Okay. Could you just start by saying your name and your position here?
I'm Emma Bolam. I'm head of production at the Clinical Biomanufacturing facility, and that's part of the Gender Institute.
It used to be, and it was during our COVID manufacturing time, but we're now affiliated with the Pandemic Sciences Institute.
Right. Okay. We'll talk a bit more about that later as well.
So, first of all, just tell me a little bit about yourself and your background.
So starting from your first interest in science. Can you just take me through the main kind of staging posts in your career?
Typical here? Well, it started obviously in secondary school and I decided I wanted to do Science A-levels.
I had a big interest in natural history and ecology, and I went to Oxford Brookes University, which was Oxford Polytechnic,
then to study environmental environmental biology with the intention of a career in conservation or ecology.
I really struggled to find a job in that field. They were very few and far between and an opportunity arose to join the NHS as a laboratory assistant.
So I started in that post and then I progressed into a research assistant role for the NHS
and there was left at the John Radcliffe Hospital was here on the Churchill Hospital site,
so 100 metres away and that was studying blood samples from babies and children
with immuno deficient diseases and looking at markers on their blood cells.
My contract came to an end after about three years and the building where we are now was built in 1995 and it opened very late 1995.
So I moved from the NHS about 100 metres over to where we are now to join the Therapeutic Antibody Centre.
Now tell me a bit about that. What did that do? Okay.
So that was part of the William Dunn School of Pathology, which is down on South Park Road and that moved from Cambridge.
And we wanted a purpose built facility to manufacture clinical grade monoclonal antibodies for clinical trials.
And that was part of the work of Hermann Wolpert. That's correct. Yes, yes, yes.
So these were therapeutic antibodies with the intention of preventing autoimmune diseases, graft, rejection, etc.
So I was in full production technician in that role and we were established as the Therapeutic Antibody Centre from 1995 till 2005,
after which our research director, Geoff Hale left.
There was really less of a need for a monopoles by that point, so we had a lot of very knowledgeable and experienced staff in the building.
We had obviously the building designed for manufacturing of clinical grade materials,
obviously in clean rooms according to what we call good manufacturing practice, which obviously very heavily controlled environment.
It's not like a standard laboratory. So we have the infrastructure and the buildings and the staff and we had a license from the
Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency to manufacture products for clinical trials.
So then we looked around for customers who wanted to take over from the pathology and the antibody centre.
And Professor Adrian Hill and Professor Sarah Gilbert from the Jenner Institute thought this would be a
wonderful idea to take it over as part of the Nuffield Department of Medicine for us to continue manufacturing,
take great products but viral vectors to become vaccines.
So now the vaccines that we're making now are designed to prevent against diseases and a lot of a lot of diseases, including malaria,
where you have manufactured vaccines against Ebola, the plague, meningitis,
hepatitis, chikungunya, Zika, a few others are probably forgotten along the way.
And that's that's taken us from. Is there a thank you? There is.
But we didn't we didn't manufacture that one. So we have quite a big range of different vaccines that we've produced.
So just just going back to you for the for a moment. So you started out in environment and ecology.
Yes. And you've gone through virtually all of essentially cell biology and presumably bits of biochemistry and virology.
Yes, that's right. How how have you how did you do that?
Well, how did that how did that how was it quiz? We we enforce a lot of training, but we enforce a lot of professional development and learning.
So obviously I was intending to have a career in plants and animals, but I started in the NHS and then moving to the antibody centre.
I thought actually humans are quite interesting.
So, so have you worked in a lab before you started with the NHS or did you only know when Degrassi the bar had to learn how to do.
I think I did that at my undergrad. It degraded, they need to do it properly.
You learn to as part of my role.
NHS Yes, because obviously we had a registered laboratory so it had to be done very carefully and then the antibody centre,
then I was promoted a couple of times,
so I was production manager at when we soon after we established the clinical Biomanufacturing
facility and then I progressed a couple of of stages to become head of production.
Mm hmm. And what does that actually involve? I mean, are you are you still hands on at the bench, or do you have other people who do that?
Well, I am hands on at the bench, but only because we've had quite a lot of turnover of new staff recently.
So they're not yet fully trained to do the manufacturing. So because I've been here for so long and I used to do it all myself,
I'm still doing it, but my time should really be more outside of the clean rooms now.
So just managing the production schedules, what work is coming in, liaising with our customers for their future projects,
making sure we meet our timelines, updating funders and clients on our progress,
writing lots of documents and reviewing lots of documents for the people.
And there's a lot of that to do with the I've lost the work I want.
What I've got is accreditations regulated. Regulated, yes, that's it.
Yes. And so we have what's called a quality management system and that controls the quality aspects of our work.
So we have to make sure everything's documented, everything's traceable, everything is fully reviewed and approved.
And that covers including all the documentation that we write.
Mm hmm. And it's not a huge facility. How many vaccine projects are you able to work on at a time?
So we have a suite of eight clean rooms, but the way that the clean rooms were designed, obviously they were built in 1995.
They're quite old now. We only have one error handling system and that's the air supply that controls the cleanliness inside the clean rooms.
So it's filtered in and then it's extracted and we're constantly replaced by clean air.
And fortunately, because we handle viral vectors to make our vaccine,
there's a risk of contamination between them because one viral vector could potentially contaminate the next one that we do.
So we work on a campaign basis, so we have to manufacture one vaccine and then we have to clean and then we have
to decontaminate our facility by fumigation before we can start the next one.
So each campaign would typically take about three or four months.
So it sounds like quite a long time to make each one. But because we're using cells to produce our vaccines,
we have to wait for the cells to grow up and then we have to purify the virus the cells produce.
And then we have to do lots and lots of testing throughout the process to make sure we're not contaminated with anything.
And then we have to fill it into our vials, the vials which we'll go to the clinic for the volunteers in the trials and those.
I'll see a lot more testing to be done on those to make sure, one,
that the vaccine is safe for the trial volunteers and also that it's the right quality.
And typically, how many doses are you going to be making in a campaign?
So we typically make up to 500.
And it all depends a lot on the productivity of the virus. They are quite they can be quite different.
It depends on how many some batches we might make before we get to the filling stage,
in which case if we do say more than one, then those can be called become make a bigger batch.
But we have changed our filling system recently so we can we can produce up to 630 doses now for each filling one.
And who decides what your next campaign is going to be?
So we have a management committee and potential clients.
So customers come to us with that vaccine of choice.
They might have a grant that they want to manufacture vaccine for a clinical trial.
And these are research teams that are around the university university and that study.
And that's why we can't secure them a slot to manufacture until they've got guaranteed funding.
And then once that's scheduled, then we see they need to tell us exactly what they want.
We'll tell them what we can deliver, we'll write the contracts, etc., make sure everybody's happy and then we'll we'll make a start.
So what were you working on at the end of 2019?
So we were working on an Ebola vaccine. And how far you got?
We were doing. We were we'd got it as far as the purification stage.
So we were partway through purifying the virus that we produced, which would eventually become the vaccine.
And this is what we need to really, I think, clarify this point,
because often you're making a vaccine against a virus, but you're using a virus to make the vaccine.
So the purification that you're talking about. Victor.
What is the thought of that? Yeah. The pure French, the viral vector, which is a chimpanzee virus.
Chad Chadox1. And that is way of getting the gene of interest into the cells so that the cells will produce
that chadox1 virus with the gene that we want against a particular disease of interest.
And I think we've we've more or less got to code now.
We've managed to talk this long without talking about it.
But, I mean, clearly, you're in an environment where people would be very alert to any kind of new infectious disease outbreak.
Can you remember where you were when you first heard about what was going on?
I do. I remember it quite clearly. It was Christmas Day 2019 and I was in Wales staying with my parents.
I think it was quite late in the evening. I was just looking on my iPod,
catching up on some news and I saw a very small news article just mentioning some pneumonia like cases in Wuhan, in China.
And I thought, this is quite interesting. I was I was tempted actually to send the link to Sara Gilbert's and cough my boss about it.
And I thought, well, no, they'd like to know about it or I will come to anything that's not for that.
And then obviously after Christmas and New Year, we started hearing a bit more and more about it.
And then the first cases started arriving in the UK and then it was all hands on deck.
And we have to seriously start thinking about doing something about this now. And what at what point did you become involved in the planning?
Because I think it was before the almost before the first UK cases wasn't it.
So, so what we were going to do, we were going to just use this as a trial case.
Let's see how quickly we can make what we call a starting material.
And it's is a batch of a batch of the viral vector that we need not produce in the clean rooms,
but made from the DNA starting material that will be ready to use for manufacturing should it be needed.
And we thought, let's see how quickly we could do it. So this is got the bit of that's probably the bit of viral load of of COVID DNA in it.
Yes. Yes, exactly right. So we started doing that.
And then obviously as an epidemic became a pandemic later on, we thought we going to have to do this for real.
It's not you know, this is not just a trial anymore. This is going to be a real case scenario.
So then we had to make the decision to postpone our Ebola vaccine manufacture.
We had to put everything in the freezer. And how difficult was that? Well, luckily,
we're at the point where we could finish the purification and then the normal procedure
would be to put it in the freezer anyway and see we were ready to fill it into vials.
So we got to that point, put it in the freezer. Then we had to really turn around our clean rooms very quickly to clean them down to make sure
they were free from contamination for the COVID vaccine virus coming into the clean rooms.
And did you have funding for that at that point? We didn't have weeks.
We secured some funding, but most of it came a lot later. So we we started, you know, at risk of no funding for this.
But then obviously the British government provided the funding and and yeah, how did it go from there?
So we started, I think I remember following the files on the 6th of March.
The volume of cells is to grow up enough to infect with the Chadox1 virus.
And we had filled our vials with the vaccine on the 2nd of April and it went into the first trial, clinical trial volunteer on the 23rd of April.
And how does that compare with normal practice? It's ridiculously fast.
So I think it was about six weeks. Six weeks is about right, I think.
Well, six of March, the 2nd of April was pretty much my work.
Normally it takes three months. Maybe you can shave a bit off.
We were lucky in that we had all the equipment ready for filming because obviously we were planning that ready for Ebola vaccine.
So the isolator,
which is a piece of equipment that we have to make sure we fill our fire until a vaccine into vials in a sterile environment, keep it clean.
So that was all ready for the Ebola vaccine. So we had everything set up, all the materials needed for that.
So that did save quite a bit of time.
But it was a case of we finished the cell culture phase immediately go through to extract the virus from the cells, immediately purified.
Normally we'd have a day or two in between to catch up, do some cleaning, etc. But it was it was literally day after day, you know,
we were working at the weekends, we were going home in the evening to make sure we had the documentation ready for the next day's piece of work.
So the whole the whole facility was actively involved. So it was considerably faster than we've ever done it before, probably again.
And it's not very far into this process.
The country went into lockdown, but you presumably as essential workers were able to we were provided with a letter from
our head of department that we could keep in our cars to present to a police officer.
Should we get stopped, ask us where we were going. My son was very lucky to be able to continue going to school.
I was classed as a key worker, so from his benefit he came off quite well.
I think a lot of his peers suffered very badly having to work to do schoolwork from home.
Yes. So we we kept going as normal, pretty much just working considerably longer hours.
But presumably there were provisions in place to prevent staff from infecting each other.
Yes, we still had to maintain social distancing where our masks obviously in the clean rooms, we have all the right equipment pretty much anyway,
we have masks as part of our normal counting procedure, two pairs of gloves for full coverage of clean room clothing.
Obviously there was a lot of office work, so we had to make sure that we had the right to meet a segregation in place.
And you have you got you've got the space to do that. Yes, you have. It looks quite crowded out.
But we've had a lot of new staff since then, but a lot of people were working from home by then.
Right. So people, you know, admin staff who didn't necessarily need to come in,
it was only really the critical staff who had to be on site for the manufacturing and testing.
So roughly how many people would that have been doing the actual hands on work?
Probably no more than about eight or ten, right?
Yes. Quite a small group. Yes. But then we have a lot of supporting staff.
Yes. To keep the facility running and keep the documentation flowing here.
Okay. So what was the atmosphere like when you were working up here?
It was excitement. We were all incredibly keen to do it, but of course we were worried that what goes,
you know, what goes could go wrong, would completely scupper our plans.
You know, we had to make sure that no contamination events or the tests pass.
We had the right documents in place to satisfy the regulators.
Obviously, they were actively involved with us, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency,
and we had to keep them updated all the time to make sure they were happy with our testing plan that we had for our vaccine.
But it was it was so many more hours per day to fit in.
You know, we were extremely tired. We were going home, not seeing our families very much coming back to do it all again the next day.
But, you know, we were all so keen to do it. And your role was simply to produce enough for the Phase one trial?
Yes, that's right. Yes. Yes. And for the phase two trial, there was another manufacturer in the case.
Yeah. Did you interact with them? Yes, we did.
We were we had to get a lot of meetings with them, obviously sharing our information and manufacturing it with them.
And they were doing likewise, sending us back information that they used.
Obviously, we had to make sure that we were in agreement about the documentation we were providing, making sure the testing regime was consistent.
Yes, but those were people who had worked with before. We've worked with that company for a long, long time.
So they were all very familiar to us. Mm hmm. Yeah.
And and once you'd as you said that the the first vaccine trial participant was injected in.
Yes, early April. That's right. Could you have a huge sigh of relief and slow down a bit at that point?
Um, we we could in some respects because obviously we wanted to know it was safe.
So we were just waiting to make sure that there were no nasty side effects or anything like that.
But then, of course, AstraZeneca came on board. So we were very actively involved liaising with them.
You know, we had we were sending out into the cell banks that we'd used to manufacture the vaccine.
We were sending that off to various places.
So the same batch of cells that you had started with was the starting material essentially from all the vaccines.
Thus, actually, yes, I'm a virus starter material that we made in our lab across the road that has gone to gone on
to produce all the doses of vaccine throughout the whole consortium of the manufacturers.
Mm hmm. And so what what did your job become after the that initial batch was made?
What did were you able to go back to working on the Ebola?
Yes, we did that. We resumed that towards the end of 2020.
And then for Christmas 2020, we had put that into vials and that is now in clinical trials in the UK and in Africa.
And there's always something coming along after that. That's right. Yes.
And I came along after that. Soon after. Yes.
So it's pretty much back to normal for us. You know, we just carry on as we would have done before the pandemic.
Mm hmm. I mean, it's quite unusual for a university to have a facility, which is very unusual.
Is it unique or is it.
It's not unique now, but I believe we were the first and we were the first academic institute to have a GMP facility, a good manufacturing facility.
And I think and obviously we were the first to use the chimpanzee adenovirus in human
trials because our first one was the malaria vaccine that we produced in 2007.
And how have you used that vector vector for all the trials, all the vaccines that you've produced?
Although there are three different vectors. So early on we were using a different chimpanzee vector.
Chadox1 is obviously the most famous one because that's been used for the COVID vaccine and it has been used for most of our vaccines.
But obviously there's a shuttles to one which we are using now and we have used for a couple of other vaccines.
The customer decides which vector they would like to engineer with the the DNA that they want to make the disease against.
But it's it's it's all been viral vectors. You have you haven't explored have RNA vaccines for you?
We haven't no. We have made some protein vaccines along the way, but only a couple of those.
Mainly it's been adenoviral vectors since we started.
Mm hmm. Um, so we were talking earlier about press exposure.
I mean, you were carrying all this work out under. You know, these must have been, like, big in the goldfish bowl.
Then the huge scrutiny from all the the press and. Yes, governments and the world generally.
Yes. Well, obviously, I was kind of locked away in the cleanrooms doing the manufacturing.
So I didn't I didn't have much exposure. Obviously, Sara Gilbert and Cath Green had the vast amounts of press exposure.
Yes, there were lots of film crews. I remember sidestepping further Walsh in the corridor.
So then came a speech, Professor Pollard, who's in this building, especially when the trial started.
So towards the end of April, then the press interest really picked up.
Yeah, but you did subsequently do some interviews. I did some interviews, yes.
Maybe in Welsh. Yes, for me and mainly for for Welsh media.
So I did some newspaper interviews and radio and Welsh television.
Yes. And how did you find that? Did you have any training? No, none at all.
That's all I was. It was because they wanted they wanted the interviews there.
And then, you know, there was no there's no way to practice runs or anything like that.
It was sometimes they didn't even let me know what questions they were going to ask.
It was just done on the spot. And did you enjoy that?
I did, actually, yes. Yes. It was a completely new aspect to the role, which I'm very unfamiliar with,
and not something that you'd expect from just manufacturing the vaccine out of out of the public eye.
And quite normal, I guess not something that you realise would happen by virtue of your being a Welsh language speaker.
That's right, yes. That didn't make a difference I think. Yes, there was press and there were quite interest and interest.
They my best friends in school, obviously we're going back 30 plus years now who is still in Carmarthen in West Wales.
We grew up. She was the vaccine coordinator responsible for coordinating the Oxford-astrazeneca vaccine in her health board in West Wales.
What's a coincidence is we both appeared on the Welsh news channel talking about
our experiences and I mean one thing I've been asking a lot of people is that,
I mean, your, your work is quite collaborative anyway because you've got you're the researchers who have,
you know, inventing the vaccine and then you've got manufacturing companies.
Did did you find that working on the COVID vaccine?
Was was that even more so? Was it or was it pretty much what you're used to?
I think it was more so because obviously we had a lot more communication with the clinical trials team
because of course they it wouldn't be so rapid that we would make a product and get it into clinical trials.
So of course we had to keep them updated all the time about when this was going to be ready,
when it would be tested in time to be able to vaccinate the first volunteer.
And of course with Professor Gilbert, who until his alarm, obviously they were still very actively involved whilst we were doing the manufacturing.
And beyond that they were essentially the people who put the their several DNA into the factory in the first place.
And it yes. It's their vaccine what it was then.
Yes. And because we're all in quite a small area, you know, there are about three main buildings in.
There's this building where the clinical trials are run, this manufacturing building across the road.
And then there's the research building, what we call the green building, just a couple of hundred yards away where the design of the vaccine happened.
And. So.
Yes, so that's I mean, I think what I'm wondering is whether you feel that the experience of working on the vaccine had
lessons for how you might work in the future in in terms of collaboration with other groups.
I think I think what benefited us is that we were all familiar with the teams involved.
We didn't have to sort of work out who did what. We knew who everyone was, what their role was, who could help with what decision making.
So I think because we and because we've been established for so long, we've been doing this for a number of years,
you know, getting an idea for a vaccine, making it getting into clinical trials.
It's although it was done very, very quickly, that sort of thing was quite routine.
And we had you, the people in place, infrastructure in place.
I think really we have learnt that's keeping people updated on where we were when we thought we'd be in a day or even two
days time so that they could plan their bit that they needed just to speed up things as much as possible and very beneficial.
And that worked very well. And did that feel unreasonable at times?
Oh. I'm to be honest, it's such a blur to me now because we would just it was just a whirlwind of activity.
I don't really remember thinking, oh, this is really not going well.
You know, it's just do what you need to do, do it properly, do it safely, and then do the next bit that you need to do.
Yeah. That.
I've done that. So yes, I think yeah, I think we've gone through things quite quickly.
But we've got to the point out and I usually ask whether you ever felt personally threatened by the virus itself, by the possibility of becoming ill?
Well, we were, of course,
all worried at the very beginning because obviously the death rate was very high until until the vaccine had been rolled out.
There was nothing protecting people. I'm still amazed to this day I've never actually had COVID.
I don't know why, but yes, we have.
We were very careful. I was more worried about my elderly parents.
They weren't shielding as such, but you know, they live in quite a remote part of West Wales.
So they were, they were happy just to keep out of the way.
But it was mainly worried about other people, not so much myself and my my son, who's 14 now, he would have been 12 back then.
He's he hasn't had it to my knowledge. So I don't know how that's quite happened.
But but of course, you know, lots of my friends have had it and staff have had it so that there were some cases with it.
It was you know, it's not when we were making the vaccine that came later when preventative measures have been reduced.
Is more social mixing again the autumn and of course we weren't testing so much back
then so people may have assumed they've had a had a cold and actually have COVID,
but we'll never know that, you know, because we had to introduce, you know, very regular testing, obviously, that came much later in the pandemic.
Yes. Yes. That's something that's difficult to remember, isn't it,
that early on when actually things were most serious, we didn't we didn't have tests to give testing.
Oh, we were told very, very explicitly to just stay safe, be very careful.
You know, we can't stop this from going out,
but try not to just so you don't get exposed to the virus unnecessarily because you would be able to come into work as a carer making the vaccine.
It would have a huge knock on effects down the line. So we did have to be very careful.
Yes. And did you feel that working under those circumstances had an impact on your wellbeing?
And if so, what did you do to to to be honest, for me, this was about six weeks, really intense work.
I think if my son hadn't been able to count going to school, it would have been a massive challenge for me.
But we got into kind of a routine where I'd come here, do my work, do was it go home,
carry on working into the into the evening to make sure we were ready for the next day,
repeat the process, keep on repeating that process, offset it, and have much, as much time with my son as I would have liked to.
He does remind me about it to this day. Yeah, he he got an electric scooter out of it, which kind of appeased him to some extent.
But I did. I don't think it had any lasting effect.
I think both of us, we've been quite lucky in that respect, in our lives, pretty much carried on as normal, apart from the lockdowns,
where you could just go to work and come home again and go to school and come home again and not do very much else.
I think I think we had we we didn't suffer too badly from that respect.
And do you think that was true of your colleagues in the CPS who were working through that period?
So, yes, I think I don't know about that, you know, personal circumstances so much because we are so focussed on what and what we had to do.
We didn't really have the time to think about, oh, you know, I haven't been working 16 hours solid.
You know, I could do with a bit of a rest. You know, we, we didn't really have the time to think about it like that.
And obviously, of course, we're all very worried about our families and friends.
Now, I just wondered whether there was anything within the facility that was laid on for,
you know, to lighten the mood from time to time or did you just have to get on?
We just had to get on with it. Yes, yeah, yeah. Oh, and and yes.
And you mentioned that you were doing seven days a week. Yes.
Working. Yes. Yeah, that's right. Um, and do you do you think that this despite that, the the toughness of that,
the fact that you were working on something that was so critical for the world in general, had brought its own satisfaction.
Oh, hugely, hugely. We we would never have guessed we would have to do something like this.
I think it was the speed that we did it and the success that we got from producing obviously a safe
vaccine of high quality in such a short time and to get to into the clinic when it was needed.
And that's because we have you know, we had cast as our boss, you know,
keeping everyone doing what they needed to do, keeping the morale up, bringing the snacks and stuff like that.
But because of that, you know, you see, obviously, it's the kind of thing I mean, it was, you know,
we had to spend the machine and get a few things, but we had food delivered to our pizzas coming in and that sort of thing.
And so many donations from people. You know, we come in this very room, we'd come and, you know,
lots of people donated food, drinks, toiletries that we could come and help ourselves to.
You know, they'd be there'd be lunch here most of the time. Um, yeah.
So that, that helped us, you know, that people were recognising what we were doing,
but we didn't have time to cook ourselves dinner or lunch, you know, that we had the opportunity to come here should we need to.
But because, you know, we'd all be working together for quite some time.
We were a good team. We knew what people's knowledge and experience was.
We knew who to go to if we needed to check something. Um, it's one thing that struck me.
I don't know if it's irrelevant, but it's quite a majority female team in the CBA.
Yes, it is involved. And yes. Other senior figures like yourself.
Yes. And and the more junior ones as well. Yes.
We've had a few more guys arrived recently but post-pandemic, but I, I there's no reason for that.
It just, I just wondered if it, if you felt compared with other places where you've worked, whether it was has it always been like that?
Well, it's always been like that, yes. Yes. We've always had more females, the males,
our qualified person who's responsible for making sure that the vaccine is okay to go into the clinical trial.
That was Richard. He obviously Richard, he's back, but he's he's left now.
So he was probably he was the most senior male in our group at the time.
And our quality control manager then a male has also since left.
But so those are the two most senior males in the group. Other than that, all females.
Yes. Mm. Yeah. I don't know why it's happened. It just seems to be the case in some some scientific roles.
Yes. No I,
I think what I was driving at was whether that whether you felt that made for a more pleasant working environment or whether that's no no different.
Nothing to compare it with. Yes.
And I mean, has the experience of working through that period changed the way you think about how to do things in the future?
Um. I guess what we've learned is that planning is the key and obviously for normal manufacturing scale and speed of see,
we plan to the nth degree to make sure everything is ready.
But even doing things really quickly, you still have to plan what you're doing because if things go wrong,
you don't get second chance and you risk something becoming not safe.
So I think I always try to instil in my team, you know, if you want to do something, you need to plan for it.
You can't just go and do it. And that's quite a big aspect of of GMP, the way that we work.
And it's it you know, you have the assurance that things are done properly if you do it like that and you reduce the risk of failure.
Mm hmm. And what do you see as your own future?
What do you plan to go and do? People ask me that and every year have my annual review.
And I still don't know, you know, I'm happy doing what I'm doing.
I'd perhaps like to spend less time in the clean rooms.
I'm getting on a bit. It's. It's quite tiring working in the change rooms.
See you fully gowned. You've got the quite dry air you get, can get quite dehydrated and thirsty and there is quite a manual job.
You know, we all have to make sure we can clean the facility.
There's lots of climbing up ladders and wielding mops around, so I'm kind of trying to delegate a lot more to the junior staff.
But I'm happy. What I'm happy what I'm doing. I'm not sure if I'll be here till the day I retire.
I'm quite late to work, possibly a few hours that I'm doing, spend a bit more time with my son, whether that's here,
if I can make sure it's a fully trained up and that might just come naturally,
or whether that might be in a different role, I don't know that yet, but I'm happy in my job.