Mister Duffy Changes Trains

                                                   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...

  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 ...

  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...

                                                   Linda striding purposefully onward at Happisburgh, North Norfolk 1.        Biting off More than I Can Chew Linda and I are doing a couple of challenges this year. First, we are trying to collect the alphabet of Parkruns, that is complete a Parkrun for places beginning A, B, C etc. So for example, I have already done   A, B, C (Armley, Bognor Regis, Coldham’s Common) and thirteen other letters. The Parkrun alphabet has twenty-five, not twenty-six letters. There is no X. This is not because there is no place name beginning with X, it is a matter of policy. The organisers figured that if there were an X, it would likely be the only one, so it would be swamped with Parkrun tourists like myself and Linda, getting an X on their list. For those that haven’t read prev...

  Grave, where is thy victory? I think I owe some of you an apology for last month’s blog. The title, Tribute to Doctor Smith , gave at least one friend of Bob Smith a fright, since such tributes generally follow after a death. She was relieved to see from the third paragraph that Bob is still going strong. I remarked later that I feel we should show our appreciation of friends and colleagues while they are alive. So: sorry about that. The trip to Atlanta was a success, and it was great to see Bob and Irina again. This got me thinking that the subject of mortality has been rather high in my consciousness for the last year or so, presumably partly due to the prostate cancer diagnosis (all OK there, I’m relieved to announce). And it occurred to me that a death can be associated with rather incongruous and seemingly unimportant issues. Let me tell you a story. I have mentioned before my dad’s rich uncle, Dan Flynn, a successful Glasgow bookie, and his sister Josephine and her ...

Tribute to Doctor Smith                                          Bob Smith visiting Cambridge a few years ago In contrast to the last two months, I am a little early with this month’s blog. This is because I anticipate that the next few weeks are going to be frantically busy. Next week and the week after, I am doing a paid consultancy job. As noted in the past, we have been helping number two son with a house purchase. We want to be in a position to do the same for number one son in due course, so I need to build up my savings again. Then on the 22 nd February, I fly out to the USA. The USA trip is for a meeting on design of cancer screening trials and takes place in Atlanta, Georgia. Our Tom was a little worried, thinking that this isn’t really the ideal time to be travelling from Europe to the USA. I reassured him. I will probably arrive at the airport, take a tax...