Wide Wednesday: Nature

Today's theme for Bobsblips's Widwed challenge, hosted by Freyjad, is "Nature".

I took this shot on my morning walk: I knew I wouldn't have much spare time later (see below). I like the single purple clover flower hiding amongst the green. The field is on a local organic farm, where the crops are rotated each year - as you can see this year the field is growing hay, I assume for the horses which are stabled close by. The industrial buildings in the distance on the left are at Procter and Gamble's Research and Development labs, where I had the honour of working as a lab technician in their basic research department for 6 months between school and university (almost 50 years ago) for the princely sum of £20 for a 40-hour week (quite good money in 1971). Time flies!

I had an interesting but busy afternoon - I was asked by one of my old colleagues in the Eye Clinic to be one of the judges in a competition for the region's trainee eye surgeons who were presenting the results of work they'd each been doing in research or in service innovation. (Clearly they thought an old fogey might still have some words of wisdom to offer, I hope they weren't disappointed!) When it was planned, it would have been held in person, but of course with Covid it was switched to video conferencing and therefore I could take part from home: most of the time the tech worked well although there were a few glitches but nothing serious. There were nineteen 4-minute presentations with 2 minutes for questions after each one. I was impressed with the standard and judging the best wasn't easy. The eventual winner was involved in some fascinating research into stem cell treatments for a retinal disorder, but I was interested to see that several of the presentations were about how to deliver certain eye services remotely by telephone, email, videos or even using an app (the app is yet to be developed though! Clearly these ideas have been hastened by the lockdown problems but may well have long term application.