Calling all geeks!

March sees two weeks of heady excitement in the form of the annual Cambridge Science Festival - surely irresistible to those of us with even the vaguest nerdy tendencies. Clearly, as someone with a self declared interest in kiddie science I HAD to go along, and so did the rest of the family who were nearly as giddy as I was.

We duly boarded the Park and Ride bright and early last Saturday morning. Weekend P&R is usually to be avoided at all costs - Cambridge city centre is bad enough on a Saturday lunchtime without adding an all standing, sardine packed blue bus into the equation. But we had No Choice, it Had To Be Done.


At the Chemistry department we donned rubber gloves, lab coats and safety glasses and walked past labs emitting Organic Chem smells that whisked me right back to undergraduate days (and the outfits reminded me why I quit bench science in the first place.) We made blue goo, and green slime, and also a bagful of violently yellow silly putty:


I can't help thinking that if a child is small enough to be tempted by a bite of that, they're probably too small to read the label ...


Something we were allowed to eat was ice cream made by stirring liquid nitrogen into sweetened milk - really delicious - prepared by two charming students who encouraged small people to wave their hands in the clouds of water vapour while geeky parents tensely muttered "Don't touch the (intensely cold to the point of tissue damage) mixing bowl!!!!"

This weekend we may brave the Vet School ...