Wednesday 5 October
Mary has always fancied herself as a hunter-gatherer. Well, to be precise, not a hunter but a gatherer. When we were younger and went for walks in the countryside we would never get very far because she would always want to stop to collect nuts or berries of some kind. Late September and early October are the best times for these stone-age activities. When we first came to Leeds in the 1980s we found a great place near here for collecting blackberries. In the Wharfe valley between Leeds and Harrogate there was a hawthorn hedge between two fields which was overgrown with brambles. The fields must have been pasture for a nearby farm, although we never saw any cattle or sheep in them. I suppose they were private property, but there was a gap in the roadside hedge, where one could get into the fields. Nobody else seemed to know about this area and we used to harvest several pounds of large, succulent blackberries each year without anyone disturbing us. We were careful to keep the location secret so that we wouldn't have to share these goodies with anyone.
In 1988 Mary became chronically ill and no longer had the energy for such activities. We stopped our annual blackberrying expeditions and eventually forgot all about them. Then a couple of weeks ago we were driving in the country near here when we saw some ripe blackberries by the roadside. We started reminiscing about the old days, and decided that we should go back to our old secret blackberry patch to see if it is still there. I wasn't optimistic that we would still find anything there after the best part of 20 years. It seemed likely that the fields would have been sold off to a property developer, or that the hedge would have been torn up and replaced by a wire fence. But last Sunday we drove back there and the whole place was completely unchanged. The gap in the hedge was still there, and the brambles in the hedgerow were heavy with big juicy blackberries. In just over an hour we harvested two large bags of them. That evening we had a mouthwatering blackberry crumble for dessert; and now Mary has made several pounds of delicious blackberry and apple jam.
Of course, the best thing about all this is that Mary, after all these years, is again strong enough for such activities. I never was much of a hunter-gatherer myself, but it's reward enough for me to see her so happy and fulfilled again (and I'm certainly glad enough to help consume the crumble and the jam).
I have been tagged by my friend Bruce for one of those memes where you have to give five examples of various things. Sorry Bruce, but I don't do memes. Ask me to name five greatest joys and my brain promptly freezes. Five favourite TV shows? Don't watch any. Five current reads? Oh come on now, I can only read one thing at a time. Five snacks? Get thee behind me Satan, I'm trying to keep my weight down. Five songs I know the words to? Sorry, brain's frozen again.
No, wait a moment, there is one song that I know all the words to. Suddenly it came back into my mind from 50 years ago: "Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind." We had a deranged German teacher at school who made us learn the whole of the Goethe/Schubert song Erlkönig, and I can still quote the whole thing. The song tells of a father carrying his young son on horseback through a lonely forest at night. During the journey the elf king seductively flirts with and then abducts the boy's soul; when the father reaches his farm the boy is dead.
I can't imagine what would happen to a teacher who tried to make teenagers learn such verse nowadays, when the faintest hint of paedophilia leads to a hysterical witch hunt. But Mr Heard the German teacher relished it. I can still hear the menacing way he whispered "Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt, Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt!" ("I love you, I'm captivated by your beauty, and if you're not willing I'll use force!").
The whole song, with two English translations, can be found here, together with a very funny parody in which the father is a tearaway motorcyclist with the terrified boy as a pillion passenger. Unfortunately there is no translation provided for the parody, which tested my schoolboy German up to and sometimes beyond its limit.
Wednesday 19 October
People have been asking if I'm still doing any teaching. The answer is yes, and it's keeping me pretty busy at present.
This is my last term of teaching. After the January exams I finally and completely retire (apart from possibly having to deal with a resit exam next August). Mary and I will be celebrating by spending the whole of February on holiday in South Africa. I could have settled for an easy teaching load this term by teaching the same courses as last year, but I rashly volunteered to develop a new course for the department.
The reason for wanting a change is that I was quite keen to drop one of the courses I taught last year. This was a remedial maths course (correction: I'm not allowed to call it remedial, it was a "preparatory" maths course) for first-year engineering students who had been admitted without adequate qualifications. It was an easy course to teach, and the students were a cheerful bunch, but it meant me trudging half a mile across campus to the Civil Engineering Department and back again four times a week. When I heard that the colleague who had been assigned to develop this new geometry course wanted to go an sabbatical leave this term, I offered to take it over from him provided that I could drop the remedial preparatory module.
It's interesting, teaching geometry, and although it's taking a lot of time to prepare the course, I'm enjoying it. English schools have more or less abandoned the subject altogether, so students arrive at university quite ignorant of topics that we used to learn in high school or even primary school. Our Department decided that it was time to correct this ignorance by including a compulsory geometry module for first-year Honours maths students, and I have been left with the job of developing this course more or less from scratch. It starts assuming zero knowledge of geometry, but I hope that by the end of the term I will have got as far as covering some topics in three-dimensional geometry (classification of the platonic solids, and spherical trigonometry, if you want to know the details).
Times have changed since I started teaching. In my first year as a junior lecturer I taught an advanced MSc course on spectral theory, including a fairly sophisticated treatment of spectral measures and the spectral theorem. Forty years later, in my final year before retirement, I am teaching Honours students how to prove that the angles of a triangle add up to 180° (or π radians, as we prefer to say). If things continue to change at that rate, in another 40 years they will be teaching new PhD students how to count to ten. But of course things won't continue to change at that rate. Change is not monotonic. Sooner or later the pendulum will swing. Perhaps in 40 years' time freshman maths students will already know the spectral theorem and will be clamouring for a course on quantum inverse scattering. (One can always hope.)
Sunday 30 October
It has been a week of contrasts. High culture on Tuesday, when we went to a recital by the famous Romanian pianist Radu Lupu. He played Schumann's Waldszenen and Humoresque, and Schubert's Sonata in G (and an encore that I didn't recognise). Leeds has a very knowledgeable audience for piano recitals, because of the triennial Leeds Piano Competition, which Radu Lupu won in 1969. The audience on Tuesday obviously agreed with my feeling that this was a memorable occasion, and gave him an enthusiastic reception. It reminded me of another occasion 24 years ago in the same auditorium. In 1981 the University held a memorial service for its Vice-Chancellor Edward Boyle, who had died earlier that year. I wouldn't normally have thought of attending such a function, but I felt well disposed towards Lord Boyle because he had chaired the interviewing panel that appointed me to my job. So I went along to this service not knowing what to expect, but fearing that it would be a gloomy and depressing ceremony. In fact, I was delighted to find that Murray Perahia (another former winner of the Leeds Piano Competition) was taking part, playing one of Schubert's Impromptus. He gave an inspired performance, and I felt that my turning up for that occasion was a case of virtue rewarded. Last Tuesday's recital was intended as a curtain-raiser for the 2006 Piano Competition, next September. By then I shall be fully retired, and I hope I'll have plenty of time to attend several sessions of the competition. Maybe I'll be lucky and hear a performance by a future Lupu or Perahia.
From the sublime to the ridiculous: yesterday evening we went to see the latest Wallace and Gromit film. Good clean fun, and I guess that Halloween is as good a time as any to watch The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, but I would have enjoyed it more if we had been able to take our grandchildren to see it. We phoned them today and found that they have already seen the film in Spain. Apparently there is a problem translating the title into Spanish. Steve says that there is a Spanish word for werewolf, but it's a single word different from the ordinary word for wolf (which as readers of this journal will know is lobo). They don't have a prefix like "were-" that can be tacked on to the name of another animal. So they have had to give the film some anodyne title like "Threat to the giant vegetables" or something equally uninspiring.
Afterthought: according to the online dictionary, the Spanish for werewolf is hombre lobo, so I suppose they could say hombre conejo for were-rabbit. But perhaps that wouldn't have have the right idiomatic connotations.
