am I going deeper or not? Because yesterday it seemed like I was. And today I am just thinking about lunch. But what did happen is that as I relaxed and as I came to terms with my situation- that I was just here every day, doing the same thing- parts of myself felt safe to come to the surface. And so the relaxation created the space for the pain that I had been keeping out of my consciousness for my whole life to come up and finally be fully experienced.
This movement between profound safety and ease and wellbeing and delight in life...followed by the most profound pain I think I've ever experienced. The ease and the safety allowed me to finally experience this pain in a way that it could be allowed and...held. And that would open me up more to the joy that comes after. We are who we train to be. We are who we allow our minds to express.
There are elements of that experience that live on in me because I've maintained them, I've practiced them. And there are other elements that I’ve let go of because they're not conducive. And there are elements that I wanted to maintain and then I couldn't because I wasn't skillful enough. It's very complicated. But what that implies is that we have choice. I have choice. So I have decided, and I have made sure that some of those insights have lived in my life. They continue to live in my life.
Elaine
[audio description: Electronic jittering. An excess of information at our fingertips. The temptation to be panicked but it’s all under control. A second voice is layered here: Elaine again. Cut, pasted and repeated with levels adjusted. Elaine at the centre, surrounded by screens, controls the room. Red lights wink. Messages pulse and blend, some isolated and emphasised momentarily: ‘giant monitors’, ‘graphics’, multiview’, ‘eight feeds’. Pulse as connective tissue, the rhythm builds, stuttering from brain to brain, machine to machine, bees take their turn at tasks for the queen.]
So when I walk in and I sit down, I'm already bombarded by computer screens. Just directly in front of me. So I have a computer screen dedicated to just graphics, titles... I always visualise myself as the person who kind of takes all the information that’s in front of me and presented to me and pieces together really, really quickly how we can make this informative to the general public.
[Background: Uh...next to me is two monitors. One for me to communicate with the rest of my team…]
I feel like when I'm in the newsroom, especially when I'm directing, sometimes it feels like a giant blur. Like I have no idea what happened. We could be covering...like...I remember covering this poor person that just went on a shooting rampage in like rural Nova Scotia.
[Background: the text...cues…]
I just couldn’t focus on anything else.
[Background: So I have one screen just for graphics...]
I had what was happening in front of me, but I couldn’t think about...like...oh, like, ‘What are the consequences of this? I can't believe this happened! How did this end up happening?’. And even afterwards, I have no idea what exactly happened. We were all on air for maybe five, six hours. It was just, you know, ‘Okay, what's the next compelling shot? What's the next shot I can get to tell the story better?’. You know, ‘Can the reporter talk about this? Is there a compelling b-roll? How can we tell this story with the limited information that we have and limited resources that we have, but still tell it in a way that does that story justice?’.
[Background: Then, next to that, I have two screens that are tied to a vision mixer. Two monitors in front of her...one monitor...three years ago, so I have a programme that can help us automate...her monitor...her job is to...my job is to...I follow that screen...I’m supposed to...when I’m directing...]
When I'm directing, if I don't agree with the story I can technically...even though it goes against various journalism ethics and I would actually never do it in real life but...if I didn't care for this person or I didn’t care for a story, I can just skip it. Like, that's the ultimate power you get. Granted, four or five people might wrestle you to the ground but...until then...
[Background: ‘Graphics, like title…’]
It almost feels like you're in a video game. It’s just like... you’re just...you're just so caught up. Full of adrenaline. You’re just trying to react to what’s in front of you.
[Background: ‘This is what we’re going to do now…’]
And you just hope for the best. And you're just like…’Okay.’
[Background: ‘Monitors...your live feeds...our camera feeds...our airspeeds, which is basically all the video feeds…’]
Um, it feels like we're all on a ship together. We're all kind of, I wanna say pirates, but perhaps the Navy is a little bit better. We're always looking out for each other and all we want to do is produce a super informative factual show. That's all we want to do. And when we get things wrong, it's like a gut wrench. A punch to the gut.
[Background: ‘So we can do like..what we call a multiview…’]
We're just like...shit. Like…we didn’t…? What was in our workflow that broke...that caused this error to surface? And sometimes it's just, you know, a fat-fingered typo. Sometimes it’s just, you know, someone didn't double check a fact and you're just like, ‘Crap…’. Those are the days when I feel like, ‘Oh, this sucks! We were so good!’. Because the most important thing for us has always been the public's trust. And also our audience has to trust us. And every single time we do something inaccurate, it's just like, ‘Shit, we let them down’.
You always forget, especially when you've done it for a while or you've been in the newsroom for a long time, that your impact is actually really huge. And especially during COVID, when no one knew what was going on, it wasn't like someone could be like, ‘Well, I'm a policy expert and I think that this isn't this’, because that story kept constantly changing. It went from, ‘We're doing great! We're doing terribly! Oh no, this new variant! Oh no, this new variant!’ So no one knew what the narrative was aside from, ‘There's a light at the end of the tunnel, we think…’.
[Background: ‘Um, so yeah, so that's immediately two…’]
When I'm off the clock, I usually have CNN running in the background, or I'm checking, you know, news stories. It's really, really hard to tune the news off because it constantly does change. And in order for me to process this information (and I think that I can say that for a lot of people on my team), it’s like we don't stop. We just keep consuming that information...making sure that we understand where it's coming from, if we’re pivoting. I think the classic example is hockey players…
[Background: ‘And then in front of me there are two premium programme monitors...so these are the tried and true- these are the things that are going to air...this is…’]
I'm not even done yet. That's the sad part. And then we have, um…
Paul
[audio description: Paul’s infectiously optimistic voice jumps from side to side. A playful bleep, bleep, bleeping. Eyes dart excitedly from one thing another. Layers of synth. Rhythmic curiosity. We are in a city. We break for a breath. An analogue mechanism is at play: a roll of film, a slide being changed by a projectionist, over and over we go. A cheer! Not often one but when it comes. Cheers! Meticulous and daring, tantalising synths fall back in, layered together, nocturnal textures strung up with a changing cassette. Hungry for discovery, an explorer scouts the ground.]
Bags, hats, scarves, shoes. Sometimes single shoes, sometimes pairs of shoes, sports equipment, play things, scooters, bicycles, shopping trolleys, full and empty. Keys. Lots of keys. Keys which all look the same, each unlocking a different door. It's almost harder to say what hasn't come through.
As the time ticks by and items stay on the shelves for longer, you start to get the sense of what is going to be reclaimed and what isn't. And as I walk through the stores, I will look and see an item and think why, why aren't, why aren't you being reclaimed? Why isn't somebody looking for you? And as we get towards the end of the three month period, you know, I start to take a bit more of a personal interest. So for some items, I think, that's just not good enough. You know, what more can I do proactively to help reunite this item?
I've done this on a few occasions with some nice cameras, where it's obvious it's been a tourist and it’s sat there and you’re just hoping somebody is going to reclaim it. They may not know the process. They may have just given it up and I have started to really play proper detective. So to start to piece together some pictures, to use social media. Not to ask people, ‘Have you lost this?’, but start to look. Can I piece together where this person has been on one occasion who has liked doing a trip around the world, to be able to follow the footsteps of this person? It was wedding photos. It was people on their honeymoon. I understood what it would feel like to lose that sort of memory. You just work your way through. And I've had three really big wins where I was able to contact somebody on the other side of the world and say, ‘Take a seat, I'm going to tell you a story that you might not believe’. And they say, ‘Why would you do that? Why did you go to all this effort to get this back to me?’ and I sort of sat and thought…’Because I can’.
Ahhhh. Workman's tools. Not just something lost, but something that helps somebody to earn a living. Electronic devices. Old electronic devices, which people have thrown away. Brand new electronic devices that people have only just bought. Laptops, full of everybody's work life. Mobile phones, full of everybody's electronic life. Children's toys, full of memories that kids can't express what it means to them. Schoolwork, art portfolios, things which have great significance, but often aren't backed up or readily available again.
There is a vast quantity of lost items. It's estimated that in the time we've been running the service, that there were over fifteen million items that have come through our shelves. So we really don't have that opportunity to do anything other than be caretaker for anywhere between say three to four months, to absorb the objects, what they mean and the interactions with the customers. And then it just becomes a continuous flow. It can be a very mechanical process. A thousand items come through, we stamp them, we catalogue them, put them on a shelf and another thousand items come in the next day. But, for every person that does work here, there is still a sense of ‘I'm doing something worthwhile. And I'm part of a process which eventually is going to make somebody smile’. So if it can't be reclaimed, that doesn't mean it can't be reused. So part of the big ethos we have is just to get things back out into circulation. Now, whether that's through donations to charity, whether that's through efficient recycling and reuse of materials. It's important that this isn't the end of the line for items. Simply because you lost, it doesn't make your status gone. It's a temporary hold. And part of our job is just to be caretakers for that small period, until we can put things back to where they need to be.
Passports, false teeth. Hmm. We've had some false legs and quite a few false things come through. A glass eye. We’ve had urns of ashes. People's remains. Ahh. Christmas presents, birthday presents. You know, if you can carry it on public transport, there's a good chance you can lose it on public transport.
Norma
[audio description: Norma speaks alone, tentative but wise. It feels as if a voice on a record, her voice is about to crack. She pauses and then, an uninvited ringing all around. A lit match crackles, the background of a ticking clock. Two clocks. Shoes over floorboards. We’re hiding or alone in a home. A hollow hallway. Tick tock. Norma is reading these words, as if a story she has written, some lines as asides. The rising sound of school children, sports whistle blows.The flame grows and flickers in longing.]
I started going to see football with my dad. When he came back from the war. Chelsea. Last night...I'm going to cry. I might cry. And I realised I'd lost him. Last night, I thought, ‘I've lost him’. He's been dead ages, but I realise it's really about the loss of my mum.
It all began in 1934, that’s when I was born. And then there was one and by 1937, there were three. One assumed the role, I call myself One. One assumed the role of deputy mum, constantly busy with important tasks. Two and Three, which were my brothers, tended to fight. This is terribly guilty. One of my guilty secrets. Number One, again left excluded. Something was missing. No one to play with, no one to fight with. It wasn't fair. My mother used to, um, probably I was about 8, 7, 8. She said, ‘Tell me if your brothers fight’. And she came in and whacked the living daylights out of one of them. Because she hadn’t wanted this child. She told him, when he got to about 20, that she tried to...she took gin and jumped down the stairs. So there were issues around us, but I've got the guilt of telling her when they were fighting, so she whacked them. She never whacked me. Well, only when I was a teenager, because I was a bit out of order when I was a teenager.
So there we go. Life moved on and the world turned dark, scary and very noisy. I can remember, we were in London, I lived in Kingsbury and it was near the aerodrome. They call them aerodromes. In Hendon. Not airports, aerodromes. And there was bombing. It was terribly noisy. And my brother, he told me that there was all these bombs around us, and I can't remember any of that. It's gone, lost...but I can remember telling my mum that my brothers were fighting and they got beaten. Perhaps I was a bit smug in that, I don't know. It's a lost cause. Life moved on.
Dawn til dark and very noisy. One, Two and Three were evacuated. To a safe place. Perhaps that missing thing would be there. Sadly, Three was missing his mum. He was the one that wasn’t wanted, he missed her like mad. We were sent home again to London. School took over, number One reverted to deputy mum role. Observing boundaries, caring for little ones, holding hands. Unfortunately, there's no spare hand for number One. On to big school. At least it could be an opportunity, one thought, at the same time that it occurred, that maybe one was too needy (I’ve always thought this), too demanding, not deserving. One tried even harder to fill the gap. In the meantime, dad was to return after seven years away. Loved number One so much. And the feeling was mutual. But on his return, One, Two and Three hardly recognised dad behind his books. And smoking. And there was little communication. Life became unbearable for One and she almost went off the rails. In time, number One found a partner, a job and some security. Could the gap now be filled? Perhaps it was the beginning of something. Three little ones appeared. I've got one plus. These are my children. One Plus, Two Plus, Three Plus. Perfection, but not quite enough for the greedy one. I do run myself down.
On a Thursday in the early seventies there was a knock on the door. It was Three, that's my brother, with parcels. One for each of the baby Plusses and an extra one for One. Oh, too many ones here. It was wrapped in Christmas paper and, joy of joys, it was a Teddy bear. The first toy to love, to own, to talk to and take to bed. The gap was filled. Here last was the missing link. The circle was complete. And honestly, these teddies are very important to me and my children. And um, we talk through them. And it's lovely. We talk through them, that seems a bit strange. And that's what it's about. But since then, as I say, I've realised. I lost my dad.
Jade
[audio description: Clock in. An underground portal is opening to a room of quiet life forms, microscopic and human-sized, busily conducting themselves. An inspection ground. There is a light rapping, a muffled metallic rolling, like corrugated sheeting being shaken outside. Or a big, long, train. Sparse now, we lay low with a processing sound. Waiting for growth. Trains rumble by above. Daylight waits at the door and our own controlled, clinical light is maintained. All temperatures exist here. Focus and press on. A cautiously hopeful rhythm of a brain persevering into the evening. The edge of our seat is a fine place to be like waiting jump leads, as two cells bump and break into conversation.]
Okay. So you get some that are very spider-like, they just kind of extend and they're very stringy and they just look very...finger-like. Alien finger-like and very flat.
And then you can get some that are perfectly spherical and they're just very custed and they're a bit rough on the outer shell, but it's just perfectly round.
You can get some that are very flat and more...shaped like pancakes. They just look like pancakes or fried eggs.
My favourite ones are the fried egg looking ones.
We actually work down in a basement. So, very far underground, like very close to where the trains are running underground. And, um...I never know what weather it is. Like what the...what kind of...daylight... is there daylight outside? I just never know.
So I come in, I put my lab coat on, put my gloves on and then I check the incubator and take out each Petri dish and look under the microscope, make sure that their cells are healthy. They're not contaminated. Um, I can tell this by looking at them and if the cells kind of start to come away from each other and they look like they're dying, the dead cells kind of float. So if I see any of that, there's one of two things. It could be contamination. They might need immediate change because they use the nutrients up in the medium quite quickly. So we need to maintain that every day. After I've checked them, I decide whether they need to be frozen because we do keep a stock, or if they need to be passaged. If they're too confluent, they need to be split to make sure that they don't overgrow because overgrowing can cause differentiation. We don't want that. We want to keep them pluripotent, which means that they can be used for anything.
I particularly work with stem cells, embryonic mass, embryonic stem cells, and stem cells are cells that haven't undergone differentiation. So, they've not become specialised. So they've not become a bone marrow cell, they’ve not become a white blood cell. They can go down any route. We use embryonic stem cells because of that. And that is how we are born.
I feel like we don't really, truly understand the depth of our work. If that makes sense. Like, we do our work and we understand why we're doing it. It's for a great goal of finding cures and treatments for diseases. But sometimes you forget. It becomes quite methodical. You do get set into a routine. Occasionally.
Cells growing on a plate. It’s very, um, different. You don't really realise how weird it is until you say it to somebody and go, ‘Oh, I'm a scientist.’ and they're like, ‘Oh!’.
We can't see DNA with the human eye. But the fact that we're altering that, we’re using molecular biology to alter the genes of an animal for research, scientific research, is incredible. Like, I just...still to this day, I don't know how it happens. I do know how it happens, but I don't...see. And I don't understand fully to this day how. I can't...my brain cannot comprehend what we do, occasionally. You can actually see a human embryo with your eye. Just using it without a microscope. But it is interesting to see how small things are. It's a bit strange, but yeah, it produces life. We’re the starting point, basically.
