|
April 2002 |
|
|
Back to
|
Friday 5 April I first went up to Trinity College Cambridge as a student in October 1959. The college told me that they had assigned me room C8 in the new Angel Court. When I arrived, I found that Angel Court was indeed a brand new building, cunningly sandwiched between Great Court and Trinity Street. Staircases A, B, D and E consisted of well appointed study-bedrooms looking out onto an impressive courtyard. But C staircase consisted of rooms in an old house that had been incorporated into the new building without being modernised at all. My room, C8, was in fact two rooms on separate floors, a living room/study on the third floor and a bedroom on the top floor, a thoroughly inconvenient arrangement. Some months later, there was a grand opening ceremony for the new building, and the Queen Mother came to Trinity College, to declare Angel Court officially open. Everything was spruced up and made to look immaculate, and two students living in the new part of Angel Court were selected to show off their rooms to the royal visitor as she was escorted round by the Master and other officials of the College. The rest of us were corralled behind a barrier to watch and pay our respects. When the Queen Mother saw us, she came over and started chatting. One of the lads from C staircase offered to show her what a typical student room really looked like. To the consternation of the college officials, she cheerfully accepted the offer, stepped over the barrier and went to take a look round one of the crummy old rooms on C staircase. At that time, she had already been a widow for eight years. I don't suppose that she or anyone else ever imagined that she would live for another 42 years. That was my closest encounter with royalty. As a convinced republican, I have never had any interest in, or enthusiasm for, the royal family. But I'm prepared to make an exception for the Queen Mother, who had something special about her. Quite apart from living to a far greater age than any previous king or queen, she was a classy lady, who knew exactly how to charm a bunch of cynical and jaundiced students. Her death marks the end of an era. The end of the era certainly is being marked, in a big way. The media here have gone completely over the top with wall to wall coverage of every detail of the events surrounding her death, to the exclusion of just about all other news. Parliament was recalled from its Easter recess on Wednesday, not to debate the appalling situation in Israel/Palestine but merely so that members of Parliament could pay homage to the Queen Mother before dispersing on their holidays again. On TV and in the papers the royal death has excluded practically all other news. I think that this excessive media coverage actually detracts from what should be a solemn but fairly muted occasion. But you have to admit that the British know how to lay on a splendid pageant when the occasion calls for it. Today there was an immense procession in which her coffin was taken on a horse-drawn gun carriage from St James's Palace to the ancient Westminster Hall where she is to lie in state until the funeral next Tuesday. It was an impressive and dignified spectacle in the spring sunshine, a fitting tribute to a remarkable woman.
"It's our anniversary next week," said Mary a couple of days ago. "That's right," I said, "next Tuesday." "But we're going to Spain on Sunday, and I haven't bought you a card yet." "I haven't bought one for you either, and we're running out of time now." "Shall we have a truce this year, and not get each other anything?" "Okay. After all, a 36th anniversary isn't a very special one, is it?" We never have made a big celebration out of our wedding anniversary. We don't give each other presents. Usually, we just exchange cards, and go out for a nice meal in the evening. But this year, with Mary's food allergies still restricting her diet fairly severely, it's doubtful whether we'll be able to find a suitable restaurant. In any case, we'll be in unfamiliar surroundings, because we'll be staying with Steve, Jo and Tom in their new place west of Seville. So the 36th anniversary will be a very low key affair. But that doesn't matter: visiting the family, after not seeing them for the past eight months, will be celebration enough for us. We leave early tomorrow morning, and get back late the following Sunday. It is very expensive to fly to Seville, so we'll fly to Málaga as usual, and drive from there. It's about 250 km, but it's a good road all the way so it shouldn't take us too long. ¡Hasta luego!
This will have to be a place holder entry, just to let you know that I haven't disappeared off the face of the earth. We had a great time in Spain, getting home around midnight on Sunday. But we have been out just about every evening this week, and tomorrow I have to set the alarm for 4.30 a.m. in order to catch an early flight to Zürich, where I shall be spending the weekend at a conference. So there has been no time at all for a journal entry, and you'll have to wait until next week for an account of the trip to Spain (and maybe the trip to Zürich also, though I doubt whether there will be anything interesting to report about that).
The weekend in Switzerland was hard work, but a lot more interesting than I was expecting. It was billed as a "brainstorming" meeting (an expression that I loathe), organised by the European Math. Soc. There were about 40 invited participants, and for me it was something of a reunion because several of them were old friends from the time when I was Secretary of the EMS. We were staying in a little resort called Berlingen on the shores of Lake Constance, at a very good hotel where the food and the local wine (a dry riesling) were enough in themselves to make the trip worth while. The meeting started after lunch on Friday, and went on until Sunday lunch, going on until 10 p.m. at night and resuming at 8:30 a.m., with breaks only for meals, apart from a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon when we were allowed out to go for a walk in the hills behind the village. The village was typically Swiss, with most of the houses on a single road running alongside the lake, and little chalets dotted around the alpine meadows in the hills behind. The hotel was right on the lakeside, and my room had a fabulous view out across the lake. It was warm enough for me to have the window open at night, and I was glad that there was an insect mesh over the window. In the morning the outside of the mesh was thick with mosquitoes. The hotel staff assured us that they don't bite, but I never yet came across a non-biting mosquito. For most of the meeting, we were divided into four separate groups, "brainstorming" on different topics. One of the topics was publications, since the EMS has recently set up its own publishing house. There were two of us there representing the London Math. Soc., both of us interested in publishing. We decided that we ought not both to be in the same group, so my colleague went to the publishing group, and I went to the group on digitisation, not knowing much about what this would involve. It turns out that there is a mammoth project underway to digitise the whole research literature of mathematics, an estimated 50 million pages of books and journals from Euclid up to the present day. The aim is first to scan an image of each page, then to index them and eventually to run them all through an optical character recognition program so as to make the whole archive searchable. It's a bit like a mathematical version of the human genome project, and the estimated total cost is around $100 million. The ultimate aim is to have a single searchable database containing every known result in the whole of mathematics. For such a massive undertaking there has to be world wide collaboration. So far, a start has been made in the USA, Germany, France, China and a few other places, but nothing yet in the UK as far as I know. The EMS is coordinating the project at a European level, and part of the purpose of this meeting was to put together a grant application for funding from the European Union. By the end of the weekend I realised that it looks like my responsibility to drum up some interest for the project in Britain, and that will probably take up quite a lot of my time in the next little while. I do realise that most readers of this journal may not have the same enthusiasm for mathematics as me, so I will try not to come back to this topic too often. But right now I'm quite excited by it all. I still haven't said anything about the trip to Spain earlier this month, but I hope I'll get round to that in a day or two.
Many years ago I read Alex Haley's book Roots, in which he traces his family history back to an ancestor Kunta Kinte from The Gambia, who was captured and sold into slavery in Virginia. It is a very well written book, but I don't remember much about it, except that in my cynical way I found the story of how the author went to Africa and actually met the descendants of Kunta Kinte a bit too much of a coincidence to be really believable. Some time later, they made a TV series of the book. Again, I don't remember much of it, except that Mary and I laughed at the idealised Hollywood set of an African village of mud huts that were so sanitised that even the mud was clean. What I do remember is that Alex Haley gave an interview to promote the series, where he described how he had learned his family history from the stories that his grandparents told him when he was young. He said something that has since been quoted all over the place: "Grandparents sprinkle stardust over the lives of children." That puts quite a heavy responsibility on grandparents, and I wasn't sure that I could measure up to it. When we went to Spain a couple of weeks ago to stay with Steve and Jo, it was eight months since we had seen our little grandson Tommy. I wondered whether he would have forgotten us, and would be shy and awkward with us. But I needn't have worried. From the moment we drove up to their house in our little rental car, he came bouncing out to greet us, as though we had never been away from him. The previous time we visited them, last August, he was just two, and could only say a few simple words. But now he is talking quite fluently, which makes him a lot more fun. He has a great sense of humour and seems to be full of energy all the time.
Jo is very reluctant ever to let Tom out of her sight, but she does need a break from him occasionally, and Mary and I managed to persuade her to let us take Tom into town a couple of times to see his Dad in the shop and then to visit his favourite bar, where he ordered a hot cocoa and tapas and flirted with the bar staff. The final full day of our visit was a Saturday. We took them all out for lunch at a very good restaurant in one of the local villages (a Spanish-style lunch, starting at 3:30 in the afternoon and going on until early evening). When we got back to Steve and Jo's house afterwards, we were wondering how to spend the evening, and Mary suggested that she and I should babysit for Tom while Steve and Jo went to see a film. This was a big occasion for Jo, because it was the first time that she had ever left her little boy for the evening. She was very apprehensive about leaving him. When the time came for them to go, she said goodnight to him and he started howling. I think Jo wanted to scrap their plans for the evening and stay home to look after Tom. But Steve insisted that they should go. When they left, Tom was furious. He stood in the corner of the room screaming, and when we tried to comfort him he sobbed "Go away back home to Leeds!"
I don't know if we succeeded in sprinkling any stardust, but you can't go far wrong with a small child if you roll a Cadbury's Creme Egg™ in his direction.
After a meeting in London yesterday, I had a couple of hours to spare so I went to Chariots, near Liverpool Street station. (Usually when I write about Chariots I give a link to their web site at www.gaysauna.co.uk. But they seem to have redesigned this using a Java script so faulty that it will not display properly on any of the three main browsers on my Macintosh, and it crashes Netscape 6.2 completely, which no other site has yet managed to do.) Anyway, I was wandering down one of the corridors in Chariots when a dark skinned young guy passed in the other direction and I felt his arm brush against mine. Actually, it was more than a brush, more like a caress. A few minutes later the same thing happened again, and this time our fingers intertwined and he more or less dragged me off into one of the private cabins. The first thing he said to me was "Are you married?" The second thing he said was "So am I." Hmm, how could he have known that? I mean, I've heard of gaydar, but is there such a thing as 'married gaydar'? He then wanted to know how old I am. I told him "Older than you would want to know." But he said that he preferred older men, and that he wasn't really interested in anyone under 60. That didn't entirely please me, because I like to think that I don't look as old as I am. But I admitted that I just about qualify for his requirements. He told me that one of his regular contacts is a man of 68. His name is Adam, 31 years old, Indian by race but British by nationality. He didn't seem to want to do anything particularly physical, just to nestle up close for a bit of a cuddle and a chat. I like that, and we had a good time together. He travels around the country quite a bit, and he seemed to know all the gay meeting places in Leeds. I was sorry that neither of us had the time to stay for longer. I would have liked to get to know him better. When I left Chariots I took the underground train from Liverpool Street to Kings Cross. I had a day pass for the underground, and since I had no further use for it I looked around at Kings Cross to see if there was anyone I could pass it on to. This is not strictly legal, but there are usually a few young hustlers in most of the busier underground stations who cadge unexpired day passes in order to sell them on. I didn't see anyone who looked as though they were doing that, and I headed off to the main line station for the train back to Leeds. Just then, someone called out Hallo, and I looked round to see that it was Adam. How he recognised me from behind, with clothes on, I can't imagine. He must be a lot more observant than me. We shook hands, told each other to take care, and he ran off to catch his train back to somewhere in East Anglia.
|
Steve and Jo moved to a new location last autumn, and this was the first time that we had seen their new surroundings. They are renting a house on the outskirts of a town about 90 km west of Seville, not far from the Portuguese border, while they look around for a place to buy. Steve has gone into partnership with someone he met there, and they are setting up a garden centre, consisting of a shop in the centre of town (with an elegant tiled plaque announcing it as a Centro de Jardineria) and a nursery on a patch of land just outside the town where Steve raises plants to sell in the shop. The shop only opened a month ago, but it is doing good business, and they are already making enough profit to cover the rent. Of course, Steve is having to work very hard to set up the business. Apart from coming home for lunch and siesta in the Spanish style, he was working either in the shop or the nursery most of the time during our visit.
So we left him alone, and after a couple of minutes he started to calm down a bit. Mary discovered in her luggage a Cadbury's Creme Egg™, and casually left it on a table where Tom could see it. If you have never come across a Cadbury's Creme Egg™, count yourself fortunate. It is a truly nauseating confection, wrapped in foil, consisting of a milk chocolate coating and a sickly sweet, gooey, white and yellow fondant filling designed to resemble an egg. A single mouthful is enough to make me want to puke. Kids love them. Tom found it irresistible and soon ate the whole thing (without being sick, remarkably). After that, he completely forgot to feel sorry for himself for being abandoned by Mummy, and he spent the rest of the evening playing football with me in the hallway, drawing in the colouring book that Mary had bought for him, and eating various snacks. He stayed up far beyond his normal bedtime, of course, and we had only just finished reading his bedtime story when Steve and Jo came home at 11.30 p.m.