Category: Travel
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From Madrid to the Cotswolds by train
I can’t pretend to enjoy flying. It’s noisy, stressful and horrendously bad for the environment. On my last journey to Madrid, I took the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander and the train on from there. The ferry crossing itself took about thirty hours spread over two nights (with an evening departure and an early morning…
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The road (back) to Madrid
On Friday last week I signed my contract and started my job as a postdoctoral researcher at the IFT in Madrid. It feels extremely good to type that. I have also been waiting a very long time to write this post. I was offered this job on the 12th of April 2020 — when the…
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Travelling during the pandemic
This week has been a particularly exciting one, and not just due to the XENON experiment result that has set both the arXiv and cosmology Twitter abuzz. Fate finally smiled on me and the Spanish borders have reopened to non-residents, thereby allowing me a small window of opportunity to return to Madrid to collect the…
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An update from lockdown
At first I refrained from writing about “the situation we currently find ourselves in”, as it has come to be so coyly referred to. I am lucky in that, while I was driven to leave Madrid and return to the UK, the pandemic has not affected my life in any great measure. Only one person…
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Homeless due to COVID19! Madrid week nine
I’ll admit it’s a bit of a clickbait-y headline, but yes, on Tuesday I was made homeless due to the coronavirus pandemic. Let me explain. I’m currently living in Madrid, on long-term attachment from my home university of Portsmouth in the UK. I’ve been here since January to work with a collaborator of mine. We…
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Show time: Madrid week eight
On Friday last week I boarded a late morning flight from Madrid to London. Three hours later I was speeding south on the familiar train from Waterloo, looking forward to my long weekend in Portsmouth. The main purpose of my trip was to see the annual University of Portsmouth Dramatic and Musical Society (DMS) show.…
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Paper day! Madrid week seven
Today my first paper as first author came out on the arXiv! You can check it out here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.10449. In this work, we reconstruct a coupling function between dark matter and vacuum energy. Such models are generally motivated as solution to problems such as the Hubble tension, so we were keen to update our previous…
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The mountains are calling: Madrid week six
This week was largely uneventful in terms of science, so instead this week’s blog is about what I got up to at the weekend. We finally had two days of solid sunshine (my idea of typical Spanish weather has certainly been changed over the past six weeks) and I decided to head to a small…
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If at first you don’t succeed: Madrid week five
Last week was a week of success for me. I solved a problem that’s been plaguing me for about six months! I’m not going to talk in great detail about what exactly the problem was (I’m saving that for a post in a couple of weeks’ time), but it was one of those small, persistent…
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There’ll always be an England: Madrid week four
I didn’t write a blog post last week as I was rather ill (fortunately not with coronavirus…) and consequently did not get up to anything of note. As of tomorrow, I’ll have been in Madrid for a month, which seems rather unbelievable. I’ve been feeling a bit homesick this week. It’s funny the strange things…
Natalie B. Hogg 