As you are all probably well aware by now, this is my favourite time of year. May brings Eurovision, several of my wedding anniversaries! and of course the Annual Conference.

For Eurovision, we hosted 5 friends from the UK for a long weekend and Eurovision party on the Saturday. Despite the many controversies surrounding the event this year, we still managed to have a great time, and we were so touched that they made the effort to come out to see us. We managed to host all 5 at ours, so quite a houseful, but the weather was great and so we were able to spend a lot of time walking outdoors and showing them Toledo.

The Annual Conference was, thankfully, free of controversies and, as usual, flew by.

Steph Bloomer (Outreach chair and Council Trustee) and I kicked off the week on Monday with a Teachers’ Event. It was a much smaller event than the one we held in Llandudno, but just as successful in my opinion. We had some great conversations with the teachers and made lots of notes on what they would like to see in terms of resources which we’ll be feeding back to the Outreach Committee.

Tuesday was the start of the conference and, to my delight, I picked up my favourite conference freebie so far, a fan from Gemini Technology Ltd. With temperatures reaching up to 36 degrees this week in Toledo, it will definitely come in handy!

This year, I’m really proud to say that, for the first time ever, we had a creche for members to allow them to attend the conference and not have to worry about childcare. I think it’s a really positive addition to the services we provide for our members, so long may it continue.

I always get FOMO when there are parallel sessions on, and this year was no exception. I chose to attend the Radon: back to basics talk and the hands-on workshop: contamination incident - incident response and monitoring techniques led by Jennifer Humphries (SRP President) and Shelan Mahmood (RRPPS) which had volunteers (victims??) on stage, dressed in PPE, enacting how they would respond to a contamination incident. It was a great session, and reminiscent of our Schools Shows – I’ll let you decide who’s better behaved on stage!

The rest of the day was jam packed with excellent, interesting and thought provoking talks, Jennifer’s President’s Welcome, The Dunster Lecture, Litvinenko and sustainability in radioactive substances regulation, a continuing theme throughout the conference.

The AGM ran at the end of the day and we welcomed some new Council Trustees, including fellow Jacobs colleague Val Atkinson (my recommendation of her application was based on “we need more gobby northern women on Council”) and President-Elect Mike Wood.  We also welcomed back Chris Perks who is returning as Professional Standards Director (you’ll remember from recent social media posts and my blog that he stepped down at the last Council meeting and we had a huge cake to see him off…so I think he just fancied coming back for more cake 😉 ). Clive Stoddart has stepped up to be Honorary Treasurerand the new Director of Science and Technology is David Rawlings.

President Jennifer managed, as always, to run impeccably to time and we were out in time for the drinks reception in the Exhibition and then the social dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant. The RGG and the “oldies” were both at the same restaurant this year, RGG downstairs so they could have some time to themselves, and we completely filled the entire restaurant! It was a great opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues I often only get to see once a year at the conference; the pizza was excellent too.

Wednesday was spent flitting between the two lecture halls trying to cram in as many of the talks as possible. One that stood out was Sarah Donaher from Clemson University’s talk on wild mussels as sustainable bioindicators in environmental radiological protection, which was completely novel and very clever.

This year the exhibitors were split between two rooms, which I thought worked really well with each room having lunch/coffee break stations allowing people to alternate which rooms they went around. It was great to see so many exhibitors there, and we also had a surprise visit from our Bee mascot.

The Annual Dinner featured plenty of good food and dancing, where those fans came in handy again on the dancefloor! Our new Patron Lord McNicol seemed to have a great time too. I bet he didn’t expect a bunch of radiation protection geeks to party so hard!

Then, before we knew it, it was Thursday, the last day of the conference, with a few sore heads, but still a great turnout for the final talks of the week.

The conference always seems to be over as soon as it’s begun and while it was definitely not a holiday camp, Eastbourne was absolutely an informative and interesting, reasonably exhausting, but as always, very enjoyable mini “break”. Now it’s back to the real world of work, which is particularly busy at the moment, and of course onto planning for #SRP2025, stay tuned for the location!

P.S. I managed to wear “the dress” all week again with no one noticing. It makes packing an absolute breeze!

Email: engagement@srp-uk.org
Twitter: chai_khaneh
Instagram: @saragoli