Mister Duffy Changes Trains

  Travellers’ Tales- Sweden My first few years of work after my MSc were spend hopping from contract to contract. In the early 1980’s I was working at Northwick Park Hospital, on the cusp of Wembley and Harrow. When my boss, Charles Rossiter, landed a Prof’s job at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, he asked if I would like to move with him, as he had a two year post vacant there. I answered that if I was going to have yet another temporary contract, I would prefer it to be overseas. ‘Good idea,’ said Charles, a good sport, ‘Why don’t you write to Nick Day?’ Nick Day, that best of men, was head of Biostatistics and Field Studies at the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, and had been at university with Charles. I duly wrote to him and it changed the direction of my life irrevocably. He hired me first as a temporary consultant to work in Singapore for most of 1985, and then for three months in Sweden in 1986. Later, he moved to Cambridge, where I...

  Things that Go Bump in the Night The comedian Jenny Éclair, when given the subject of Things that Go Bump in the Night on the radio game show Just a Minute, declared that she hoped that if anything went bump in the night in her house, it would be the headboard, due to her having wild and exuberant sex. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I thought I would say something about ghost stories and haunting (not to say haunted) places. In October 1978, I went to London for a year to do my MSc at Imperial College, in the South Kensington campus. Although my MSc was in statistics, and rather mathematical statistics at that, I had an ambition to be a writer of fiction, and I thought that a writer ought to be well read. On the campus was a decent enough fiction library and during that year the books I read included: Moby Dick, Herman Melville Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe Humphrey Clinker, Tobias Smollett Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift Albert Angelo, BS Johnson Ma...

  Distance This painting is An Italianate Evening Landscape , by Jan Both, a Dutch artist of the 17 th century. More of that later. Between the ages of five and seven years, I lived in Kinglassie, a coalmining village in central Fife. Every weekday, my brother Tony (Tbone) and I would get the bus to and from our school in the neighbouring village of Bowhill, three miles away. One day we lost our bus fare home, or perhaps had not been given it due to an oversight on the part of our parents. In any case, we found ourselves unable to get the bus back to Kinglassie at four o’ clock when school finished. I was five years old and Tony was ten. As far as I was concerned, he knew everything that was worth knowing and was the ultimate arbiter on all decisions which had to be made. He decided we should walk home across The Craigs, two and a half miles of open country, a shorter distance than by road. We did so, without incident. When we got home, our parents were not particularly please...

  Never Walking Alone We have a whiteboard in our house on which we have written the places we want to go once it is safe and permitted to do so. The list goes: • Uffington White Horse • Lincoln  • Scott Polar Museum • Japan • Yorkshire and Scotland to see the two sets of in-laws • Welsh coastal walks • Liverpool As you can see, it’s something of a mixed bag, and we can’t do them all in the same afternoon. Linda looked at me quizzically when I added the last item. I explained that it is one of my favourite cities. She didn’t ask why, but it got me thinking about why, and about the history of me and Liverpool. When I was a student I used to get a couple of weeks work as a pipe fitter’s labourer in the first two weeks of the summer vacation. A team of specialist fitters would come up to Fife from Sheffield to overhaul an oxygen plant, but they would hire the unskilled labour locally. Incidentally, the skilled workers had very traditional South Yorkshire ways ...

  As Big as I Can Get Them On television on Sunday night, in a very addictive cop drama set in Northern Ireland, the hero just shot someone in cold blood. I feel rather cheated about this. See below for my reasons. Have you seen the film My Favourite Year ? If not, you should. It is very funny and very touching. The plot centres around a fictional event in the history of television, when Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole as a thinly disguised Errol Flynn) appears as a guest on King Kaiser’s (Joseph Bologna as a thinly disguised Sid Caesar) weekly comedy TV show in the 1950’s. A young comedy writer, Benjy Stone, who hero-worships Swann for his swashbuckling film roles, is detailed to look after the hell-raising movie star, ensuring that his drinking and womanising doesn’t lead to too much trouble, and getting him to rehearsals on time and sober. Towards the climax of the film, Swann refuses to go on camera, having a severe bout of stage fright at the thought of appearing on live telev...