Thursday 1 April 1999

To: [Dan]
From: [Chris]
Subject: sabbatical
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 16:44:56 +0100

Dear Dan,

I just tried to call you (at work and at home) but no reply. I hate leaving messages on answering machines, so this e-mail is the next best thing.

Mary and I talked about the pros and cons of spending next year at Penn at great length over the past few days, and I'm sorry to say that the answer has to be No. I'm very tempted, of course, but on balance we both think that it would be better to stay where we are for the time being.

I won't go over all the plusses and misuses again - we talked about them on Friday. But I want to say, first, MANY thanks for trying to turn my life upside down again. It does need that from time to time, and I'm very grateful for it. On the other hand, there are times when it's better to stay put and plug away at what you are doing. That's how I feel at the moment.

But now that the possibility has been raised, I also know that the time will come when I shall want to blow the cobwebs away and come to Penn for a sabbatical year again. Not this year, and maybe not next year, but definitely once more before I retire (which isn't that many years from now).

All best wishes to you and [his wife], and to all at Penn,
Chris

But although Dan knows exactly what the plusses and minuses are, and why Mary and I decided against going to Penn this year, I haven't explained them very well here, and a couple of people have asked me to say more about it.

Let's take the plusses first. The possibility of taking a sabbatical year from time to time is one of the big perks of academic life. When you work in the same department for year after year, you gradually get lumbered with all kinds of administrative jobs and responsibilities that start to clutter up your life. But when you go away for a year you have to get rid of them all and hand them over to other people. That's what I meant in the e-mail by "blowing away the cobwebs." During the year that you're away, you have a sort of unreal existence as a visitor, you don't get involved in the politics or the personal rivalries of the department that you're visiting, and it's almost like being on an extended vacation.

Each time that I have had a sabbatical year, I have spent it at Penn. I have been there for five years in all, so Philadelphia has become like a second home to me. That's another reason for going back: I want to meet old friends again, I want to see the Phillies playing in Vets' Stadium, and the Flyers at the Spectrum. Hey, I'd better stop getting too nostalgic, or I'll want to change my mind about not going there this year.

Then too, being based in a foreign country gives you scope for extra travel and vacation trips. Each time that we have been to Penn, we have spent the whole summer travelling round the country, camping in the National Parks and so on. That has included some of the most memorable experiences of my life -- scuba diving in the coral reefs off the Florida Keys, trekking into the Grand Canyon, hiking in the Rockies, ... (Take a look at the photo of me in Monument Valley on my pictures page.) For me, that sort of travel is addictive, and I can't wait for the opportunity to do it again.

During the second year that I spent at Penn, Dan said something that I have never forgotten: "After you have spent a couple of years living in a foreign country, you will never feel truly at home anywhere." His wife is Danish, and they have spent many years in Europe, so he knew what he was talking about. Maybe it explains why I get this restless feeling from time to time, a need to go back to my second home. Mary doesn't feel that way, though. She likes it well enough when she gets there, but the prospect of another year abroad is not something that appeals to her at all. It's a complete coincidence that I quoted that poem by Garrison Keillor a couple of weeks ago, before I had any idea that Dan was going to try to turn my life upside down again. But it has been on my mind a lot these past few days:

"John," she said, "What's on your mind
Besides your restlessness?
You know I'm not the traveling kind,
So tell me what you hope to find
Out there that's not like this?"

The fire leaped up bright and high,
The sparks as bright stars shone.
"Mountains," he said. "Another sky..."

As for the London Math. Soc., I guess it probably sounds odd that it should mean so much to me. I took on the post of Publications Secretary a couple of years ago with the idea that it would keep me going for the rest of my career until I retire in say four to seven years from now. I can count it as an academic activity (so it serves as an excuse to my university for the fact that I am no longer particularly active in research) but in fact it's more like a hobby. There are big changes taking place in the world of academic publishing, with the development of electronic journals, and I want to see these through for a few more years yet. If I gave it up now, I would feel that there was nothing for me to come back to on my return to Leeds. That's what I meant in my e-mail to Dan when I said that "there are times when it's better to stay put and plug away at what you are doing." I think that I can achieve something worth while with LMS Publications, and I don't want to give up on it yet. As well as being interesting in itself, the work for the LMS gives me plenty of opportunities for travel. If you've been following this journal for a while, you'll have noticed that this often gives scope for side trips and other activities. I wouldn't want to lose those opportunities.

The purpose of a sabbatical year is supposed to be that it gives you the time and the freedom to carry out some major research project. On previous visits, that's exactly what I have done. But this time, I don't have the plans or the appetite for any such project. I would be going just for the sheer enjoyment of it. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But it would be hard to justify it to Leeds University, to Mary and even to myself just now. So my game plan at the moment looks like this: stay here for another three or four years, then try to negotiate an early retirement package (that would depend on the University making up my pension contributions, and boring things like that) and take off for a year at Penn. I'm already looking forward to having my life turned upside down again, but not just yet, thanks.

Saturday 3 April 1999

What do suburban couples do on Easter Saturday? Right first time -- they go to the local garden centre to buy bedding plants.

I have mixed feelings about gardens. I like to have one. It's good to be able to look out on some green space around the house, and to be able to sit out in it in the summer. But gardening as such has never appealed to me at all. In the days before we could afford a gardener, I used to mow the lawn and dig over the flower beds, but to me that is just as dreary a chore as doing the laundry, and I never enjoyed it. Mary loves gardening and knows a lot about plants, although she doesn't have the energy to do very much in the garden these days.

This afternoon, we joined the rest of suburbia at the garden centre. Walking up and down aisle after aisle of green things in pots bores me out of my skull. But fortunately there is a cafe at this place. so I left Mary to choose the plants she wanted while I had a pot of tea and read the evening paper.

Earlier this year, we were talking about something else, when Mary made some chance remark to the effect that it would be nice when I was less busy at work and had time to do things in the garden again. I was amazed that she should think I wanted to do anything of the sort, and I said so. But she was equally amazed to discover that I didn't  actually enjoy gardening. She loves it so much herself that it had never occurred to her that anyone else might feel differently about it, and she had assumed that it was only lack of time that kept me away from it.

It's strange that two people can be married for over thirty years and still have such misconceptions about each other. Makes you wonder how much else there is about me that she doesn't even suspect. *g* And maybe there are things about her that would surprise me if I knew them.

Well tomorrow we leave the house, and the garden, for two weeks, to go to Spain and see Steve and Jo, so I won't be posting updates here for a while. It's four months since I was last there, and I still haven't even read the first chapter of "Spanish in three months." Oh well, I'll take the book with me, and perhaps I'll learn a few words while I'm there.

Wednesday 21 April 1999

Home again, after two wonderful weeks in Spain. In fact, we arrived home on Sunday evening, but I have been too busy since then to write anything for the web site. I don't have much time this evening either. But we have people coming to visit tomorrow, I'll be in London on Friday, and we have a lot of things to do at the weekend, so if I don't write a short entry now I don't know when I'd get round to it.

The weather in Spain is about as perfect as you can imagine at this time of year---day after day of cloudless skies, with temperatures in the upper twenties (that's around 80º if you still think in terms of Fahrenheit) and a gentle refreshing breeze.

Steve, Jo and the Blob are all doing well. Jo had an appointment at the pre-natal clinic for a scan the day after we arrived, and she was told that the Blob is male. (My online friend Hal, who is also expecting a grandchild, tells me that American doctors emphasise that there is always a 10% chance of a false reading of the scan. Spanish doctors apparently don't bother with such niceties. Of course, US doctors have to be cautious about such things---they would get sued for a zillion dollars if they could be shown to be giving out possibly false information.) So we expect a grandson at the end of August, with 90% confidence. Steve and Jo spent the rest of the week arguing about names. They want a name that will sound familiar in both Spanish and English, which restricts the choice quite a bit. At present, the shortlist consists of Thomas, Daniel and Rafael. Mary and I both prefer Thomas. Mary spent a whole evening trying to convince them what a great name Thomas is. She seems to have forgotten how counter-productive it is when parents try to push their views on their children like that. I just kept very quiet most of the time, except to point out that Thomas is a good traditional name in our family (it was my grandfather's name).

Time moves at a different pace when you're on holiday, especially in rural Spain. It was really good to be able to unwind and not care what time it was. Even so, we were both surprised one morning towards lunchtime when Mary asked me what time it was. I looked at my watch and noticed that it was the 9th of April. "Oh," I said, "Happy Anniversary!" We had both completely forgotten that it was our wedding anniversary (first time that has happened in 33 years). That evening I cooked an anniversary dinner for the four of us on the little camping stove that is all Steve and Jo have in their primitive kitchen. Quite a contrast to last year, when Liz was living at home and we took her to the very smart Thai restaurant in Leeds on our anniversary.

I'll have to stop there for now. It's getting late, and I can feel a cold coming on, probably caused by coming back to cold wet England after two weeks in the sun. I think I'll go straight to bed and feel sorry for myself.

Thursday 22 April 1999

Yesterday evening, when I wrote the previous entry, I was feeling very sorry for myself. I could feel a really vicious cold coming on---sore throat, completely blocked nose, coughing and sneezing all the time. I thought that I was in for a miserable few days. But now, lunchtime the following day, I feel virtually better. It's not often that I use my lunch hour to write a journal entry, but I thought that if you ever suffer from colds or flu, you might like to know the secret.

As soon as I felt the cold coming on, I started on a course of Sambucol. This is a completely natural product, extracted from elderberries, and it has a magical ability to stop any respiratory viral infection dead in its tracks. (Well I suppose it is not really magic: it seems to work by boosting the immune system.) Mary discovered it a few months ago, and was amazed to find how effective it was. Since then, she has recommended it to several friends, and they all say the same. Now I can add to their testimony. This stuff is unbelievably effective. I took the first dose at dinner time yesterday (you are supposed to take it four times a day) and a second dose when I went to bed. At that time, I felt really wretched, and when I woke up at about 3 am I felt even worse. Then I woke up again about 5 am, and I could sense that the immune system was beginning to get to work. By the time I took the third dose at breakfast time this morning I knew that the worst was over. I'll keep taking the Sambucol for another couple of days just to make sure of it, but I'm pretty sure now that the cold has gone.

I guess that sounds like a paid commercial, but I can assure you that I have no financial or other connection with this product, other than gratitude at the fact that it works so well. You can get Sambucol at health food stores or through several internet sites. It is not cheap. In the UK it costs £7 for a small bottle, which is enough for one course of treatment. But I think that's a small price to pay for keeping colds and flu at bay, and in fact it's probably not much more than you would pay for one of those paracetamol-based flu "remedies" that only treat the symptoms and don't do anything to cure the disease.

I still haven't told you much about our Spanish trip. That will have to wait until the next entry. Meantime, make sure that you get a bottle of Sambucol for the medicine cabinet.
 

Sunday 25 April 1999

The reason that we stayed for a second week in Spain was so that we could house-sit for Steve and Jo while they went to visit some friends in Almería. For the first week of the trip, we stayed at the Venta de los Arrieros in Colmenar, as on previous visits, and went out to Steve and Jo's place each day. (Six nights of air-conditioned comfort for a total price of £150 for the two of us. Isn't that amazing? You would probably pay that for one night in London.) But then for most of the second week we stayed at their place overnight while they were away, so that we could look after their kitten, water the vegetable garden and generally make the place look inhabited so as to discourage marauding burglars, wild boar and other predators.

Their house is at the end of two kilometres of a rough dirt track that winds down a hillside from the paved road along the ridge of the Montes de Málaga. When they first moved there, the house was in a virtually ruined state. Steve has done a lot of work on it since then, and it now has a roof, a front door and some windows. But it still looks pretty much like a building site. At present, Steve is working on installing a kitchen. They have no mains services at all, no running water or electricity, nada (as they say in Spanish). They aim to be as self-sufficient as possible, to grow most of their own vegetables and eventually to keep their own livestock (chickens and pigs). So far, the only livestock is a tiny black cat called Topsy, who was supposed to be a ratter and mouser. But it turns out that she is a pampered little princess of a cat, who will not eat anything but Purina cat chow and doesn't know what to do with a mouse when she finds one.

The whole setup reminds me a lot of Thoreau's experiment with the simple life, in Walden. You don't get the full effect of it when you go back to an air-conditioned hotel each night. But actually living there in the wilds for 24 hours a day has a genuine 'back to nature' feel to it, which I really love. I wouldn't want to live there permanently, but for a few weeks, or even months, I could easily get used to it. Not that conditions are entirely primitive there---they have solar panels, boosted by an electric generator, which gives them a power supply for lighting, radio telephone and a couple of computers. But while Steve and Jo were away we did not turn on the computer at all. We preferred to enjoy the simple life. Living there is very much like camping (except that the tent has thick stone walls), and it reminded us of happy times spent camping in the National Parks on various trips across America, or of walking in the Scottish hills. For me, as for Thoreau, these are the times when I feel that I am really living.

It was hard work, mind. Take an apparently simple task like watering the vegetable garden. This may sound straightforward. But you have to realise that it is not just a matter of turning on the sprinkler system. To get the water, you first have to drive half a kilometre up the drive, to a place where a footpath leads down to a pool. You then have to fill four large bidons (25 litre plastic drums) with water from the pool, while the frogs look on disapprovingly and croak at you. You then have to carry the bidons about 50 metres up the path and load them into the car. This is really hard work, and I found it exhausting. But I felt a lot fitter by the end of the week. Drive back to the house and empty the bidons into the water butts beside the house. Then you have a supply or water for the watering cans, and you are all set up to water the vegetable garden at sundown.

Steve is about the same height and build as me, but after two years of this sort of work he weighs about 40 pounds more than me. The extra weight is all muscle. He has really impressive pecs and thighs.

Steve and Jo's land slopes down to a deep ravine, on the opposite side of which there is a farm with a large herd of goats. They have been having a bit of trouble with these neighbours, who sometimes graze the goats on their land. So while Steve and Jo were away we were supposed to keep an eye on them in case they tried to trespass. The goats have bells around their necks, which sound really beautiful at a distance across the valley. But one afternoon we thought that they sounded a bit too close, so I wandered down the hillside to investigate. I got to a point where the slope becomes much steeper, and I still couldn't see through the shrubs to the place where the goats were. Suddenly a man appeared through the shrubbery just a few metres away. He was probably in his 40s, short and swarthy, and seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see him. We said hallo to each other, and I explained that I don't speak Spanish ("No hablo espanõl"). He didn't speak any English either. But it turned out that, being Moroccan, he spoke French (about as well as I do). So we had a polite, somewhat stilted, conversation in French for a few minutes, at the end of which I said that I hoped his goats weren't coming our way. "No, no, no, no , no, tranquillo," he said, and we said goodbye to each other. I still don't know whether the goats had come onto Steve and Jo's property or not, but we didn't have any trouble with them after that.

The week of living à la Walden passed all too quickly, and I can't wait to go back there in September.

*****

Follow-up report on Sambucol: You may have thought that I was exaggerating in the previous entry, when I described the amazing effects of Sambucol in curing colds and flu. Well maybe I was, but only a little. Let me bring you up to date with the progress of my cold. I first suspected that I was heading for a cold when I woke up on Wednesday morning. I should have started on the Sambucol straight away, because it is much more effective if you catch the virus at the earliest possible stage. But I was in a hurry to get to work so I did not bother, and by the time I took the first dose at Wednesday dinner time the cold had already taken hold. By Thursday lunchtime, as I described in the previous entry, I was feeling almost better. Since then, I have to admit that the cold has not entirely disappeared. But the symptoms have been much less pronounced than you would expect from a normal cold, say 25% of what it might have been. It has felt like a shadow cold, a virtual cold. I have been aware that it is lurking there (especially in the evenings, when it is worst), but I have not been suffering from it the way you do from a real cold. So I continue to endorse Sambucol enthusiastically. I have finished the bottle now, and this evening I feel that the cold has just about completely gone away, so I won't start another bottle. Next time I will start the treatment more promptly and I hope that the results will be even better.

Tuesday 27 April 1999

I meant to say in the previous entry that I did a lot of reading while I was in Spain. Some of it won't be of much interest to you (like the long and complicated chapter from my research student's PhD thesis that I finally managed to understand), but there is one book that you really must read, if you can get hold of it. Brokeback Mountain, by Annie Proulx, is one of the best novels I have read in a very long time. At less than 60 pages it is almost too short to be called a novel, but it packs a hefty punch. It tells the story of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who meet in the summer of 1963 when working as ranch hands on Brokeback Mountain, and what happened to them after that. I don't want to spoil the story by telling you any more, except to say that it may help you to understand why many gay men of my generation chose to live a straight married life. It is beautifully written, a wonderful exercise in how to say a lot in a very few words. By the end I felt completely drained.

As far as I can tell from the Amazon catalogue, it is not published separately in North America, only as part of a collection of short stories called Close Range: Wyoming Stories. But you can get it through the Amazon UK catalogue, and it will only cost you £3.99. Excellent value. Read it slowly and savour it.