I started this morning in unusually energetic fashion, by going for a run before starting work. It was a bit chilly but the sky was clear blue and the sun was shining. The birds were singing and the blackthorn blossom has topped the newly green trees and hedges with a creamy white glaze. The daffodils are just about over, there were bumblebees and butterflies taking a tentative early morning flight: spring is finally here.

Then a quick sort through emails before completing my part of the revisions requested by the referee on our latest paper. That only took about forty minutes out of the two hours I’d allotted it, and so I’m writing this post at 11am rather than 12pm as I’d anticipated.

The rest of my day is going to be devoted to writing a talk. My abstract submission to Britgrav21 was accepted and so I’ll be preparing a 12 + 3 minute talk on my (not so) recent work on standard sirens and the distance duality relation, which appeared in this paper.

I didn’t give that many talks last year, and I’ve only talked about this particular work once before, in a 45 minute time slot, so I’ve got more preparation to do for this than I normally would for a talk, since I’ll be planning the structure and making the slides from scratch. I’m keen to put more effort than I usually word into my slide design, as I attended Valeria Pettorino’s seminar at the IFT yesterday and was really impressed with the design of her slides (the content of the talk was great too!).