THE ABINGDON WEEKEND

The Quekett Abingdon weekend was held at the Four Pillars Hotel in Abingdon during the weekend of the 6th September. To be more accurate it was also held in the Council Chambers of Abingdon Town Hall! Because that's where an excellent series of lectures and the Gossip were held.

This is a short report because I myself gave a talk on 'the adaptations of rotifers to their environment'. I was hoping to prepare this properly at the hotel having arrived early, but the M25 decided differently!

Above is a general view of the sumptuous Council Chambers of the Abingdon Town Hall, where the lectures and gossip meetings were held.

The first talk was given by Dr John Manlove on Forensic Entomology. He showed how a knowledge of the species of fly or maggots that settled on a corpse could give some indication of the time of death. It was fascinating stuff, but I was rather glad that lunch was still a couple of hours away! He also displayed a mounted exhibit of a month in the life of a dead pig...

Maurice Moss followed with a talk on the wings of mayflies. This was illustrated with some quite superb macro shots of these beautiful creatures. He then showed some equally stunning Scanning Electron Microscope pictures of the fine structure of the wings.

Then it was my turn: I talked about the way that rotifers, although a comparatively phylum, have diversified into almost every aquatic niche, from the open water, where they show different adaptations according to whether they are predators or prey, to the littoral and benthic species, and finally the sessiles, attached to roots or plants.

Finally Kit Brownlee gave a talk 'Things in my Kitchen' about fungi that grow on food, again showing some attractive pictures to illustrate her points. I must say that this is a subject that interests me personally, since during a long delayed clear out of my fridge, I found 'The Coleslaw That Time Forgot' lurking at the back which provided some splendid examples.

Lunch then followed - some of us found an excellent pub not far from the Town Hall

The afternoon was devoted to a talk and demonstration of arranged diatom and butterfly scales by Klaus Kemp, whose productions are as good as anything achieved by the best Victorian microscopists.

The left-hand shot shows Klaus busy at work, with assistance from Phil Greaves in holding the camera steady, so that Klaus' expertise in handling individual diatoms can be seen on screen. The right-hand shot is of a Kemp arrangement exhibited by Dick Speight using a special type of dark ground illumination developed by Shadpole in the 19th century.

Sunday morning was given over to a gossip. Allan Brinkworth introduced an interesting and worthwhile innovation here; each exhibitor spoke for a couple of minutes about their exhibit, which gave added interest to the meeting.

In the afternoon another talk on forensic science was given by Tiernan Coyle on dispersion staining, illustrating the various techniques to distinguish fibres of different composition one from the other. I am unable to offer illustrations here, since I was the only one to bring along a laptop with a CDROM drive, which was duly pressed into service, to run the PowerPoint presentation, and was therefore fully occupied in handling the computer! Both of the speakers on the forensic science were from the Forensic Alliance, Culham.

Allan Brinkworth then opened a discussion on the possible production of a CDROM to issue to schools and similar bodies. He illustrated the various techniques, including stereo sound which could liven up such a CD.

And so ended a thoroughly enjoyable weekend. A heartfelt vote of thanks was given to Allan Brinkworth whose hard work had made the whole thing possible. As a matter of interest the meeting covered its costs so the Club was not out of pocket.