Friday 10 October

With Liz living at home, I don't get so much chance to spend the evenings at the computer. At least, that's my excuse for not updating the journal recently. Liz came across my Riven CDs and been working her way through the game. She keeps asking me where to go next and how to solve the puzzles, and I found that I have totally forgotten everything about the game. That's one advantage of growing old and forgetful – it means that I can go back to the game and enjoy it all over again.

Actually, Liz hasn't just been spending her time on computer games. She has been busy looking for a job, and setting herself up with all the things that she will need for a career as an osteopath. She'll certainly need her own transport, and last weekend she bought herself a car. More accurately, I bought her a car, using practically all of my last month's salary to pay for it. It's a little Vauxhall Corsa in a lurid metallic green, and she is very pleased with it. We bought it through the brother of one of Liz's old school friends, who is a secondhand car salesman, and he gave us a very good price on it.

Liz has also got a job for the next six months, replacing an osteopath who is taking maternity leave. She works in a practice in a little town in the Welsh borders, and Liz will be starting there next week. She will only be working two or three days a week to start with, and she'll be coming home for the weekends. But it's just the sort of first job that she was looking for, and it will look good on her CV when she starts applying for more permanent jobs.

It's exciting to see Liz's career beginning to take shape, just as mine is coming to an end. Not that you would know that I officially retired at the end of September. I have been going in to work as usual, and I even persuaded the Head of Dept to agree to let me stay in my nice big professorial office until Christmas. After that, I'll have to move into a smaller one. But for now, life goes on as normal.

Another thing I haven't had much opportunity for, with Liz at home, is to watch sport on TV. Mary and Liz have been monopolising the TV, and their choice of channels is not what I would go for. But it seems that there is a major televised snooker tournament taking place at present. The first I knew of it was that this web site has been getting dozens of hits from Google searches for "Paul Hunter hairstyle". I discovered (by using this same Google query to visit other sites) that young Paul has created a big stir by turning up for this tournament with a David Beckham-style haircut. You may remember that I anticipated this topic several months ago when I did a journal entry on Paul Hunter's evolving hairstyle. It just goes to show that if you want to be at the cutting edge (so to speak) of male fashion, you need to keep reading this journal.

Liz is off to London for the weekend to stay with friends and go partying, so I may finally get the chance to catch some of the snooker and see the notorious new hairstyle.

Added later: I watched the snooker on TV for half an hour earlier this evening. Paul Hunter is out of the tournament, so I didn't see the hairstyle. But I enjoyed watching another good looking young player, Matthew Stevens, who was also sporting a stylish new haircut. Which reminds me: I must remember to get my own hair cut tomorrow morning. Nothing stylish for me, no braiding or spikes, just a short trim for those few remaining strands.

Monday 13 October

I went to Danny's Place for a haircut on Saturday, and was confronted with the usual problem: should I tip him or not? Some of his customers do, others don't. He thanks all of them for their custom in the same cheery way, and I don't think he really expects to be tipped. Danny does pretty well out of me in any case – I have so little hair left that he only takes a fraction of the time to deal with it, compared to some of his other customers with elaborate hairstyles. But I left him a small tip, as I usually do, by giving him £11 for a £10.25 haircut. By American standards, that's an insultingly small tip. But in Europe we don't go in for tipping on a large scale. An amount of 10% for restaurant meals and taxis is normal, but in any other situations tipping is strictly optional.

When Mary and I first went to live in Philadelphia, we phoned for dinner from the local pizzeria one evening. A few minutes later, a teenager came to the door bringing our order. I took the pizza from him, thanked him for bringing it so promptly, and paid him the exact amount of $14.99. As I went back indoors, I heard him stomp off down the drive snarling "Well thank you very fucking much too." That's how I learned that tipping is endemic in America, and that many casual service industry workers are so poorly paid that they rely on their tips to make the job worth while. Here in England I would never dream of tipping a pizza delivery boy. But things are different over there, and I had to learn to be more generous.

There are some advantages in a culture where generous tipping is expected for good service. American waiters tend to be more attentive and friendly than you'll sometimes find in Europe. But I think there's something a bit synthetic about service that's only given in expectation of payment like that. I prefer to imagine a world where service workers are properly paid, and doing a good job is its own reward.

Which brings me to another weekend incident. Mary noticed that one of the front tyres on our car was completely flat. So I jacked the car up, replaced the tyre with the spare, and drove down to the local Kwik-Fit. There were no other customers there, and the two mechanics on duty were sitting around listening to the football on the radio. One of them checked the flat tyre, which was practically new and had no sign of damage, and decided that the trouble was probably due to a faulty valve. He removed the tyre from the wheel, replaced the valve, put the tyre back on again, rebalanced the wheel and put it back on the car. Then he said, "That's all. You can go now." I asked what the charge would be and he said they wouldn't be any charge. I had already taken my wallet out of my pocket by then, and if there had been a fiver in it I would have given it to him. But I had nothing smaller than a £10 note, which seemed excessive for a tip. So I ended up paying nothing. As I drove off I waved at him, and he gave a cheery return wave. So he obviously didn't feel at all aggrieved at not getting tipped. Even so, I felt guilty about that. The company certainly lives up to its slogan "You can't get better than a Kwik-Fit fitter." I have always found them totally efficient and good value, and you can't get better value than a zero payment. But if I have to go there again I'll make sure that I have a £5 note in my wallet.

Monday 20 October

You're not going to get a lot of sense out of me for the next little while, while the baseball world series is taking place. Channel 5 is carrying the series live, as it has done for the past couple of years. The games take place in the middle of the night, British time, so I tape them and watch them whenever I have a free evening. That's a good way to watch baseball. You can fast forward through all the breaks between innings, changes of pitcher and so on. Even so, each game lasts quite a while, and I expect it will be at least a week before I get through all of them.

Last year, I mentioned in this journal that I liked the look of David Eckstein. I'm clearly not alone in that, because this site gets a regular stream of hits from Google enquiries for him. It's too soon to say yet whether I'll find a favourite to support this year.

Apart from the baseball, nothing interesting seems to happen in October. I don't know why, but in the five years since I started this journal, I have always found it the hardest month in which to find anything to write about. Roll on November!

Tuesday 28 October

I really thought I had got away with it this year, but it has finally caught up with me.

Every year towards the end of September, a new university term begins. Half the students seem to come back with coughs and colds, and they sit in the lecture theatre sneezing and coughing at me as I stand at the front lecturing to them. It's usually only a matter of days before I come down with some infection. But this year seemed different. Maybe it was because of the very mild autumn, or perhaps students are just becoming more health conscious, but they all seemed to be in much better shape than in previous years and I began to think that I might get through the term without catching anything.

Two days ago, that all changed. Just before bed time, I felt an ominous scratchy feeling at the back of the throat. I slept badly, and by the morning I had a really heavy cold. Today it has seemed worse than a cold, more like a dose of flu. I have had a slight fever, and a very sore throat. I went in to work as usual, because I have to give two lectures on Tuesdays, and I don't want to fall still further behind on the syllabus than I already am (what with taking time off for trips to London several times this term, and a visit to Amsterdam next week). But by lunch time I had had enough, and I came home to spend the rest of the day feeling sorry for myself. At least this should give me the chance to curl up in front of the TV and watch the rest of the baseball games that I taped last week. I'm about half way through game 5 at present, and I have carefully avoided reading the sports pages of the paper, so I don't know the results. I'm kind of hoping that the series didn't go to a seventh game, because I forgot to put a tape into the recorder on Sunday. I would feel annoyed with myself if I completely missed the deciding game.

Friday 31 October

I still haven't shaken off this virus. I feel okay in the mornings and go in to work, but by lunchtime I'm beginning to feel achy and feverish and I come home to veg out for the rest of the day. I was talking to a colleague this morning, and we agreed that despite all the bureaucracy and hassles that have afflicted academic life in recent years, we still enjoy our jobs sufficiently that we hate to take off time for sickness. That's something to be very grateful for – so many people have jobs where they're only too glad to grab the slightest excuse to take time off work. As my colleague pointed out, another advantage of academic life is that if we do feel like taking time off then we just take it, without even pretending to have an excuse. (Not that we often do that, needless to say.)

Perhaps it was the virus making me feel crabby when I shouted at a student during a lecture this morning. Then again, I think I was fully justified. It's a big class, over 100 students, and they are usually very well behaved. I explained to them that I could only speak softly because of my voice being affected by the virus, and they responded by being extra quiet so that even the kids in the back row could hear what I was saying.

Then a mobile phone started ringing. If there's one form of interruption that I can't stand when I'm lecturing, it's the sound of a ringtone. I have always disliked telephones of any sort, and I have a particularly deep loathing for mobile phones. I warned the class at the start of term that they should always make sure their phones are switched off during lectures. On the rare occasions when someone forgets, my strategy is to stop lecturing instantly if I hear an electronic noise, and glower fiercely in the direction of the sound. Usually the student immediately switches it off and looks apologetic and embarrassed. This morning, the ring tone was very loud and playing some stupid song which the other students all recognised but I didn't. So they all started giggling. The wretched owner took forever to locate the phone, buried somewhere in his backpack which was lying on the floor beside him. When he eventually found it, instead of turning it off, he looked at the text message on the display panel, then took the call and started talking into the phone.

At that point, my patience snapped. I said, "Turn that thing off NOW," and proceeded to tell him in front of the class that that sort of behaviour was totally unacceptable. He did switch the phone off, but I noticed that for the rest of the hour he stopped taking lecture notes and sat there glaring at me. Whenever I looked in his direction, I glared back at him. When I got home and told Mary and Liz about this incident, Liz said that a better strategy would have been to smile sweetly and sarcastically at him. Perhaps she's right. If ever such a thing happens again (which it better hadn't) maybe I'll try that strategy.

I still find it hard to believe that anyone could behave in such an outrageous way. What is the matter with some of today's young people? Don't they have the slightest idea of responsible and courteous behaviour? And why are they turning me into a cantankerous old curmudgeon?

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