She left about 2 weeks ago, I'm not good with dates but I know it was around the end of October. Eleanor and I decided to get her a little going away present in the form of anything we could find in the local Mile End shops. We snuck out while we were trying to clean our fly tubules; one thing about my project that always grosses me out. The problem with incubating flies for 2 weeks is that you end up with fly stew; often a mixture of dead fly, mould, fly feed and paraffin. It's quite a tedious job because of the need to remove the paraffined (yes, I know that's not a real word) end of the tubule using piping hot water. Then, placing the tubules in the death contraption that is the Autoclave; it relies on the production of steam to clean and therefore reaches great, explosive pressures. We tentatively, always tentatively use the autoclave.
We told her that we were going out for lunch; something we rarely do because we often get too engrossed in analysing our data. We walked along the Mile End road stopping in shops to check out their card and chocolate collections. We settled, after several minutes of debate, on a card adorned with black cats against a yellow background, on the interior was a night-time landscape; midnight blue with swirls of various lighter shades of blue to highlight the clouds. And yes more cats, but not the whole cat just the eyes. Across the A5 piece of card there were at least 15 sets of eyes staring back at us, Eleanor loved it, I was a bit dubious but not bothered enough to argue. We went on, to another shop, to buy her some chocolates, one standard Cadbury's chocolates in a box shaped a bit like a Christmas cracker and some Smarties, not just any smarties though. These were like easter egg smarties except instead of an easter egg it was a penguin which sound like maracas when shaken, now that I liked.
We skillfully hid our presents in Eleanor's big coat when we got back to the office, unfortunately she was knee-deep in a conversation with one of the Phd students in the lab. We had to wait. So, we thought it would be best to start analysing our data. I'm not going to go too far into it but my data was faulty so I couldn't analyse. With the intention of correcting the problem I walked - in total - 12,255 steps that day, trekking all the way from the office to the fly lab was a bitch. I'm not fit and I've never tried to be but the always broken lift (I think I've mentioned this before) left me with 5 floors to walk up at least 4 times that day. I was not pleased.
When she'd finished with her colleague and we were finished with cleaning the fly tubules we handed our card and presents to her. She was genuinely shocked and grateful. She opened her card, which she loved because apparently she was a big fan of cats. Unfortunately, her husband was allergic so she couldn't have any. So, she had resigned herself to collecting cat statues from all over the world. She gave us a hug and a Ferrero Roche as a thank you. We said our goodbyes and that was the last time we spoke.
I'm gonna miss her.
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