Getting to know... Helen Palmer

Helen Palmer leads the Seafood Technologies Portfolio for Plant & Food Research and spends her weekends on the sidelines of her kids’ games, hiking, or gardening. She loves coffee, effortless dinners, and cherishes simple pleasures in Nelson.

As a child, I was really into... collecting tickets. I wanted to be a bus conductor on a London bus, so the obvious training was to collect tickets from everything and everywhere. Turns out that being a bus conductor on a London bus wasn’t the path that I went down, and for that I am grateful. But ticket collecting is still a useful skill to have right?

At the weekend you’ll find me... on the sideline of the netball court and football pitch for the kids’ sports games, at the dog beach, up the Gramps, or in the garden.

After work, you’ll find me... trying to convince the kids that eggs on toast would be a good dinner option. That usually fails, so then it’s into dinner-making mode. I often dream about having meals magically appear, especially during the week after a big day at work.

I get my coffee fix from... Sublime, large flat white. Preferably at about 11am! I’m also a regular customer of Ruby’s at the marina since it’s so close to the Plant & Food Research site, and good coffee in the sun beside the water is always a treat. We are lucky to be spoilt for choice when it comes to good coffee in Nelson.

Something I learnt way later than I should have... is that worrying about things you can’t change is a waste of time. Though this is a work in progress - I still stress way too much about stuff that I can’t do anything about!

A random fact I love is... that the blue spots on snapper are just like a fingerprint – each individual has a unique pattern that endures as they grow bigger. We use this to ID fish as part of our snapper breeding programme so it’s a random but also very useful fact.

My simple pleasures are... tramping with the kids, wandering around the Saturday market, a walk or paddleboard with a friend, hanging out with Milly (my very loyal dog). Nelson is such a great place for simple pleasures, and I love that getting out and about in the outdoors is so easy here.

One thing I’ll never do again... is get a stamp in my passport from a pub – it seemed like a good idea at the time but in the light of day the stupidity was rather obvious, especially since I was in the middle of six months backpacking around Europe.

I wish more people knew… what an amazing opportunity the blue economy is for New Zealand – for sustainable economic growth while also contributing in a really positive way to our country’s ecological, cultural and social well-being.

When I’m bored I... assume that there’s something that I should be doing. I’m an active relaxer and boredom doesn’t feature much, there’s always something that looks like it needs some busy work.

I hope in ten years I will be... wishing that I’d appreciated the kids’ mess more and not complained about it. Empty nesting sounds hard!

This article was published in Nelson Magazine. To read the full edition online, click here.