Wednesday 1 January Happy New Year!

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made.
Robert Browning, 1864

Looking ahead into 2003, I'm facing bigger changes than I have experienced for a long time. Assuming that my application for early retirement is accepted, I shall only have another six months or so of full time employment. If they give me part time re-engagement then I shall try to load all my teaching into the autumn semester. So in fact I shall still be working more or less full time through the whole of 2003, and then I'll be completely free for the first half of 2004. Also, I am resigning as Publications Secretary of the London Math Soc at the end of 2003. So throughout this year, just about everything that I do, I'll be doing it for the last time. I imagine that there will be a blend of relief and regret about all this.

Having written that, I'm wondering what it is that I'll regret. Maybe nothing at all. I have been very lucky to have a career that enables me to spend most of the time doing things that I enjoy, but I certainly won't miss the bureaucracy that has been stifling British universities in recent years. As a part time member of staff, I'll be able to continue doing the things that I enjoy, without having to bother about administrative chores. I shall miss the opportunities for travel that the job has given me, and in particular I'll be sorry not to have the opportunity to enjoy the gay atmosphere of Chariots sauna on visits to London, once I stop working for the Math Soc. On the other hand, I'm very glad that next June's trip to Moscow will be the last time that I have to go there. And one of the big advantages of retirement is that I'll be free to travel the world with Mary. We have all sorts of travel plans that we want to accomplish while we're still in good enough health to be able to.

Apart from travelling, I'll want to spend quite a bit of time on various projects around the house and garden. The front porch needs re-flooring, and I would like to convert the loft into a more accessible attic. I get part of my pension on the form of a lump sum, and we're thinking of using that to buy up an old property that we could renovate and rent out.

I hope Robert Browning was right: "The best is yet to be." Most people dread the thought of growing old, but I think that so long as we stay reasonably healthy the "third age" could be the best of all.

To mark the new year, I have been tinkering with the journal design. Nothing very radical: the most noticeable change is that the font colour has changed from dark green to dark blue. I have dropped the "reply coupon" at the bottom of the current month's page, because nobody has been using that recently. In future, if you want to contact me, you'll have to (and I hope you will, from time to time!).

I would like to have had time to learn more about html, css and so on, so that I could make the site properly standards compliant and ensure that it displays as it should on a wider variety of browsers. That is one of the many projects that I am saving up for my retirement.

Sunday 5 January

Winter has finally arrived. When I looked out of the bedroom window on Friday morning there was a couple of inches of snow on the ground, and it's still there today. But it only affects the hill top where we live. There's no snow in the city centre. I had to go to London for a meeting on Friday, and there was no sign of snow anywhere between Leeds and London. There was plenty of flooding, though, after the past two weeks of steady rainfall. There were parts of Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire where the train seemed to be travelling on a causeway, with the fields on both sides of the track underwater for as far as the eye could see.

It has turned much colder too, with the temperature hardly going above freezing for the past three days. Just the time of year to get away from England to the subtropical warmth of the Canaries, and that's where we are heading tomorrow, for a couple of weeks in our usual winter hideaway in Puerto de Mogán. Last year, Mary stayed on there for a couple of months after I came home. This year, she is in two minds whether to do the same again. Healthwise, she is much better now than she was then, so there isn't the same medical need for her to escape the damp British winter. But she is by no means fully recovered, and my guess is that she'll be unable to resist the temptation to stay on in Gran Canaria for a few weeks longer.

Last year, our friend Lorraine came with us for the first week of our holiday in Puerto de Mogán. You won't have seen any mention of Lorraine in this journal since then. The reason is that she and Mary haven't been on speaking terms for most of the year. We're still not entirely sure what caused the rift. Lorraine certainly had a rather miserable week on Gran Canaria. The weather was not nearly as perfect as it is supposed to be, and Lorraine had a very bad cold for most of the time. But on top of that, she somehow got the feeling that Mary was neglecting her. If so, it certainly wasn't deliberate, it was just that Mary was so ill that she hadn't the mental energy to cope with company. In fact, she was even too ill to realise that there might be a problem. And of course I'm far too unaware to be sensitive to situations like that. I think Lorraine was partly to blame in that she never took much interest in Mary's illness and didn't know how serious it was. In any case, she didn't say anything at the time about how she felt, she bottled it all up and went home seething at the way her expensive holiday had been ruined. It was only gradually, in the following months, that we realised how aggrieved she felt.

Mary is very good at handling situations like that. She made no attempt to contact Lorraine until later in the year, when she sent her a friendly letter, followed by a postcard from Beijing during our trip to China. Lorraine replied, and they exchanged a couple more letters before Mary suggested that Lorraine and David should come over for dinner some time during the Christmas holidays. They came for dinner last Monday, and we also invited our friends Christine and Simon. The evening went very well, and I think Mary's friendship with Lorraine is now back on an even keel. I hope so, anyway. We have few enough friends that we don't want to start losing any of them.

We're not taking any friends with us to Gran Canaria this time, and I hope we don't have a week of bad weather as we did last year. While I'm lazing on a beach reading, swimming and eyeing the boyz, the students here in Leeds will be having examinations. The downside of that is that when I come back home on the 20th I'll be faced with a great pile of exam scripts to be marked. That will keep me busy for the following few days, so I'm unlikely to be updating this journal again until some time towards the end of the month.

Wednesday 22 January Home alone II

This entry could easily be a copy of the one that I wrote this time last year. I'm back from Gran Canaria feeling refreshed and nicely tanned, but with a mountain of work to do here, marking exams and doing household chores.

Mary has stayed on in the Canaries. She was in two minds about whether or not to do so, because the weather there was not quite as perfect as it should be. Daytime temperatures for the first week of our stay were in the lower rather than the upper twenties (that means 70s rather than 80s if you prefer Fahrenheit), and it got quite cold at night. 'Quite cold' is a relative term: the temperature never went below 14°C even at night, but when you're in an apartment that has no form of heating whatever that can certainly seem too cold for comfort. But it got warmer last week and Mary decided that five more weeks there would be in order. She is treating herself to one more week in the apartment where we were staying, with its comfortable accommodation and roof garden. Then for the following four weeks she is moving down to what we call the dungeon, a small room in the basement of the same building which is of course much cheaper.

Living alone doesn't have the novelty that it did last year, but I'm still looking forward to having a month or so in which to come and go as I please. I'm not sure how I'll use the time. At the moment I can't concentrate on anything while there's still this great pile of exam scripts waiting to be marked. I had better get back to them now, and then hope to resume journal entries some time next week.

Monday 27 January

After a busy weekend, I have more or less caught up with all the chores that were piling up, and also had a bit of time for relaxation. On Friday evening I drove over to Dewsbury for a couple of hours at the Plastic Ivy sauna. There is a gay sauna in Leeds, called the Spartan, which more than lives up to its name, being generally seedy and grotty, and I usually avoid it. It's definitely worth the 40 minute drive to Dewsbury for a visit to the Plastic Ivy, which is clean, comfortable and friendly. I mentioned it in this journal last March, and since then I have had over 60 visitors to the site as a result of searches for it. I asked the manager if he had ever thought of setting up a web site for the Plastic Ivy, and he claimed that there already was one. But I certainly can't find it, and I guess that people searching online for it will continue to be referred to my site.

On Saturday and Sunday I divided my time between marking exams (now thankfully all done) and household chores (three loads of laundry put through the washer and dryer; 28 pounds of marmalade prepared and bottled, to see me through the coming year).

I still haven't said anything much about the trip to Gran Canaria. It was so similar to last year's that there isn't a lot to be said. We have now had two years running in which the weather there in the second week of January has been less than ideal, and it begins to look as though it would be better to avoid that week in future. Next year, if my application for premature retirement goes according to plan, I should have a lot more free time. If all my teaching is loaded into the first semester then I shall be completely free once the January exams are out of the way. Mary and I started to think in terms of spending the whole of February in Gran Canaria. Then we got more ambitious still, and decided that next February and March would be an ideal time for a round the world trip to Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. We would both love to do that. There is a slight hitch in that we would have to find someone to look after our remaining cat, Rosie, for that time. But if we can get round one or two little problems like that then we'll definitely want to do that.

Back to Gran Canaria, for a little gripe about Avis. We rented a car from Avis, and when I collected the car key from their office at Las Palmas airport they told me that they were giving me a free upgrade because I had made the booking over the internet. But when I found the car in the Avis car park it seemed to me to be more like a downgrade than an upgrade. It was a diesel powered vehicle called an Opel Combo, that was more like a van than a car, tall and square, with double doors at the back and a sliding door for the rear seat passengers. It looked and handled like an upturned bathtub on wheels—definitely not a pleasure to drive on Gran Canaria's twisting roads.

But I mustn't criticise Avis too much, because I feel guilty about the way I have treated their cars over the years. It seems that whenever I rent a car from them I end up driving it over rough dirt tracks, and returning it to them in a filthy, scratched condition, probably with a wrecked suspension. This has happened in Spain, New Mexico, Norway, and now Gran Canaria. On two of the days when the weather was not warm enough for lazing on the beach we decided to take a ride into the interior of the island. Gran Canaria is basically an extinct volcano, and as soon as you get away from the coast you find yourself driving up narrow lanes that twist and turn steeply up rocky valleys as they wind their way up to the inland villages in the higher parts of the island. We drove over a 1000 metre pass to a delightful little village called Soria where we stopped for a drink at the local bar. But about 10 km of the road was a stony and deeply rutted track for which the Combo was not at all suited.

Talking about rental cars reminds me of something that I have wanted to mention here for a long time:

Ways in which Europe is better than America (#1 in a very occasional series): the price they quote is the price you pay. When I first visited America nearly 40 years ago, it took me a long time to get used to the fact that advertised prices are misleading. If I went to stay in a motel displaying a room price of $9.99 then I would offer them a ten dollar bill and expect 1¢ change. But no, they wanted a further 29¢ to cover the (unadvertised) sales tax. Motel prices have risen since then; and in some States the sales tax is 6% or 7% rather than the 3% of those golden days. But they still don't include it in the quoted price. In Britain, we have an outrageous 17.5% rate of VAT, but at least it's normally included in the advertised price. If I buy a shirt with a £19.99 price tag, then I can pay with a £20 note and expect to get a penny change.

These hidden costs are at their worst in the car rental business. When I went to California a couple of years ago I found several car rental companies advertising a rate of $99 per week, which sounded pretty good to me. But when the time came to pay, I found that the rate didn't even include basic insurance. Then they added on several other compulsory items and finally the sales tax, so that the total charge was about double the advertised rate. This has happened to me several times before, but somehow it always comes as a nasty surprise. On Gran Canaria, Avis quoted £181.98 for two weeks, and that is exactly what I paid. The only other expense was that I twice had to fill the tank with cheap Spanish diesel fuel. Life is so much simpler that way.

Thursday 30 January

I still seem to be struggling to catch up with things, and I don't really have time to write a journal entry. Dammit, I don't even have time to read journal entries. There are about 20 online journals that I like to read (those on my links page plus a few others), and I haven't had time to look at most of them since I got back from the Canaries. Some of them I haven't been to for over a month.

Things won't get any easier in the next few days either. I foolishly volunteered to take part in a weekend "brainstorming" meeting (I loathe that word) in Switzerland, organised by the European Math Soc, and tomorrow I have to get up at some unearthly hour like 4:30 to catch a flight to Amsterdam and Zürich. I'll be back late Sunday evening, and then on Monday a couple of American friends from Tuscaloosa, Alabama are coming to stay for a few days. It will be good to see them again—first time in several years—but I am a bit apprehensive about entertaining visitors without Mary here to look after them. Alan is a mathematician, and is speaking at our weekly research seminar on Tuesday, and his wife Nan is also an academic, an expert in medieval history. They'll be staying until Thursday, but I'm hoping that I'll only have to cook a dinner for them once, on the Monday. On Tuesday we'll be going out to dinner with a group of colleagues after the seminar, and on Wednesday I'm kind of hoping that Alan and Nan will offer to take me out to dinner.

That's all for now. I need an early night.

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