Monday 2 May
As we were walking across the Copenhagen town square on Friday evening, Mary asked how many times we had visited Denmark. We counted eight trips for me (seven to Copenhagen and one to Aarhus), and six for her, but we may have forgotten others. Copenhagen has lots of happy memories for us. The previous time we were there was five years ago, when there was a conference to mark the 60th birthday of my friend and mathematical colleague Gert. That was a memorable meeting, which took place in the mansion belonging to the Carlsberg brewing company. The highlight of that meeting was the birthday dinner that Gert and his wife Dorte hosted at their home. I wrote about it here, together with a couple of pictures.
Looking back to my journal entries then, I see that I came back from that meeting feeling a bit sad. I wrote "You can't reach 60 without being reminded of mortality. Not that Gert shows any signs of mortality – he is as agile, both mentally and physically, as he ever was. But some of the conference participants are a good deal older than 60, and I wonder whether I shall ever see some of them again." It's as well that one can't see into the future. What I couldn't have known then was that I would be coming back to Copenhagen five years later, not to celebrate Gert's 65th birthday but for a conference in his memory. At that previous meeting Gert may already have been beginning to suffer from the cancer that eventually killed him. His wife was the first to notice that he was unwell. He didn't take it seriously and resisted going to see a doctor for several months, by which time he urgently needed surgery. It looked at first as though the operation had removed the growth, but by then it had spread to other organs. Gert died while we were away on our round the world trip last year, and we only heard the sad news when we got back home.
Gert's colleagues at the University of Copenhagen organised last weekend's three-day conference in his memory, with talks from many top mathematicians whose research has been influenced by Gert's ideas. You might think that it would have been a sombre meeting, but in fact it was very much an upbeat celebration of Gert's life and work. I came away from it without any of that feeling of sadness that I had after the 60th birthday meeting.
Gert was firmly nonreligious in his beliefs, and didn't believe in any sort of afterlife. Dorte made it clear that she didn't want to hear any nonsense about Gert's spirit being present at the meeting, but that he would have wanted to be remembered through his mathematical discoveries. The lectures made it obvious that this will happen. The final lecture was given by Dorte herself. She is also a fine mathematician, and she gave a splendid survey of Gert's life and work. I was honoured to be asked to chair that final session, and even more honoured that Dorte chose to sit next to me and Mary at the conference dinner the previous evening.
Gert was a great friend and colleague, and he will be sadly missed. As well as being an outstanding mathematician he had a wicked sense of humour with a true actor's sense of timing and style. He liked to present himself as a traditional Danish paterfamilias, like a kindly grandfather out of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy story. You can see something of his character in this picture taken around the time of his 60th birthday.
Friday 6 May
After staying awake half the night listening to the election results on the radio (through an earpiece so as not to disturb Mary), I'm in no fit state to write a coherent entry. The election result was about as good as one could realistically have hoped for: Blair's majority was slashed, as a direct result of widespread disgust at the invasion of Iraq, and the Lib Dems picked up about a dozen more seats than they had in the last parliament. This will make it a lot harder for the government to introduce oppressive new "anti-terror" measures such as identity cards and internment without trial. I hope.
My brother has been staying with us for the past three days. Andrew was last here in 1984 so he was about due for a return visit. He came on his own because his wife and daughter were busy running their B&B. One of Andrew's interests is canals, and on Wednesday we took him to see some stretches of the Huddersfield narrow canal which was restored in 2001 after being totally derelict for many years. First stop was the town of Slaithwaite (pronounced something like "Slowit") where there is a lock on the canal and a couple of old wool mills. Many of these little Pennine towns look as though they have hardly changed since the canal was first dug in the 1790s. Then we drove a few miles further on to Marsden where we had a picnic lunch near the eastern portal of the Standedge tunnel. The tunnel is only seven feet wide but nearly three miles long, constructed entirely by hand over a 12 year period 1799 to 1811 – quite an engineering achievement in that pre-mechanical age. Nearby is a visitor centre where you can book guided boat trips into the tunnel. But the centre and the boat trips only operate at weekends and school holidays, so we weren't able to do that.
The picture on the left shows water spurting from a leaky lock gate at Slaithwaite, and on the right is the entrance to the Standedge tunnel, with the railway tunnel just beyond and alongside it.
After lunch we drove across the Pennines to the western terminal of the tunnel, then back home via another canal, the Leeds and Liverpool canal, where there is a famous staircase of five locks at Bingley. Although we live only a few miles from Bingley and often pass very close to it, we had never seen the canal. We had to stop to ask for directions to the flight of locks, and had a hard job understanding the man who spoke to us in an almost unintelligible West Yorkshire accent. He seemed to have a speech impediment which didn't help the process. But we caught the gist of what he was telling us, and we were lucky to arrive at the locks in time to see the lock keeper guiding a boat up the five locks.
Mary and Andrew at the foot of the five rise locks.
Yesterday I took Andrew and Laura for a drive around the Yorkshire Dales (forgetting to take my camera, so no pictures of this trip) to follow up another of Andrew's interests. In his youth he was a keen potholer, and he wanted to revisit some of the potholes and limestone caverns in the Pennines that he used to explore in his student days. He has put on a lot of weight since then (and now weighs about 45 pounds more than me), so there was no question of actually entering any of the caves. Andrew was actually more interested in checking out the pubs where he and his friends spent the evenings after their caving trips. We had a very good lunch at one of these, the Crown Inn at Horton in Ribblesdale.
Sleep is catching up on me, so I'm going to stop short there before I crash out over the keyboard.
Sunday 8 May VE Day
It's a bit scary to have a clear memory of something from sixty years ago. This is not my very earliest memory, but it's the first one that I can put into an exact context.
On 8 May 1945 my mother told me that it was a very special day because the war had ended. The reason that day sticks in my mind is that I was allowed to stay up much later than usual. After dinner in the evening, instead of going to bed I was taken by Mum and Grandpa to the local recreation ground at Coney Hall, where a great crowd had gathered, covering the entire cricket ground. There was a platform with a microphone and loudspeakers, and I was bored and sleepy after a succession of interminable speeches that I didn't understand. Then as it got dark I was lifted up on Grandpa's shoulders so that I could see the bonfire being lit. Everybody was excited and cheering as the flames and sparks from the huge bonfire rose into the night sky. Maybe it wasn't really such a huge bonfire, but it seemed that way to me. At the age of four I had never seen a bonfire before, or indeed any other kind of outdoor light after dark, because of the blackout. [For younger readers, the purpose of the blackout was to make navigation harder for enemy bombers. Throughout the war years, all windows had to be covered with thick black blinds at night time, there was no street lighting, and cars were not allowed to use their headlights.]
I remember asking Mum whether the end of the war meant that Dad would be coming home from the army. She said Yes, but not just yet. In fact, it was nearly a year later before Dad was demobbed. When he came home, my younger brother called him Grandpa at first, because that was the name of the only two adult men he had ever known. With all men of military age called up into the forces, he had lived in a world of women, children and Grandpas.
Mum explained to me that the end of the war meant that there would be no more bombing raids, no need any more to go to the air raid shelter when the siren sounded. I asked her if the war had really ended completely, and she told me that there was still fighting across the other side of the world but that the war in Europe had ended. For some reason her answer stuck in my mind, and a few months later I asked her if that other war had finished yet. She said, quietly and seriously, Yes it has. She didn't say any more than that, and I didn't ask any more questions. But I have never forgotten her sombre tone of voice, and I wondered why she wasn't happy and excited about VJ Day as she had been about VE Day. Of course, as a four year old I knew nothing then about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was only many years later that I understood the apprehension that people felt about the new age of atomic warfare, and the mixed feelings that Mum must have had about the apocalyptic way in which the war in the Pacific came to an end. Having lived through five years of air raids on London, she would have sympathised with the terrible suffering of the Japanese civilians. But as she waited for Dad to come back from the army in Germany she would also have known how many American and Japanese servicemen's lives were saved by the abrupt ending of the war.
Monday 16 May Journal anniversary
Seven years ago today I sat down and wrote my first online journal entry. That was long before the days of blogging or LiveJournal, of course. I used the free hosting service generously provided by GeoCities (since absorbed into the Yahoo! conglomerate). Three years later, I left GeoCities and acquired my own domain name lobo-solo.com. Apart from the occasional extended vacation trip I have kept the journal going all that time, with an entry on average at least once a week. Before then I had never kept a diary of any kind, and I wish now that I had. I find it interesting to browse through old entries, which often remind me of incidents that I had completely forgotten.
Of the half dozen or so online friends I made in those early days, only one (Bruce, who started his journal a few months before I did) still makes regular updates. Seven years is a long time, and I think there are very few personal web sites that have been regularly updated for that long.
I usually try to do something on the anniversary date to improve the site, and as from today there are a couple of small changes. First, I have tweaked the style sheet to make the appearance of the pages a bit clearer and less fussy and I have redesigned the home page to make it less cluttered. Second, I have decided that I will usually make a brief entry in my LiveJournal page when I update the journal. I don't like the idea of going over completely to LiveJournal because I want to keep the journal on my own site. But a few LiveJournal friends have asked me to put entries in LiveJournal because they have got out of the habit of looking at sites anywhere else. Maybe I shouldn't pander to such laziness, but I'll do (almost) anything to get readers.
Just so that this entry won't be entirely about meta matters, let us note that this week sees the release of the final (please god) instalment of the Star Wars series of films. Episode III: Revenge of the Sith has been unanimously panned by the critics. The best headline was in the Sunday Times of all places: "Sith happens".
Monday 23 May
The big advantage of retirement, obviously, is that you have so much free time to do all the things there wasn't time for when you were working. The big disadvantage of retirement is that with all that free time you no longer feel justified in paying the gardener to mow the lawn, sweep the drive and so on. So most of the free time is taken up doing menial chores.
I'm not sure if I mentioned that for the past year Mary has been President of the University's Ladies' Club. As retiring President, she has to host a garden party for about 50 members in a couple of weeks' time, and she wants the garden to look immaculate for the occasion. So the gardener has been tidying up all the flower beds, trimming out the dead growth and pulling up the weeds, and I have been given the responsibility of keeping the lawns in good shape. It is so long since I have done this myself that I have had to buy a new lawnmower and a strimmer for tidying up the verges (the old ones were completely knackered). I don't pretend to enjoy gardening, but I suppose it's good healthy exercise so long as the weather is reasonable.
All this unwonted gardening may partially explain why it has taken me over a month to complete the refurbishment of the front porch. This is just a very small area in front of our front door. When the house was built it would have been an outside door step, but some previous owner had it enclosed and added an outer door. It has always looked shabby, with too much bare brickwork and an uneven floor covered with a tatty old sheet of rumpled linoleum. It gives a very bad first impression to visitors, and it's a bit of a disgrace that in the nearly 25 years we have lived here I have only now got round to doing something about it.
Last month I pulled up the lino and its damp underlay, expecting to find a concrete base underneath. But what I actually found was some rather classy sandstone flagstones laid out in a stylish diamond pattern.
This would have looked very good as an outside doorstep, but it would not be suitable for an interior porch floor. Some of the stones had subsided slightly in the 74 years since the house was built, but the area was near enough flat that I was able to smooth it over with a bit of Polyfilla, before laying down a sheet of polythene as a vapour barrier, then a thin foam underlay and finally a covering of oak parquet strips. Then I put some wood cladding over two of the walls, leaving the exposed bricks of the original house walls but covering over the inferior bricks used when the porch was enclosed. I'm pleased with the final result. At a casual glance there isn't much difference from how it looked before, but if you look closely at the before and after photos below you should be able to see that the porch looks a good deal smarter than it did.
And here is another pair of before and after pictures, this time taken from inside the house looking out.
