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...