Assorted Duffys and partners at my retirement do

Everything Changes

Quite a lot has been changing in my life and bigger changes are hurtling towards me like a train. With the clang and the thunder of the Southern Pacific rolling by, as Tom Waits put it. My retirement happens on 29^th February. Last week, my employer, Queen Mary University of London, held a major celebration, to mark the establishment of the new Centre (that’s what we call departments nowadays) for Cancer Screening, Prevention and Early Diagnosis, and the retirement of me and my distinguished colleague Jack Cuzick. The new Centre will be run by the inspired researcher Peter Sasieni, so I am confident that it will go from strength to strength when I step down as head.

The retirement event was lovely. The University paid for friends, colleagues and family to come from all around the world. The event included tributes to myself and Jack- those to me I think were a bit over the top, but lovely to hear nevertheless. There were moments when I was close to tears. My dear colleagues from Atlanta, Sweden and Taiwan came and said very nice things about me. One of my siblings had been ill and so could not travel, but the other three attended, with their partners, and my great friends Kevin and Barbara Connelly, sort of honorary Duffys, were there. There was a day of scientific presentations and tributes, as noted above, followed by a lavish reception and dinner at one of the Worshipful Companies of the City of London. We were all generously fed and watered, and the Duffys and Connellys stopped at the pub for a nightcap on the way back to the hotel, just in case we weren’t already sufficiently plastered. We were all in good spirits and there were no punch-ups.

The institute where I work is already very different from its pre-pandemic self, and will change more in the next few months. That’s the way it goes, and as it should be. During the dreadful days of 2020 and early 2021, the building was only used by those with clinical or paraclinical duties. My admiration for them is difficult to express. When I first started returning to commuting in late summer 2021, one of the neurologists remarked that the building was like a ghost town, especially on a Friday afternoon. I responded that it had been like a ghost town on Friday afternoons long before the pandemic.

Another change is about to happen. Number One Son has been living in London for years, but next Tuesday, Number Two Son moves out, leaving Linda and me to rattle about the house by ourselves. There have been times when both guys have been living away before, but at university, which can be transient. This time, it feels final- we really will have an empty nest, albeit one that continually needs a regiment of tradesmen tramping through it fixing this and that. Our house is about a hundred years old, and it’s one damn thing after another. I will miss Tom like crazy, although he is only moving a couple of miles away. In particular, I will miss the Sunday night ritual. On Sundays I get home from Taekwondo training at about seven in the evening, have a shower, we all have dinner and then at about half past eight, Tom and I go to the pub round the corner and do the Observer crossword together. This coming Sunday will be our last. What am I going to do?

Other changes have been borne in on me more gradually. Every day in every way, I am getting baldier and baldier. After Parkruns and Taekwondo classes, the formal protests lodged by my knees and ankles have been getting more shrill. At least my nose doesn’t seem to have got any bigger. Or has it? That’s a frightening thought.

Have you read the most brilliant Italian novel ever, The Leopard, by Lampedusa? A very good Italian pal of mine once said that everything that is important is in Il Gattopardo. It’s a terrific piece of work written in the 1950’s but set in the Risorgimento of the 19^th century, the Garibaldi years, in Sicily. The theme is that everything must change in order that it can stay the same. I think the idea is that for an institution to survive, it has to evolve, which I think you can agree is true. However, I have fallen into the habit of misquoting it as Everything changes and nothing changes, which strangely may be just as true. Consider how social attitudes seemed to return to the 1950’s with the Brexit business. And measles is back, thanks to vaccination resistance. One thing about the book which I found very amusing was the foppishness of the Garibaldista officers, who seemed like ancestors of Bertorelli, in the TV sitcom, Allo Allo.

What will I do with my new-found leisure? Well, I think I have mentioned before that during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 I worked at home, and could see the garden in blazing sunshine over the top of my computer screen. I resolved that in my retirement I would spend more time out of doors. I will also try to take more exercise, as my body keeps threatening to blow up like a balloon. I also plan to finish my novel. I am writing a comedy thriller (at least I hope it is a comedy- readers may find it less funny than I do). There is a slight problem with this. I had planned for its length to be about 60,000 words. However, we are now at about 30,000, and already it is hurtling towards its denouement, like the train mentioned above. I may have to think of some nonsense with which to pad it out.

When I was a child in the 1960’s, it was thought that in the 21^st century, we would have routine space travel, perhaps interstellar travel, flying cars, teleportation whereby you would dissolve in one place and reconstitute in another hundreds of miles away, a second later, and all the rest of it. None of it came true, except the communications. Your phone has computing power that would have needed equipment filling a whole street fifty or sixty years ago. And you can have meetings with colleagues on the other side of the world in what is called Real Time, and see them as well as hear them.

All too often (sorry).