Sunday 7 December

Earlier this year I pruned the two pyracanthas that grow round our sitting room window. They blossomed very well in the summer, and were soon covered with bright orange berries. Usually, the birds soon eat all the berries, but this autumn has been very mild, and the birds seem to have found other things to nourish them – grubs and insects, probably, full of protein and more appetising than acid-tasting fruit. This photo was taken a few weeks ago, but the pyracanthas looked just the same today, with the pale late autumn sun low in the sky. With luck, the berries will last right through the winter, brightening up that corner of the house.

It seems like life is on hold at the moment. Big changes are just around the corner, but none of them has taken effect yet. At work, there is one more week of term. After that, apart from having to deal with the exams in the middle of January, I shall be completely free until the end of September. I have also handed over my publishing responsibilities for the math soc. I no longer get several emails a day from the society's publisher in London asking for my advice or action. But my work for the society hasn't quite finished yet. I still have to organise all the files that I have accumulated, and hand them over to my successor, who is a professor in Edinburgh.

I am hopeless at filing. If I need to file a document I put it in a 'pending' tray, waiting for a day when I have time to file it away properly. Of course, such days rarely come. I discovered a couple of weeks ago that I have a pile of papers dating back nearly three years, all waiting to be filed. When that was done, I had the even more daunting task of weeding out all the obsolete material before taking the rest to Edinburgh. My predecessor in this job was a compulsive hoarder, who filed multiple copies of every single piece of paper that came his way. When I took the job on he presented me with four four-drawer filing cabinets full of files. I never even looked at most of this stuff. I spent the whole of last week throwing most of it out. But hidden among it there are some things that need to be kept, like contracts with publishers and employees, so I had to pay careful attention to what I was doing. I have now dealt with most of it, and when I drive up to Edinburgh some time next week to hand it over, I think I shouldn't have more than about half a filing cabinet's worth of files.

Some of the papers that I weeded out are old enough that they may have some historical value. I'll send them to the society's archivist in London in case she wants to preserve them for posterity. Of course, most correspondence these days is by email. I must have many megabytes of emails, systematically filed on my computer (I'm better at filing emails than I am with paper files), but I won't be handing any of them over to my successor because they're all in Macintosh format and he's a Unix person. To get round this problem I have been copying him in on all email correspondence for the past six months or so. If he needs to refer to anything that goes back before then, he'll have to ask me for it. I'll keep it all on the computer for the next few years, but I don't think any of it will ever reach the archivist. Future historians (assuming that there are any) are going to curse the invention of the computer. So many valuable documents, which previously would have been stored in paper archives, are going to disappear forever when they are deleted from the computers that store them.

Let's see, what did I start out talking about? Oh yes, big changes ahead. The biggest event on the horizon is the round-the-world trip next February and March. I have the feeling that I ought to be doing lots of planning for this, but somehow I don't seem able to get round to this. The flights are all booked, and so are car rentals for the various countries we're visiting. Also, we've got tickets for a performance of The Merry Widow at the Sydney Opera House on 11 March. Other than that, all I've done is to make hotel bookings for the first couple of nights in each place. I have a feeling that's all the advance planning that's going to get done. We prefer to keep things as flexible as possible when we travel, so we'll keep advance planning to a minimum and play things by ear as we go along.

Sunday 14 December

Yesterday we spent most of the day in York, for a couple of concerts in the Christmas Early Music Festival. The afternoon concert was not Christmassy nor even particularly early music. A chamber music trio (three young men from St Petersburg, including a cute-looking pianist) played piano trios by Pleyel, Eberl, Wölfi and Beethoven. These composers all lived at about the same time and their trios all sounded similar in style. Yet only Beethoven's music has survived, and the others are more or less forgotten. Mary wondered why that should be so. My explanation is that early Beethoven (like the Opus 1 trio that was played yesterday) sounds pretty much the same as the music his contemporaries were writing. But Beethoven kept innovating and developing throughout his life, and his later works belong to a different world altogether. That's what distinguishes a real genius from someone who's just very talented.

The evening concert started at 7pm, which meant that we had to have a very early dinner. None of the decent restaurants in York were ready to serve dinner at 5.30, so we went to a fish and chips place. Not bad, but by the end of the meal my stomach was saying that it had exceeded its annual allowance for intake of saturated fats. That made it hard for me to stay awake through the concert, which was an excellent performance of Bach's Christmas Oratorio. Bach was a devoutly religious composer, and most of his choral music was written for performance as part of a church service. But you don't have to be a christian to appreciate it. If I could afford it I would love to have the complete 60-CD set of Bach cantatas. Maybe someone could give that to me as a retirement present.

Speaking of retirement, the University gave a dinner on Wednesday evening for retiring members of staff and their partners. We were hoping to sit at a table with friends from the Maths and Physics Depts. But it turned out that there was a seating plan, and we had to sit at a table with people we hardly knew. There was a time when I would have found that very stressful (not being at all good at making conversation with strangers) and I would have left Mary to do all the talking. But I think one gradually learns to be a bit more sociable as one gets older, and I managed pretty well. In fact, most of the other people at the table were friendly and easy to talk to, and I actually enjoyed the evening.

On Thursday, we were both home for the evening, and we spent it together in the same room. That is something that very rarely happens. Usually, Mary spends the evenings in the family room watching TV, and I go to the sitting room to listen to the hi-fi and either read or play at the computer. But last weekend Channel 4 screened Bowling for Columbine, which we both wanted to see. We were out that evening, so we taped the film and watched it on Thursday. It's a blistering indictment of America's gun culture. The thing I found most impressive about the film is that although Michael Moore is obviously appalled by the epidemic of gun violence in the US and presents the case against it passionately, he realises that there are no easy solutions to the problem. The film deliberately raises questions without giving answers.

The film compares the annual death rate from shootings in Britain (about 100) with that in the US (about 10,000). But I don't think we have any cause to feel smug about that. Most things, good and bad, from America eventually find their way here, and there's no doubt that gun crime is very rapidly increasing in Britain. I just hope we find some way of reversing that trend, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Friday 19 December

At our departmental Christmas lunch yesterday, a colleague told me about a strange Christmas card his wife received from some friends in Japan.

The manufacturers of the card apparently knew nothing about Christmas except that people in the West buy cards to send to each other at this time of year, and they wanted to get in on the act. They must have done some research, from which they discovered that Christmas is connected with a religion in which seasonal festivals are associated with powerful stories and myths about virgin birth, death and resurrection. These myths are represented by vivid and sometimes violent images. So the Japanese company produced a card which combined two of these images in a novel and spectacular way.

The card depicted Santa Claus being crucified. [Sorry if that offends you. I thought it was hilarious.]

Speaking of striking visual images, what do you make of those video clips of Saddam Hussain undergoing a medical inspection? It has to be good news that this man has been captured, and I hope (without much conviction) that this will help to bring peace to Iraq. The pictures of Saddam having his mouth and hair inspected are unforgettable, and make an incredible contrast with the way he used to appear before the war, strutting around brandishing a rifle like Vinnie Jones in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. But I can't help feeling uncomfortable that these pictures should have been released. Donald Rumsfeld is on record as saying that Saddam "is being accorded the status of a prisoner of war, and his treatment will be governed by the Geneva Convention." Yet the Convention clearly prohibits POWs from being subjected to humiliating publicity. Can you imagine the howls of outrage if similar pictures of American detainees were shown on Arabic TV? In fact, you don't have to imagine it, because that's exactly what happened when comparatively innocuous pictures of captured US soldiers were released to Al-Jazeera TV in March.

Rumsfeld later backtracked slightly on his statement, saying, "He is being accorded the protection of a POW but he's not being legally described as one at this stage." The former top legal official at the International Committee of the Red Cross responded that Saddam benefited from protection under the Geneva Conventions as the head of his country's army, and that it was not up to the United States to decide how Saddam should be classified.

Then there's the question of interrogation. Under the Geneva Convention, captives are only required to provide their name, military rank, date of birth and regimental serial number. No further questioning is allowed. Here again, the Convention is being blatantly disregarded. In fact, it seems as though the rules of war now apply only to the enemy, and can be ignored by our side whenever convenient.

Personally, I think that this high-handed approach to international law will backfire on the US administration. It may even achieve what would otherwise have been inconceivable, a degree of sympathy for Saddam in some parts of the world.

	Tuesday 23 December The festive season is well and truly upon us, and we have been caught up in a mad social whirl. Well, that's probably a little bit of an exaggeration, but we seem to be going out, or having visitors here, just about every evening. On Saturday we went out to an Italian restaurant with Stephanie and Fran, on Sunday we gave a dinner party here for some friends, yesterday was Mary's birthday, today we have a "parents' evening", and tomorrow we're going to dinner with Lorraine and David. In fact, the only day when we haven't had a social event of some kind was Mary's birthday. We were thinking of going out to a Thai restaurant for her birthday dinner, but Liz was due to come home for a few days and we wanted to be here when she arrived. She said that she would be home by mid-afternoon, but we knew from experience that this would never happen, and sure enough she arrived at about 8pm, just as we had given up waiting for her and started our dinner (which consisted of the leftovers from the previous evening's dinner party). But we're glad that she's here for Mary's birthday and for Christmas. Mary's birthday present from me is a Dell laptop. She has been asking for this for some time, so now she's going to have to learn how to use it. I won't be a great deal of help there, because I have always used Macintoshes and I don't know the first thing about Windows. But Liz knows her way around PCs and has offered to give her mother some tutorials, and I'll hope to learn a bit at the same time. The "parents' evening" should be interesting. When Liz was at school (in other words about 15 years ago) she had three close friends, and she still keeps in touch with them. At some stage, the parents of the four girls decided to get together for an evening, and we have continued this tradition almost every year since then. One of the couples bought a holiday home in France, and they have now retired and live there permanently. But they are back in Leeds visiting their family at present, so all four couples will be there this evening. On Christmas Day we usually invite our friend Francesca and her daughter Fiona for dinner. But they are off on a cruise in the Mediterranean, so they won't be with us this year. We thought for a while that there would just be the two of us and Liz here for Christmas dinner. But we like to keep an eye out for waifs and strays who don't have anywhere to go at Christmas, and it looks as though we have found two of them. One of them is a woman who suffers from the same sort of allergies as Mary, only much more severely, which makes her almost unable to go out at all. But she knows that our house is pretty much free of allergens so she should be able to tolerate it for a few hours. The other one is a Chilean woman who lives in Leeds and suffers from ME. It looks as though our Christmas will be fairly low key and not exactly exciting, but I expect we'll enjoy it anyway. I'm not sure how long Liz will be staying with us. She wants to visit some friends in Birmingham for the New Year, so presumably she'll be leaving before then. For as long as she's here, I'm unlikely to have much time at the computer, so this is likely to be my last entry for a while. I'll sign off with best wishes for the holiday season. May your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases etc. etc.

Tuesday 30 December

You know it's been a quiet Christmas when you end up with more wine than you started with. All our visitors brought a bottle of wine with them, but few of them actually drank any. The result is that the wine cupboard is now completely full, and I shan't have to buy any for a few months.

After several days of overeating and drinking and hardly venturing outside the house, I decided that a bit of exercise would be in order. It was a cold day, but fine and sunny. I drove a couple of miles to a little village called Wike, on the outskirts of the city, and walked along a stretch of the Leeds Country Way, a 60-mile circuit of footpaths that encircles the city. The path goes across fields, alongside hedges, over stiles and through muddy farmyards, and feels as though it's in the depths of the country, even though it's never more than about ten miles from the city centre. Leaving the Country Way, I walked a little way along a narrow lane that crossed a stream at a ford, where there was an ancient stone footbridge for pedestrians. Then I took another footpath to get back to the car. One of the pleasures of living in England is that it has this huge network of footpaths crisscrossing the countryside. I hope to explore a lot more of the paths around Leeds now that I'm retired.

I came across this posting on a discussion group site recently. It struck a chord with me, especially the bit about accidents (remember accidents?).

Once Upon A Time !!! According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s or even the early 80s probably shouldn't have survived. Our baby cribs were covered with bright coloured lead-based paint. We had no childproof lids or locks on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. Not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking!

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors! We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing. We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle! And no one actually died from this. We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode it down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. No cell phones. Unthinkable! We did not have Play stations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, personal computers, or Internet chat rooms.

We had friends! We went outside and found them.

We played dodge ball, and sometimes, the ball would really hurt. We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents .. They were accidents. No one was to blame but us. Remember accidents? We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it. We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out any eyes. We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them. Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team .. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Some students weren't as smart as others, so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. Horrors! Tests were not adjusted for any reason.

Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected.

The idea of parents baling us out if we got in trouble in school or broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the school or the law. Imagine that! This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers, and inventors, ever. We had freedom, failure, success, and responsibility – and we learned how to deal with it.

And if you're one of them, Congratulations! You survived!

Well yes, I survived. But what about those who didn't survive, because of lead paint poisoning, cycling without a helmet, falling out of a tree, or whatever? It's too easy to get nostalgic about the good old days and to forget how much society has improved on balance. Even so, I'm glad I grew up at a time when kids could go out unsupervised, get into all kinds of trouble and have accidents (remember accidents?) without regulators, bureaucrats or lawsuits being involved.

The day after that discussion group posting, there was a response from someone who said, "This email reminds me of the kind of reminiscing that my grandfather used to do (and I was annoyed with his self-righteous reminiscing back then)." I can see that, as a grandfather, I'm going to have to be careful not to indulge in self-righteous reminiscing here, as we head into 2004.

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