The election of a Labour government in 1997 would not have impinged on my mother’s world in any meaningful way had she been alive to witness it. As it happened Margaret died a few months before the election, in December of 1996. ‘She wouldn’t hurt a fly’, Ron muttered as we drove in procession to… Read More »
The boy who was to give the phrase ‘war games’ a cruel new resonance was born on 6 May 1953, the second son of Leo and Hazel Blair. His family background was modest but aspiring. Fettes and Oxford delivered him to party politics via a brief flirtation with the rock industry. He married Cherie Booth… Read More »
Gray’s ‘Elegy’ above all else calls to mind the forgotten multitudes: Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear; Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air. And the very next verse, only the second I can quote… Read More »
Ron’s favourite poem was Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’. In his old, tattered edition of the Oxford Book of Verse his marker long rested here. From memory, the opening verse runs: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o‘er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way… Read More »
From cars to trains and the London underground. From the days of my first full-time job in central London – at St Bartholomew’s, a stone’s throw from St Paul’s tube – I have been a commuter. Many people hate commuting: my parents, Ron and Margaret, could not wait to put safe distance between home and… Read More »
As I commence this I have just bought a new car. Well, I say ‘new’. It is our first twenty-first century car, and I write at the fag end of 2014. We have actually never before this spent more than £1,400 on any vehicle. Cars are not what they were when my father, Ron, constructed… Read More »
As the summer of 1996 approached, American friends Dick Levinson and Mike McQuaide suggested that we consider visiting Atlanta for the Olympic Games. Mike, in particular, was adamant that we should. The subtext was his desire to exit Atlanta even as we would enter it. We could stay in his house and he in ours,… Read More »
In 1995 I accepted an invitation to go to Munich to give a keynote address to the German Society for Neuropharmacology and Clinical Neuropsychology. I seem to recall that the invitation emanated from Michael Bruch, a clinical psychologist who had provided longstanding support on a popular Middlesex/UCL training course in behaviour therapy run jointly for… Read More »
As one of our early joint initiatives Paul Higgs and I got the paperwork for a new Masters in ‘Sociology, Health and Health Care’ through the UCL bureaucracy and approved. We had not wanted to tread on the toes of our colleagues at Royal Holloway, whose seminal and profoundly influential M.Sc dated back to the… Read More »
The mid-1990s brought with it a new kind of companionship at UCL. For many years I had soldiered on with my medical school teaching without much by way of support, seasonal peripatetic tutors apart that is. But in 1994 Stan Newman, inheritor of the headship of the Department of Psychiatry (and thenceforth also of) ‘Behavioural… Read More »