Summer BBQ at Exmouth

The summer BBQ of 2025

Yesterday, the lab swapped pipettes for paddles and PCR machines for picnic blankets as we embarked on a much-needed retreat to the stunning Maer in Exmouth. The sun was blazing—perfect for a BBQ, where the sizzle of burgers and the aroma of grilled veggies filled the air (though, admittedly, Jon could not replicate the precision of a thermal cycler when it came to cooking temperature).

The feast

No lab outing is complete without proper sustenance, and this BBQ did not disappoint. The grill was a battlefield of sizzling proteins—classic beef burgers and sausages sizzled alongside some special “synthetic flesh”.

The buns, tragically uncut, became an impromptu test of manual dexterity. Knives were wielded with varying degrees of success—Rosie’s attempt at splitting the bun cleanly in half left something to be desired, leaving crumbs scattered like fragmented reads in an RNA-seq dataset.

On the side, we had chilli and mozzarella, crisps, and a colorful array of carrots and peppers with dip. And let’s not forget the pickles, whose tangy bite cut through the richness like rs429358’s p=3.7×10⁻¹⁹ in a meta-analysis of late-onset Alzheimer’s risk loci—undeniable, sharp, and impossible to ignore.

The games

Frisbees soared through the air like poorly aligned reads in a FASTQ file, while the vortex proved some of us had better hand-eye coordination than others. Football and cricket matches broke out, revealing hidden athletic talents among the bioinformaticians.

After some nondescript amount of time, we hit the beach, where sandcastles were constructed with the same meticulous detail as a multiple sequence alignment. A brave few ventured into the water for paddleboarding, their balance as precarious as a poorly thoughtout ATAC-seq pipeline. The rest of us lounged, soaking in the UV rays—thankfully, unlike our DNA, we remembered sunscreen to prevent thymine dimers.