I was going to regale you with a report on last night’s Royal Society public lecture. Professor Robert Mair of Cambridge University gave a talk on the science behind London’s Crossrail project, among other subterranean engineering challenges. Or at least I assume he did. I turned up half an hour before the lecture to join a (mostly male) queue that stretched out of the gates. Turnout was so great that only those who’d arrived ~45 minutes before the talk managed to get in. I was not among them. Just to rub it in, I got home to find that several friends had watched the talk from their own sofas via webcast, which was available live but has not yet appeared in the archive. Curses.

Fair enough, the Royal Society do say on their web site that lectures are on a first come, first served basis. In principle, this seems like a fair and open way to allocate seats. But it results in large numbers of people, many of them elderly, queuing up in the cold only to be turned away. I heard a few disgruntled punters complaining that they’d paid a taxi fare to get there, and I’m a few quid down after making a special journey into town.

I really love the Royal Society and the work they do. I’ve had many pleasant interactions with them, read countless books about their history, visited a play about their foundation…hell, I even have the coffee table. But why can’t the world’s oldest learned society learn how to operate a pre-book ticket system. It works perfectly fine at the Dana Centre and other science venues. They don’t even have a Facebook page where people could indicate their intention to visit (a crude way of judging the total numbers, but an indication nonetheless). I’m not normally one to grumble, but I know this isn’t a one-off occurrence and I’m not the only one who feels this way. Until the Royal Society adopt a basic ticket system, I’ll not bother turning up again.

Here endeth the grumble.