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 actually liked.

In fact there was one thing he was fond of and that was the drink, which made me, if not a kindred spirit, at least a tolerable colleague. He introduced me to a number of bars in Newcastle in which even I would have felt apprehensive without Julian, a regular,  as my companion. One, in the Byker area, seemed to be populated by a sort of rogue’s gallery of Newcastle. And Newcastle isn’t a particularly genteel city.

Anyway, I was the only applied statistician, the others in the stats group were very mathematical. On one occasion, a sociologist asked Julian to check over the statistical and methodological aspects of a study proposal on risky behaviours among young people. Julian handed the job over to me, on the basis that I had more experience of this sort of thing. I was invigilating an exam for three hours, so during that time I read the proposal and made some longhand notes. When I typed these up later and sent them to Julian, he was effusive in his thanks and substantially exaggerated my expertise.

‘That’s great insight,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t have done that. None of the other statisticians here could have done that. We can programme a complex stochastic estimation algorithm, but we can’t do applied study design like that.’

He was wrong of course, they could all have done what I had done, although they might have taken longer than an afternoon. But it showed that the bear with a sore head also had considerable generosity of spirit.

2.      A Grand Master

Every spring I act as a ring co-ordinator in a Taekwondo poomsae competition in London. This is not sparring, poomsae are the Taekwondo equivalent of kata in karate- the performance of a pattern of techniques, a bit like choreography. I’m not a qualified referee, the ring co-ordinator just instructs the competitors when to enter the ring, when to bow to the referees, when to start their performance, and so on, all in Korean. The co-ordinator has to accompany these orders with the correct hand gestures, and I feel a bit like a tic-tac man at the horse races. Five to four the field and no takers.

One of the referees at these events is a Grand Master (no names, not pack drill), I think an eighth dan in Taekwondo- he had to live in Seoul for a couple of years to reach this giddy height. He is also a black belt in about half a dozen other martial arts. As you might expect, he is something of a stickler for perfection and has the reputation of being a rather harsh referee. The first time I acted as a ring co-ordinator, he gave me a bollocking for pronouncing some of the Korean terms wrongly. I was suitably respectful, and we got on all right thereafter.

However, this May, I didn’t get a chance to speak to him until the competition was over and we were clearing up. When I told him that I had recovered pretty much fully from my prostate cancer treatment, he said, ‘I am so pleased to hear that,’  and hugged me. When I told some of his fellow referees this, they were incredulous. The stern perfectionist also has a good heart.

3.      A fictitious episode

In one of Agatha Christie’s later Miss Marple novels, At Bertram’s Hotel, first published in 1965, part of the plot hinges on a mistake about dates on the part of an unworldly old cleric called Canon Pennyfather. The Canon is booked to take a night flight to Lucerne for a conference the following day, but when he presents his ticket at the air terminal, he finds that he has turned up one day too late. His ticket was for the day before and the conference has already taken place.

As he makes his way disconsolately from the terminal, he stops for dinner at an Indian restaurant. It’s hard to believe a Canon of the church of England in a novel by Agatha Christie having a curry, but it really does happen in the book. But here is something that does not happen in the book but does in a television adaptation.

Do you remember the nineteen-eighties television versions of the Miss Marple stories, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple? They were very good, and played dead straight, unlike the later adaptations starring Geraldine MacEwan, in which they somewhat played it for laughs, and gave the narratives a slightly sexy and sinuous feel. Anyway, the 1987 television production with Joan Hickson stuck very closely to the book except for the scene in the Indian restaurant. In the TV show, the Canon is the only customer in the Indian restaurant, and he confides his mistake to the waiter who is also the manager. The latter sits at the table with him and offers some words of comfort as the Canon munches his madras. It’s a clever departure from the book’s narrative and is very touching.

4.      July poem

This month’s poem is a bit confessional and embarrassing. Although written only a year or so ago, it refers to the time when I was a lovesick nineteen-year-old, a nerdy maths student with no girlfriend, working as a barman in my summer holidays in Cowdenbeath Miners’ Welfare Institute. Coalminers’ social clubs in those days and that part of the world were always referred to as ‘The Institute’.

Incidentally, this reminds me of something I found amusing in the film Quatermass and the Pit. As I recall, at one point in the film, someone asks, ‘Where’s Professor Quatermass?’ and receives the reply, ‘He’s not at the pit. He must be at The Institute.’ It occurred to me that there were plenty of people in Cowdenbeath of whom the same could be said- if they weren’t at the pit, they were at the Institute, with me supplying them with regular pints of heavy.

Anyway, here is the embarrassing poem.

July

Summer Holiday, 1976

The college term is over, and you are home,

In a working men’s club, behind the bar.

Serving whiskies and wishing you were far

Off in a wider world and not alone.

 

In a chic foreign setting, she’s doing fine,

Smoking French cigarettes, glamorous, free,

As you lock up the public bar at three,

And take the short cut by the railway line.

 

This academic year’s love interest

Is unaware of your longing and loss.

The sun sears the waste ground you walk across

To eat your lunch in the parental nest.

 

Sorry for yourself, back across the parched ground

To open up at five. Why all that blight

Of youth on hopeless crushes? Life was right.

You always paid your rent and bought your round.