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 22nd 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 taxi to the hotel, sit in meetings for two days, take a taxi back to the airport, and fly home.

Since my retirement, I usually say no to requests to attend meetings and conferences. However, the invitation this time came from Bob Smith, Senior Vice President of Early Cancer Detection Science at the American Cancer Society. As well as being a valued colleague, Bob is an old and dear friend.

I have mentioned before that since 1986 I have gone to Sweden several times a year to participate in breast screening research projects there. These projects have largely been funded by the American Cancer Society, thanks to the vision of Bob Smith. And he has not just been our research funding Big Butter and Egg Man. He has been a crucial co-investigator in the research. The other investigators, myself, Laszlo Tabar, Tony Chen and others have not always been the easiest characters to get on with. Bob has invariably overlooked our shortcomings of temperament for the sake of the science and has cheerfully continued to find funding and contribute his own considerable expertise to the projects.

Our families are friends too. In 2024 we celebrated our wedding anniversary as guests of Bob and his wife Irina in Atlanta. As you can see, we had lobster for dinner.

 


Bob is a couple of years older than me, and heaven knows what the American Cancer Society will do when he retires. He currently does at least three jobs. He is a cancer charity executive par excellence, a terrific researcher in cancer screening, and a worldwide ambassador for cancer control. And he never seems to stop working. I have sent him emails at what must be three in the morning in Atlanta, and had replies by immediate return.

So from the above, you can see that if Bob asks me to attend a meeting, I will do my best to do so.

Bob and I have been at work camps and conferences together all over the world. On one occasion, we were both presenting at a conference in Finland. The proceedings and accommodation were at the Murikka institute, a training centre for the Finnish Metalworkers’ Union. It sounds Spartan, but was actually quite luxurious. The premises included a sauna on the edge of the lake and one evening the conference attendees did the Finnish thing of sitting in the sauna and periodically going outside and getting into the hole in the ice in the lake. Not as dreadful as you might imagine, as long as you don’t put your head under the water (you don’t want to have a stroke), and as long as you only stay in the freezing water for a few seconds.

Anyway, Bob told me later that he had emailed Ben Anderson, another colleague who was back in the states at the time, saying, ‘This evening I was sitting in the sauna with Stephen Duffy, Tony Chen, Tony Miller, and Matti Hakama, all of us buck naked.’ Ben Anderson replied, ‘I am trying not to have a mental picture.’

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Like the Vogon captain in The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, I propose to inflict my poetry on you this year. I recently put together a cycle of twelve poems, one for each month of the year. Some I had already written, others I composed specifically for this project. This year, I will include the corresponding poem with each month’s blog. I forgot to include January’s poem in last month’s blog, so here is a double dose. Lucky you. Some of you will have read these already, in which case, you can go and put the kettle on or visit the lavatory while the others catch up, as you might do when the adverts come on the telly.

January

Four Lamps

Four lamps and four roads by Midsummer Common.

The cars and the cycles glide by in the mist.

The frost on the road glistens white on Maids Causeway,

With ice on the windows that Winter has kissed.

 

Town houses, tall windows glow down in the twilight.

Mist-muffled bells clang from college and spire.

Above the street doors are the bright yellow fanlights

With promise of solace and comfort and fire.

 

D’you wonder what goes on behind those tall windows?

Do they feast and make love, do they wait by the phone?

Oh turn up your collar, the cold blast is bitter,

Look up at the windows and wish you were home.

 

February

Dry Drayton

There’s a row of redbrick houses by Crafts Hill and A14,

The phone box red and ruined stands alone.

The sun and rain are flying and the gentle hill shines green,

But the February trees are bare as stone.

 

The hedgerow still stands sentry and the starlings wheel around

The corrugated iron village hall.

The sky’s awhirl with trouble and the shadowed clouds abound

By the churchyard of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

 

The bare trees stand in squares around the fields that feed us all.

No cattle out, but grass and turnips grow,

And the men who cleared the gentle hill and built the dry stone wall

Sleep below the soil they harrowed long ago.

                                                          ******************************

OK, those who took a break can come back in now. While I remember, I am going to digress and tell you a story that my dad used to tell. I am sure this is fiction, but the old man insisted that it really happened. At an outdoor evangelical meeting, all preaching, tambourines and hymn-singing, one point of the programme included a reformed sinner testifying. The man said, ‘I was a drunkard, a deceiver and a womaniser. I fell into the pit of sin. And for all my drinking and fornication I was the most unhappy man. But now I have seen the light and found Jesus as my saviour, and I live a good, clean life. And I’m that f***ing happy I could put my foot through the big f***ing drum.

                                                          ******************************

That’ll do for this month. Please raise a glass to that best of men, Dr Robert A. Smith.

 


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