Tuesday 4 March

Mary is back home! I drove over to Manchester airport yesterday evening to collect her. She looked happy and healthy as she came past the arrivals barrier. We were both glad to see each other again, although we both admitted to each other that we would have been happier if the separation had lasted longer. Don't get me wrong: all I mean by that is that she would have liked to be able to stay on in the warmth of the Canary Isles for another month or so; and I have been too busy with work and household chores to have had time to appreciate the solitary life at home as I would have wished.

We also agreed that, although we both like to have time on our own and could have done with a few more weeks of it, it makes a big difference to know that we still have each other to come back to eventually. Neither of us would cope at all well with being genuinely on our own on a long term basis.

As I guessed would happen, Mary's return has brought bad weather. Her main aim in staying in the Canaries was to avoid the dull, damp English winter. But in fact the whole month of February was bright and sunny, and the past week or so has been positively spring-like. The garden is full of snowdrops and crocuses in bloom, and the daffodils are starting to sprout. But today, a front of thick cloud and rain has moved in from the Atlantic, and it looks as though we are in for a gloomy, wet month.

So life is returning to normal. Living on my own has not been as interesting as it was last year – it no longer has the novelty that it did – and the reunion yesterday was also more low key than last year's. Now all that remains is to get used to the little details of our household routine again. I was cursing under my breath at breakfast time this morning when I realised that the electric kettle was not heating after I turned it on. Mary had switched it off at the wall (she has this fear that it will spontaneously combust if it's not switched off overnight). Then when I left the house to go to work I unthinkingly turned on the burglar alarm, so of course Mary triggered it when she got up. Ah well, we'll get used to each other's little ways again eventually.

Monday 10 March

Once every two years the Council of the London Math Soc holds a weekend retreat to discuss its future priorities. There have been two of these since I started this journal, four years ago in Manchester and two years ago at a conference centre in the Ashdown forest. This year's retreat took place in one of the Cambridge colleges.

I drove to Cambridge on Friday morning, and noticed on leaving home that the car was low on fuel. I stopped just outside Leeds, at the service area by the M62/A1 junction, to fill up with petrol. As I was doing so, a girl came up to me and asked if I was heading south. There was a boy hovering nearby, and I took a good look at them both to judge whether they looked potentially homicidal (which they didn't) before admitting that I was going to Cambridge. They then explained that they were from Durham University, and were hitchhiking to Amsterdam as part of some sponsored fundraising event. Cambridge was right on their route to Harwich, from where they were booked on a ferry to Holland, so they were lucky to get a lift from me.

As we travelled south, they told me that they were part of a group of 50 students travelling in pairs, and that they had left Durham at 5 a.m. With so many people looking for lifts, and scarcely any traffic at that hour, they had made a very slow start, which was why they had only reached Leeds by 9.30. They had until 7 p.m. to reach Harwich, and they were staying at a youth hostel in Amsterdam for a couple of nights. For the return journey, they would not have to hitchhike because there was a bus taking them back to Durham.

We stopped briefly at the big service area on the Newark bypass, where I had a Coke and offered to get something for them to drink. But they had their own bottles of water in a backpack, and declined the offer. Back on the road, they both fell asleep in the car, already exhausted by their early start to the day. The traffic was very light, and we had a clear run to Cambridge. I dropped them at a service area on the A14 a little way outside Cambridge just before midday, and arrived at the college in plenty of time to go and browse round Heffers bookshop for a while before the meetings started.

This is the seventh time that I have been on one of these retreats. It is also the last, so it could have been a nostalgic occasion. But the truth is that most of my closest friends in the LMS have already left the Council and handed over to a younger generation, and I no longer feel that I belong there in the way that I used to. That's just as well – it means that I have timed my retirement right, and I won't feel too many regrets when my term of office finishes in November.

We were lavishly entertained, as you expect from a Cambridge college. Dinner on Saturday was particularly splendid, at the Master's Lodge. The table was decorated with an impressive selection of the college silver. I remember that the menu included roast pheasant. The rest is lost in an alcoholic haze. I do recall that each place setting included six wine glasses (not counting the champagne aperitif, nor yet the silver water tankard at each of the 21 places at the table).

The meeting finished at lunch time on Sunday, and I set off to drive back home. As always, I stopped at the service area on the Newark bypass, which is about the midpoint of the journey. As I sat there drinking my Coke, I noticed that there was a large party of students milling around the restaurant. I was watching a group of them at the next table, where a couple of rather good looking boys were getting a lot of attention from the girls in the group. So I didn't notice that a couple of the students had come across to my table from the other direction. "Wasn't it you who gave us a lift on Friday?" they asked, and sure enough it was the pair who had travelled with me from Leeds to Cambridge. What a very strange coincidence. They had enjoyed their weekend in Amsterdam, and were very grateful that I had helped them on their way. Their bus had stopped at the service area on its way back from Harwich to Durham and was about to set off again, so we had no time to talk further.

I did not go straight home after that, but stopped off for a relaxing visit to the Plastic Ivy sauna in Dewsbury. I mentioned a couple of months ago that I could not find the web site for this place. I have since discovered that the site does exist, but it does not seem to be indexed on any search engines. If you want to see it, you'll find it here.

Wednesday 12 March

When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, a very long time ago, I had a generous scholarship from Trinity College (no student loans or overdrafts in those days), which meant that I could live quite comfortably. One of the luxuries I indulged in was a tape recorder, which in 1960 meant a large, cumbersome reel-to-reel machine costing £60, one sixth of my entire annual budget. I used it to record the LPs in the College record library, and I also recorded some music from Radio 3, or the Third Programme as it was then known. One of my favourite tapes taken from the radio was a series of four half-hour programmes of American folk music collected by the great musicologist Alan Lomax, in which he talked about and played some of the recordings he made during his journey through the Southern states in 1959 when he returned to the USA after several years of exile during the McCarthy years.

I played that tape so often that I knew every track by heart, and I never grew tired of it. Eventually the tape recorder packed up and would play no more. I still have it up in the attic somewhere, because I never throw things away, but it is many years since it worked, and it certainly never will again.

Last month, I saw this article in the Guardian, describing how Alan Lomax (who died last year) made his historic recordings of blues, spirituals and other folk music. The article mentioned that some of this music is available on a four-CD collection called "Sounds of the South". I knew at once that I had to have this, and I looked for it on Amazon. I couldn't locate it on the Amazon UK site, but I found it here on the Amazon USA site, and I ordered it straight away.

Yesterday there was a note from the postman saying that a parcel had arrived for me but that I would have to go to the sorting office to collect it because there was £12.56 to pay, to cover import duty and something called a "customer charge". This seems to be a charge that the Royal Mail levy to compensate themselves for the inconvenience caused by the customer having to go to the sorting office to collect the package rather than having it delivered. (Does that make sense? It probably does to them.)

I called in at the sorting office this morning on my way to work, and they presented me with an enormous parcel, 20"x14"x4". I assumed that they must have made a mistake until I saw the Amazon logo on the side. When I opened the carton I found that it contained a huge amount of plastic padding, but in one corner there was the box containing the CDs. I'm playing the first disk right now, and it's great. Most of my old favourites are there, in amazingly clear stereo without any of the tape hiss and surface noise that I was used to, and a whole lot of other material as well. It's excellent value, even with the import duty and "customer charge".

Sunday 16 March

I mentioned last month how my American friends Alan and Nan, who are spending six months in Lancaster, came to visit for a few days while Mary was away, and how surprised I was by what seemed like their meanness and lack of generosity. When I told Mary about this, she said that perhaps they were genuinely short of money while on sabbatical. She pointed out that Alan almost certainly isn't getting paid anything in Lancaster, and salaries in Alabama are probably low by American standards. This made me feel a bit guilty about having manoeuvred them into taking me out for dinner on their last night here.

A week or two ago, Alan emailed me to say that he was going to York to give a seminar, and asking if he and Nan could stay with us for a few days on their way back to Lancaster. I replied that of course we would be glad to see them, and he sent another message saying that they would arrive on Thursday evening, but that they would be quite late and we should not expect them for dinner.

On Thursday, we had just finished dinner when the doorbell rang, and there were Alan and Nan. When they had taken their things up to their room, Mary asked them if they wanted anything to eat or drink. Oh yes, they said, they had decided to drive straight to our house without stopping off for dinner, and they were hungry. So Mary bustled round preparing a meal for them. She found some ingredients for a main course, but she didn't have anything for dessert except cheese and biscuits and some fruit, all of which they consumed. (They have big appetites. I was going to say "typically American appetites", but I shouldn't make racist remarks like that.) Mary was pleased to have been able to create a good meal at no notice, but after the visitors had gone to bed she complained about their thoughtlessness in making her cook two separate dinners that evening. I was equally annoyed, and I realised that the impression of them that I had from their previous visit had been correct. I no longer feel guilty about making them take me out to a restaurant.

On Friday they planned to go out for the day while I was at work. We said that they could make themselves some sandwiches for lunch, but they proceeded to make themselves a huge picnic, practically cleaning out the fridge in the process.

Okay, that's enough griping. You get the picture that we did not find them to be ideal guests. But apart from their unbridled greediness and the fact that Nan never stops talking, they are good company. Anyway, nobody's perfect, and I wouldn't want to fall out with old friends whom we have known for very many years. They are both of them keen walkers, and on Saturday I went out with them for a day's hike in the Yorkshire Dales. After some early morning mist had cleared, it was a beautiful sunny day. We drove to the car park in the picturesque little village of Kettlewell and set off up the valley of Dowber Gill Beck, from where we climbed to the summit of Great Whernside. Despite the fine weather, there was a strong and very cold north-easterly wind. This must have discouraged other walkers, because we only passed about half a dozen people all day. We found a sheltered spot in the lee of the summit crag, where we had lunch, with a panoramic view of the upper Wharfe valley, and then walked a couple of miles along the summit ridge before circling round to Top Mere and back to Kettlewell, an excellent day's excursion.

This morning, after a gargantuan breakfast, Alan and Nan set off for Lancaster, telling us that we would have to come and visit them there. Mary and I then made an emergency visit to the supermarket to restock our depleted larder.

Monday 24 March

I'm in two minds whether to write about the invasion of Iraq. Nothing I say is likely to affect the way anybody else thinks about it. On the other hand, it seems frivolous to write about anything else at the moment.

There seems to be a consensus that, whatever reservations one might have about the legality, wisdom or ethics of the invasion, we should all rally to the support of our troops now that hostilities are underway, and we should hope for a quick, clean end to the war.

As usual, I'm in a minority even among minorities. I'm not at all sure that an easy victory would be for the best. That's not to say that I don't support our military personnel. I have two cousins who spent their careers in the armed forces, and I have a lot of respect for the courage, dedication and selflessness of anyone who serves their country in that way. If I had a religious faith I would be praying for the safety of our forces. I certainly hope that the bloodshed and loss of life doesn't go beyond what has already occurred.

But I think there are real dangers in a quick, easy victory. It would only encourage the crazy gang who control the US government and the Pentagon to start planning the next incursion, whether into North Korea, Iran or some other hapless nation. Once they get the idea that they can take over other countries with impunity, I can't see that there will be anything to stop them doing so. And lurking in the shadows behind the crazy gang, there is an even crazier gang of fundamentalist christians who believe that by provoking war in the middle east they are paving the way for Armageddon and the second coming of Christ. If the conflict in Iraq doesn't do the trick, they'll want to move on to war in Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the region, hoping to prepare the way of the Lord for the apocalypse. (Do I begin to sound paranoid? Very well, I am paranoid, I'm allowed to be. This is my journal, where I can let loose the wilder thoughts that I might suppress in my more rational moments.) [Credit for paranoid graphic: http://www.flooble.com.]

The chief casualty in the war so far has been the United Nations. Of course, that is just what the crazy gang want. To them, the UN is a challenge to the global supremacy of the US, and they will be only too happy to see it lose its authority. To me, that would be a complete disaster. For virtually the whole of my lifetime it has been the UN that has been the world's only real hope of peace and progress, and I hate to see it being undermined and bypassed as it has been in the past month.

My parents lived through two world wars. After the first, the "war to end all wars", the League of Nations was set up as a means to establish international law and order and to prevent such wars from ever happening again. But it didn't last very long. In the 1930s the League fell apart and before long the world was at war again. After the Second World War there was another attempt to bring order and stability into international relations, and the United Nations was established. The UN may not have a perfect track record, but during the nearly 60 years of its existence we have been spared any more global wars. I don't want to see it fall apart now. I don't want my children or grandchildren to have to live through the grim times that my parents endured.

So I have very mixed feelings about this war. I don't want to see a prolonged, messy conflict. But I don't want the US and UK governments to succeed too easily in this preemptive invasion which Kofi Annan has declared illegal and the Pope thinks is immoral.

Friday 28 March

Term finished today, and the students have gone off for their four weeks Easter vacation. "Vacation" is a misnomer – this is not holiday time, it's an opportunity for the students to work hard revising for their exams next term. And it's certainly not a vacation for the professors, of course. No indeed, we work around the year and around the clock, don't you know. But it does give Mary and me the opportunity to take a short break to see the family. We're going to Spain tomorrow, to spend a week with Steve, Jo and Tom.

As it happens, we could hardly have chosen a worse time to visit them. They are moving into their new apartment today, and they don't have the guest bedroom organised yet. So we'll have to stay in a local hotel. The builders originally gave them a completion date of last December, and when we booked the trip we assumed that they would be well settled into the new place by now. But we reckoned without the mañana factor. In Spain, everything takes ten times longer than it ought to, and unexpected complications arise all the time. Getting the water and electricity connected took several weeks. Then there were the bureaucratic hassles of ensuring that all the paperwork was correctly completed. They had to delay completing the purchase until the local authority had certified the building as being acceptable for habitation. The bank then made a mistake with the mortgage, and if Steve hadn't spotted this at the last moment, they might have been saddled with paying off a loan on the wrong property.

The upshot of all this is that they have had to endure another winter in their spartan temporary accommodation, and they are now having to move when Jo is seven months pregnant. Hopefully there won't be any last minute hitches, and they will finally be installed in the new place by the time we arrive tomorrow. I hope we won't get in their way too much by turning up at such an inconvenient time. At least we may be able to help them a bit with unpacking and sorting things out.

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