A bomb went off last night around midnight at Holywood. I looked on the map and saw that this was about seven miles north-east of my hotel. I didn’t hear it and no one seemed too concerned.
After lunch I gave my lecture to the BSAS conference in which I talked about the difference between research carried out by commercial companies (eg. feed companies, veterinary drug companies, tack companies, etc) and research carried out in Universities and Veterinary Schools. Jo Winfield (FBHS) from Hartpury College followed with a presentation about what the equine industry is looking for from equine research and the session was finished off by Dr Pat Harris who discussed whether there were better ways in which colleges teaching equine courses, other universities and industry could work together when it comes to research. Most colleges have two great assets – horses and labour (ie. the students). Over the past 20 years funding for equine research has become harder to obtain and it tends to go for problems such as infectious disease and lameness, probably quiet rightly. However, the problem many of the colleges face is that the staff 
teaching the courses, whilst they are likely highly competent to teach, usually have little research training. So the possibility of setting up a national mentoring system where recognised equine researchers could provide practical support to those with less experience, was proposed. We will have to see how we can take this forward. Certainly the BEF research committee that was set up recently might be one route. But BSAS could also be a route. The main problem was that very few of the colleges that we are thinking about had representation at the meeting!
Later in the afternoon I went to listen to lectures on new research related to exercise and heart rate, whorl characteristics and performance, embryo transfer in polo ponies and genetics and performance in sport horses.
The conference dinner was held in City Hall, a magnificent building in the centre of Belfast. I sat with, amongst others, Prof Wil Haresign from Aberystwyth with whom I had co-authored a paper on hormones and exercise many years ago, but who I had never actually met, Dr Jack Murphy from University College Dublin, Jo Winfield, nutritionist Catherine Hale, Dr Joanne Murray from University of Edinburgh and neuro-behaviourist Dr Matt Parker from the Royal Veterinary College, London. All was going well until Catherine Hale, for reasons best known to herself, decided we all (men included) needed glitter on our faces! After the dinner we retired to a trendy bar called the Apartment, with untrendy prices. I headed for an ‘early’ night around 1am.