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  Misconceptions For many years, I had the mistaken belief that C. Northcote Parkinson (of Parkinson’s Law ) and Dodie Smith (who wrote I Capture the Castle , and The One Hundred and One Dalmations ) were the same person. Just in case you had the same misapprehension, they’re not. I have no idea why I believed this in the first place. It might be because Parkinson also wrote a children’s book Ponies Plot , in which ponies are anthropomorphised, as dogs are in The One Hundred and One Dalmations. The only other tenuous similarity is that both were northerners, Parkinson born in County Durham and Smith in greater Manchester. Doing some internet research to see if there were any interactions between the two which might have led to my mistake, I discovered first that no such interactions existed, and second, that famous people can have big lives outside of the subject for which they are famous. Cyril Northcote Parkinson (1909-93) was a naval historian who wrote dozens of books in additi...
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  Oh Vinyl! In these days when everything is online, it is perfectly reasonable to feel nostalgic for the age of CDs. But let’s think back a little further to vinyl. Round about 1971 when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, I shared a Saturday job with my oldest friend, James Barker- we had first met at age seven in Mrs Meade’s class in St Bride’s school, Cowdenbeath in 1963. Our Saturday job was for a fishmonger, Bill Kay. The day would start at stupid o’ clock on Saturday morning when we could clean the smelly old fish trays. We then delivered pre-ordered portions of fish around the town and requested payment from other customers who had received deliveries earlier in the week. This would keep us occupied until noon or one o’clock. The last duties were light to non-existent, assisting Bill in his van, which served as a mobile fish shop. He would drive into a suitable parking spot on a housing estate and bellow out of the window an incomprehensible monosyllable, whereupon a h...
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  Bump in the Night Yet Again Unnerving phenomena I’ve had a few slightly unnerving experiences recently. As I must have mentioned before, due to age-related hearing loss, I wear hearing aids. Even with them in, I often have to ask Linda to repeat herself, which causes her considerable (and understandable) frustration. Recently, I have tried to reduce this frustration by turning up the amplification to its full extent, so that I am not saying ‘What? Pardon? Excuse me?’ all the time. It also means that I can watch telly without having the volume at a level at which it could be heard in Ely, fifteen miles away. This habit of having my hearing aids at their maximum sensitivity has a side-effect. I’m sure you’re aware that houses make noises. Water in the pipes, door and window frames expanding or contracting with changes in temperature, and so on. The trouble is that the hearing aids amplify these noises much more than human speech. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, when Linda is at wo...
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                                         Me with my siblings on the occasion of my 60th birthday, ten years ago How Many Miles to Babylon? There was a nursery rhyme when I was a kid, which went: How many miles to Babylon? Three score and ten. Can I get there by candle-light? Yes, and back again.   There are various versions of the rhyme, some with a different destination in the first line, but I think the most commonly known one was Babylon. I don’t know whether the lyric should be taken literally or whether some symbolism was intended. If internet sources can be said to have a consensus, it seems that it was written to be taken literally as a sincere query. However, for me it does have symbolism of life’s journey, this month in particular. This is because later in August, I reach my biblical sell-by date of 70, three score and ten. I am rather aw...
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                                                   The river Cam on this scorching July Kindness 1.       A Bear with a Sore Head It has been quite an emotional week, for reasons I won’t go into here, but some of the events got me thinking of episodes of human kindness, both real and fictitious. Not momentous incidents, just acts of goodness or empathy that take you by surprise. In 1986, I was a temporary lecturer in statistics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Durham University. My boss was the then Professor of Statistics, Julian Besag, now sadly no longer with us. The expression bear with a sore head could have been coined especially for him. He was extremely grumpy, complained incessantly, and disapproved of almost everything. I was sometimes tempted to ask him if there was ANYTHING he actuall...
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  Age and Perfection 1.       Age I have just received in the post a form to apply to renew my driving license, in view of my approaching 70 th birthday. I know I’m getting old. There’s no need to rub it in. I also received my invitation for lung cancer screening. They are determined to find something wrong with me. I think I have mortality on my mind, as the other night I dreamed that my dad was still alive. He went to what the thriller writer Janet Evanovitch calls the Big Bacon Barbecue in Godland in 1989. While it was nice to see him again, it does suggest that my subconscious is a bit nervous. Not quite an age thing, a few weeks ago I was offered the opportunity to have a spring COVID vaccination. You don’t usually get this until after you hit the biblical use-by date, but because I had radical radiotherapy last year, I’m deemed to have potentially impaired immunity, so I get the jab at age 69. Yet another prize in the lottery of life. When ...
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  Well, We Did It                                                                 Linda at the highest point on the walk We completed the Hadrian’s Wall walk without any casualties. The first few days were pretty demanding, averaging about fifteen miles a day. Indeed at the end of the first day, we wondered whether we had bitten off more than we could chew. Also, in our hotel room, the door of the ensuite bathroom fell off its hinges. Never a dull moment. I walk more slowly than Linda, and you can’t go for fifteen miles at someone else’s pace, so we came to an arrangement that Linda would wait for me to catch up every half mile or so. My excuse is that I am four years older than her, but in fact she has always gone faster than me. She reminds me of what they say about Hungarians- they go in...
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