“Betjeman’s” salute to MATCH at its five-year celebratory dinner

Researchers of MATCH!   Researchers of MATCH!
It’s exactly five years since you started from scratch:
Now at last you’ve a chance to relax and have fun
Celebrating completion of Phase number one.

Although it’s November and chilly and dark
And the leaves have all fallen in Windsor Great Park,
Here in Cumberland Lodge there’s a fire in the grate
In this haven of warmth on the Royal Estate.

The oldest part dates from the Commonwealth years
(A decade we don’t like to mention round here)
King Charles lost the land after Cromwell attacked
But young Charles the Second soon got it all back,

And he made it the home of the Windsor Park Rangers
Who went around being officious to strangers,
Like park keepers everywhere, dazzled with power:
“If you pinch the conkers you’re off to the Tower.”

Today it’s Her Majesty’s conference centre
Where the great and the good have permission to enter
And spend time discussing the fate of the nation
– And it’s just thirty minutes from Waterloo Station:

Not stopping at Putney on slow Weybridge trains,
And then Chiswick and Brentford and Hounslow and Staines,
But arriving in style on the Egham express
Which is fit for a queen or at least a princess.

Here, an old master can meet a young Turk
In the one part of England where sat-navs don’t work
(That’s a bit of a worry for us older chaps
But the rooms are en-suite so there’s no need for maps).

Tonight it plays host to MATCH and its friends
Who are working together for laudable ends:
Innovations galore come from MATCH R&D
With funding from good old EPSRC.

From Nottingham, Birmingham, Ulster as well
And from just down the road, the Queen’s neighbours, Brunel.
 Lucky chaps from Brunel!   They’ve no distance to drive
Once they find their way under the M25.

Telemedicine systems, spectroscopy too,
Sociology, heart transplants, medical glue,
Tools, needs assessment and implementation,
An end-to-end framework that’s frightfully Bayesian:

It’s all much too complex for people like me,
With no philosophical higher degree:
When I hear a long Powerpoint presentation
I often need personal defibrillation.

So I say – thank goodness for people like you,
With ingenious gadgets that know what to do:
Airy-fairy ideas to which science is liable
Made solid and what’s more, commercially viable.

You never look backwards to where you have been
But forwards with funding to 2013:
I suspect that you never get bottles of wine
From doctors and nurses who man the front line,

Because when you’re involved in a medical crisis
You don’t stop to wonder who made these devices
Or stand back and say: “What a marvellous sight!
All those things that go ‘beep’ in the dead of the night!”
 
You just stare at the screens as you silently curse
If the LED readings are all getting worse,
And when in the morning the patient is better
You don’t sit down and write the inventors a letter:

“Dear Sirs, your amazing creative ideas
Saved hundreds of lives in a couple of years:
Believe me, our gratitude couldn’t be deeper.
Please, make your devices a little bit cheaper.”

When I was young, you can take it from me,
Devices were things you wound up with a key:
They had mercury, sellotape and chewing gum – 
It’s marvellous to see just how far things have come!

And in future?  Who knows, with this wonderful team?
Are you dreaming a nanomolecular dream?
I can’t wait to see what devices you’ll hatch
But for now, let’s all drink to the future of MATCH.

Jim Drife      (with apologies to JB)