Mister Duffy Changes Trains

  It’s Funny the Things You Feel Nostalgic About It is strange, isn’t it, the things one tends to look back on with fondness and longing? I used to say that the happiest time of my life was when the kids were pre-school age. It may be true, but I have for the most part stopped yearning for those times recently. But there are particular periods in your life and they often come to an abrupt end. When you were at school yourself, and towards the end of that time, couldn’t wait for the confinement and repression (I may be overdramatizing here) to end. When you were a young man or woman and were out on the town every Saturday night. Various marital or occupational periods. When the lockdown started in early 2020, I am sure I was not alone in my first thoughts being to regret the times immediately past when we could go where we wanted and when we wanted (assuming we could afford it).   I mourned for the Yorkshire Three Peaks Holiday in 2017, mentioned in a previous blog, for L...

                                                       Running Wild In 2005 or thereabouts, I took up two forms of exercise, having been a complete couch potato for the previous thirty-odd years. That year, we decided as a family to do the Sawston Fun Run, around 5 miles I think. So I started going for a run down the river to Stourbridge Common and back, on Saturday mornings. To my surprise, I found running short distances (4 miles or less) relatively easy. This may have been partly because I already used to run from my office to the tube station every afternoon, so that I would arrive at Kings Cross sufficiently early for my commuter train back to Cambridge that I could have a quick pint in the awful bar there. Mister Health, that’s me. Thereafter, we took up the Parkrun, a five kilometre run at nine o’ clock every Saturday ...

  Mad Professors In my first year as a student in Edinburgh, I took courses in mathematics and computer science. The last computer science lecture in first year was always a tour de force given by the charismatic Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Sidney Michaelson. Prof Michaelson was a pioneer of mainframe computing, known as a great character, and held in great affection as a sympathetic colleague and mentor. He was slightly portly and had a great big grey beard. He looked like Santa Claus’s grandfather. His daughter Rosabel was in the year above me, also studying mathematics. As I recall, she was clever, confident, left-wing and attractive (but quite a scruffy and in-your-face dresser). I suspect in common with other male mathematics undergraduates, I thought she was wonderful but was also a bit scared of her. But back to her dad and the final computer science lecture of the academic year, in May 1975. Prof Michaelson gave us a glimpse into the future. His essential me...

  And Gentlemen in England Now Abed In honour of the local elections, this week’s blog is a recycling of a piece I wrote about fifteen years ago, itself reminiscing on the 1992 general election. Although it deals with experiences as a Labour Party election organiser, I hope you don’t have to be a Labour Party supporter to relate to it. Linda and I were joint election organisers for Kings Hedges Ward Labour Party in the 1992 general election. Anne Campbell was standing for the Labour Party in Cambridge and it looked like she had a good chance. Up to the day before the election, Labour appeared to have a decent chance of a majority in Parliament. Somehow, the national majority did not materialise until five years later, but Anne scraped home for Labour in Cambridge. Kings Hedges ward is a nineteen-fifties and sixties council housing estate on the north side of Cambridge. Tony Crosland, the Foreign Secretary in the Callaghan government, once described it as a concrete jungle. We...