Thursday 1 May

I put in an application under the University's premature retirement scheme last December, and received an acknowledgement a couple of days later. Since then, nothing.

Our friend Lorraine, who works in another department of the Uni., applied at the same time as me, and was told in February that her application had been successful. I still heard nothing.

I found out that the reason my application was stalled was that the chairman of our department was waiting to approve it until he knew what the departmental budget for next year would be. That just didn't make any sense to me. If I retire then my salary doesn't have to be paid out of the departmental budget, so you would think that if he was worried about running into deficit then he would be only too glad to be rid of me. But I didn't say anything to him, because I don't want him to think that I am anxious to go. There were some things in the early retirement package that I wanted to negotiate, and I thought that it would weaken my bargaining position if it looked as though I was desperate to leave. For instance, I wanted a guarantee that they would offer me part time re-engagement for the next three years. I also wanted my retirement date to be 30 September rather than the University's standard date of 31 July. This would mean that I stayed on full salary throughout the summer vacation. My only argument for this was that I first started work on 1 October, and I wanted to complete a whole number of years before retiring. That seems like a pretty thin argument (Mary said that only a mathematician would find it convincing), and I guessed that even if the departmental chairman supported it, the university's central administration would veto it.

By the end of last term I had still heard nothing, and I finally cornered the chairman and asked when he was going to forward his recommendation to the human resources people. He told me that I should definitely hear something by Easter. But Easter came and went and I still heard nothing. Then at the beginning of this week I heard that the chairman was said to be making plans to use my salary to make a new appointment. I sent a message back to him, indirectly through someone else, reminding him that I hadn't yet decided to go and that he shouldn't take my departure for granted. Then I contacted the central administration and asked them why I still hadn't heard any response from them.

That seemed to nudge things in the right direction, and yesterday I finally got the letter I had been waiting for. They are offering me everything I asked for, even the 30 September retirement date. I signed the form on the dotted line this morning and sent it back to the human resources manager.

So now Mary and I can start to make plans for next year, including the round the world trip that we have been looking forward to.

Monday 5 May May Day Bank Holiday

Public holidays come thick and fast at this time of year. The May Day holiday marks the culmination of the world snooker championships, and I have spent most of the weekend watching them on the television. The star attraction this year has been local lad Paul Hunter, who has not only been playing extraordinarily well but is a real pleasure to look at. The attraction of snooker is that it is a game of enormous skill and deep strategy, but it has the added bonus of being played by some very good looking young men. Paul Hunter scores very highly on all counts.

I looked around the internet for some pictures of him, but most of them, like these here, are a couple of years old and show him with a very unflattering haircut. It seems that since he started to win big money at the game he has been able to afford a top hair stylist. The difference that makes is amazing. Mmm...dreamy!

After a winning streak that lasted all week and saw him beat some of the top players in the game, Paul Hunter reached the semifinal and went into a 7-1 lead. But then he tensed up and lost some of his confidence, and was very narrowly defeated 17-16.

The scenic quality of the final is a disappointment without young Paul to enliven it, but it's an equally enthralling match. Ken Doherty, who came from 7-1 down to beat Hunter in the semifinal, looks like doing the same again. He was trailing by 7-1 again after the first session, but has pulled back to 14-14. I think I'll quit the internet now and watch the rest of the match on BBC2.

Paul Hunter winning an earlier tournament.  The hairstyle is beginning to improve.

Monday 12 May

I mentioned last month that I have been having trouble with a painful right thumb. I thought at first that this was an RSI condition caused by the fact that I operate the computer mouse with my right hand. I'm left handed, so the right hand doesn't get used as much as the left hand for most things. I shifted the mouse over to the other side of the computer, and that seemed to stop the trouble from getting worse for a while. It flared up again while we were in Spain and I was doing a lot of lifting and carrying as we helped Steve and Jo to move house, but it quietened down again when we came home.

Then about a week ago it suddenly got a whole lot worse, for no apparent reason. All the joints in the thumb, from the top knuckle right down to the wrist, were feeling painful all the time, but particularly when I did anything to exercise it, such as gripping something. It was worst of all first thing in the morning, and in fact the pain of it was waking me up early. That seemed strange to me, as I can't think what exercise the right hand was getting while I was in bed (and nor can you – let's keep this clean, okay?). I made an appointment to see Mary's nice young osteopath, Nathan, who is very good at dealing with musculoskeletal pain. But his receptionist phoned me on the day of the appointment to say that Nathan was ill. So I went to see our family doctor instead.

The doctor took one look at the thumb and prescribed a course of anti-inflammatory pills. The only other comment he made was that I should try to keep the thumb joints moving. (Maybe it's because they're not moving during the night that the pain is worse in the morning.) I must have been in and out of the doctor's office in less than five minutes.

Whether or not because of the pills, the pain stopped almost at once. But I could feel that the underlying problem was still there, and that the drugs were just masking it. I was glad that Nathan was back at work this week, and I went to see him today. Mary warned me that he probably wouldn't be interested in the thumb, and that he would say that the cause of the problem was tension in the neck and shoulders. Sure enough, that was just about the first thing he said. He also said that I need to readjust the position of my computer, to push it much further back on my desk, so that there is a clear space in front of it and I can rest my elbows rather than my wrists on the edge of the desk when using the keyboard and mouse. I have already tried this with the computer at work, and it does seem to be more comfortable that way. I can't do it at home, though, because my desk isn't deep enough to push the keyboard any further back.

Nathan then spent a while massaging my neck and shoulders. He asked if I could feel anything in my thumb when he pressed on a pressure point near the collar bone. Eek! I felt a sharp tingling sensation all down the right arm to the thumb. When he did the same on the left side, there was no sensation. So I assume he was on to something. Then he got going on the thumb, prodding and manipulating all the joints. He said there was a bit of arthritis in one joint. ("Quite normal at your age." Humph! I don't like to hear that. But he placated me by showing me the severe arthritis in his own knuckles, the result of too much karate training, he said.) He then spent quite a while massaging the muscles in the hand. It felt very gentle at the time, but he said that it would be sore for a day or so, and it is. So it's too soon to know whether he has cured the problem, as he claims. I'm to go back and see him again if I'm not 100% better two weeks from now.

At £25 for a 40 minute consultation, Nathan is good value. I have more faith in him than in the National Health Service doctor.

Friday 16 May Anniversary entry

Five years ago today I wrote the first Lobo Solo journal entry and posted it on my brand new Geocities web site. Two years ago today I moved to my own domain, efficiently and inexpensively hosted by Fatcow.

When I wrote the first entry I was nervous that I would soon run out of things to say. Five years later I still feel the same way. I certainly couldn't come up with an entry every day as some people do. But I feel guilty if I leave it more than a week between entries (except when I'm away on holiday), and usually something crops up that seems worth commenting on.

Five years is a long time in the world of online journals. Back in 1998 there was no Diaryland, LiveJournal or Blogger. Times were hard in those days. We used to sit in our unheated cabins and hammer out our own HTML by the light of a flickering candle...

In an early journal entry I wrote "I guess that very few of the current journals will still be around in five years' time." That was a correct prediction. Very few journals last for that long, and I am proud to have reached that landmark. Whether I'll still be doing this in another five years I can't tell, but I'm not about to give up just yet.

In last year's anniversary entry, I mentioned how much you can learn about visitors to the site from the site log. I knew that I had several regular readers who had never contacted me and I invited them to email me. This was only partially successful. I had two interesting messages from people who hadn't previously written to me. But I seem to have scared off another two, who never came back to the site again. They must have been alarmed that I knew something about them, even though it wasn't very much. That makes me a bit diffident about renewing the invitation this year. But I know that I still have a number of readers who have never written to me, including three or four in the Leeds area. I would love to know a bit more about them. So if you're one of them, why don't you send me a short to let me know who you are?

Here's a little innovation to mark the journal's anniversary. Starting from today I'm going to arrange that links from journal entries open in a new window. That way, you can go to the link and close the window when you've seen it, instead of having to use the 'back' button to return to the journal. I have noticed that some other people have taken to doing this and I find it convenient, so I decided to do the same here.

Thursday 22 May

For three Fridays in the past month I have had meetings in London. Each time, I have managed to find a couple of hours after the meeting to go to Chariots sauna before coming home. It's a great place to chill out (if that's an appropriate thing to say about a sauna) and enjoy the gay ambience. But be warned before you click on that link that their web site is atrociously written using Microsoft FrontPage with a bunch of dodgy Java applets that have succeeded in crashing both Netscape and Explorer on my Macintosh, something that no other site has ever managed to do.

I have to go to London yet again tomorrow, but the meetings are likely to go on too long to allow a visit to Chariots. In fact, I won't have many more opportunities to go there, because I am giving up my position in the London Math Soc at the end of this year. Each time I go there, I wonder how I'll cope next year, when I no longer have this chance to get away from my everyday life from time to time and enjoy a few hours in gay company.

Mary is also wondering how she'll cope with having much more of my company when I retire. We're both looking forward to the chances that this will give us to do some travelling together. But Mary remembers how her father got her mother's nerves when he retired and was always hanging around the house all day getting in her way. She doesn't want us to have that problem. We're going to have to work on finding some way that we can enjoy more of each other's company and yet still have some personal space of our own away from each other.

That's something that is important in any relationship, getting the right balance between togetherness and individual freedom. The right balance varies a lot between different couples, and even for the same couple it evolves over time. Mary and I certainly feel much more comfortable spending time apart from each other than we did when we were younger.

So if I can't get away to London for an occasional awayday next year then I'll have to find opportunities nearer home, like the Plastic Ivy.

When I get home tomorrow evening I'll be busy packing for our next little trip, a week in Ireland. I have to do some examining at a university near Dublin, as I did last year. Immediately after that there is a three day math conference in Cork. Mary is coming with me, and we'll stretch the trip by adding a day or two at each end to stay in Dublin and do a bit of sightseeing. Mary is proposing to spend her time on Cork doing some shopping while I'm at the conference. I hope the credit card can stand the strain.

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