The Sixteen - Victoria Requiem
After months of hard work, I’ve finally emerged out of one of the tunnels I’ve been in, and have a few precious days to enjoy the sun and fresh air before plunging headlong into the next tunnel, which is marked with a nice Victorian enamel plate reading “Move House”.
It has been a very busy and somewhat stressful time. On Tuesday, I hit the button marked ‘Submit’ on my grant. To my disappointment, I didn’t get a lovely friendly message from the web interface saying “Congratulations! You’ve done it—-go and have a couple of beers and relax”, nor was there a sound effect like a rocket launch when I pressed the button. There really should be, because it was a bit of an anticlimax, though for reasons that I’ll explain, I wasn’t able to totally relax until Wednesday. As soon as I’d done the deed, I dashed off to catch a train to Lichfield to see The Sixteen and Harry Christophers performing Victoria’s Requiem. I had a bit of a nasty moment when the brakes failed (in the on position, rather than the off position, thankfully) on my train, and we had to get off and board the next one.
I’d like to say that the train breaking down was a portent for the way that the pressure on me didn’t quite let up, and that obstacles remained, but trains breaking down are a portent only of the terrible state of our rail system, and quite commonplace.
The concert itself was wonderful. The Sixteen are extremely talented early music singers, and they gave a beautiful performance of the Requiem. I’ve written before about my rather paradoxical atheist’s love of religious music, and I’m particularly fond of Requiems1. I find them very meditative because the words and order of movements are always the same and familiar, so you can concentrate on losing yourself in the music. Their voices soaring and swelling to fill the Cathedral on the words lux perpetua will stay with me for quite a while.
I was back down to earth again with a bump when I checked my email on returning home and found that the grant had bounced back because of various problems I had to fix. Even after I’d fixed it and resubmitted, I found myself awake for hours from 2am. I kept getting a horrible lurching feeling in my stomach as I suddenly worried whether I’d remembered to attach this document, or fix that typo, all the time internally yelling at myself to just let it go, dammit and go to sleep.
Only when I had notification on Wednesday that it had finally, irrevocably gone to the funding body, and that I could no longer do anything about it, did I finally relax properly. Time to take a deep breath, catch some rays and look out for the mouth of that next tunnel.
1 For some reason, that plural doesn’t seem quite right. I want to write ‘requia’. â
1
Requiem has its origin Middle English being derived from a Latin verb, the accusative of requies "rest", so, as it was not derived from a Latin noun, it would not follow the Latin riules for singulars and plurals, but English ones.
by Jonathan Briggs @ 13/07/2006 4:07 pm • Permalink •
2
Over here the main research councils also have a nifty web-based submission process; fill in the blanks, append a few doc's and click send. Then all you need to do is print the single page generated by their web-app and sign on the dotted line. Then you have five days to get it to the funding council. Wonderful. Unless of course you have to deal with the Swedish national space board. For those dealing with astrophysics, remote sensing and other tech-heavy fields the process is somewhat different. Fill in the excel spreadsheets, print twenty copies, and deliver. Twenty paper copies; that's more than five kilos! Bah humbug! Good luck- when do you hear back?
by Ian @ 14/07/2006 6:08 am • Permalink •
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Good Luck bsag, and wishing you and Mr bsag a following wind for the next few weeks.
by ThoughtBadger @ 14/07/2006 8:08 pm • Permalink •
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Congratulations on getting it submitted! How long until you'll hear back from them? I know with the NSF here in the US I typically have a 6 month wait before I hear that my request has been declined ...
by Radagast @ 19/07/2006 8:08 am • Permalink •
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Jonathan Briggs: Interesting. Still seems wrong somehow.
Ian: We have the web submission process too, but the forms are huge with lots of complicated parts to fill in. Still, at least we didn't have to print it in triplicate.
ThoughtBadger: Thanks! Only a week till we complete on the house now!
Radagast: I'm pretty sure it will be 4 months or so.
by bsag @ 21/07/2006 4:08 pm • Permalink •
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