Nobel Prize Memories

Ye Olde Facebooke has reminded me that  on 10th December 2006, ie exactly ten years ago today, I was in the lovely city of Stockholm for that year’s Nobel Prize celebrations.

I was bit taken aback when I got the invitation from the Nobel Foundation, partly because I didn’t expect to be invited in the first place and partly because there wasn’t and never has been a ‘Mrs Peter Coles’:

In the absence of an actual Mrs Coles I went with a colleague from the University of Nottingham, where I was working at the time.

As guests of the Nobel Foundation, we  attended the award ceremony but also the sumptuous banquet afterwards (both of which are traditionally held on a Sunday 10th December):

I found this old selfie taken as I was trying on the gear for the occasion in the room we were given in Stockholm’s very swanky Grand Hotel:

They even gave us each a Nobel Prize of our own, though only made of chocolate!

I’ve kept quite a lot of souvenirs from that weekend because I knew it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but looking at them thus morning it just struck me what a lot has happened in the decade since. I had no inkling at the time of the Nobel celebrations that I would be moving to Cardiff the following summer (2007) nor that I would move to Sussex and back to Cardiff.

I wonder what the next ten years will bring?

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