Personal Blogs

As a protection against vampires, try combining celery, grapes, apple, walnuts and mayonnaise. I call this "ward off" salad.

When I was 14 the oldest person I knew was Mr Smith. He lived in a tiny cottage, one room up and one down, with a scullery cum kitchen behind the ground floor. The cottage was on a sharp 80 degree angle between two streets, contributing to its miniscule size. Later it became a one-man barbershop, which shows how small it was.

I was assigned by my local community to visit Mr Smith. Our church, of which I was a reluctant member, had a scheme for sending volunteers to visit old people who might be lonely and Mr Smith was my assignment, to visit during the summer break from school. I don’t remember minding at all. They told me he was 93 and I was curious to meet him.

I was a bit scared when knocking on his door the first time but we instantly got on, in spite of the 79-year age gap. He was a good conversationalist and asked me about myself and what my ambitions were. I don’t know how well I answered.

This was in 1960 and he was then 93. So his birth date had been 1867.  The American Civil War had ended only two years before.

In our weekly talks Mr Brown told me he had been a merchant seaman at the end of First World War and been part of a convoy that sailed to the far northern Russian port of Archangel. It was a hazardous run, with over 40 British merchant ships being lost between 1914 and 1918.

People in Archangel had given him simple presents. He showed me Easter breads – little buns stamped with a cross – and decorated wooden spoons, whose varnish had hardly dried in almost 50 years. I held and saw the past in my hands.

Mr Smith had been 47 when the First World War started. Think of it. At that point he was already too old to fight, although not too old to go to Archangel with the convoy.

When the summer holidays ended and my duty rota ceased I had good intentions to go and see him, but I was young and life beckoned. So I missed his going and I was sorry.

This is something I've been thinking about recently. Why are there no oldspapers?

A couple of days ago an associate and friend who likes intriguing puzzles sent me this different take on the notorious Travelling Salesman Problem.

The original question is: given a collection of cities and all the travel distances between each pair, how can a travelling saleman plan a circular tour that is as short as possible? This is a hard problem, in the sense that when there are any substantial number of cities finding the best solution will bring any computer to its knees.

Although my friend is not a mathematician but a developmental psychologist, he had a mathematician's idea, one that follows one of George Pólya's heuristics: can you solve a simpler version of the problem?

So my friend asked himself, what if the cities are all in a line?

Imagine the cities are not cities, but houses on a street, assumed to be equally spaced out, and a mailman wants to minimise their walking distance. The solution is just to walk along the numbers in sequence 1, 2, 3... up to the last house number. Pretty obvious, huh?

And then he asked another good mathematical question, what if we varied the problem? So he asked for the longest path the mailman could take. Imagine they have a yen for exercise and want to walk as far as possible.

If we have 10 houses each 1 unit apart, what is longest route they could take to visit each house exactly once, and return to the end of the street where they started?

And what if there are n houses; can you find a formula?

"I'm counting how many pots of tea you make", said Tom brutally.

"I adore the sound of church bells on a summer's evening", said Tom inspiringly.

Yesterday I had a bad dream. I was an old mongrel dog, and they put me in a cur home.

The original is from Hillaire Belloc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cautionary_Tales_for_Children

You've probably seen those YouTube videos where someone texting in a shopping centre doesn't notice a fountain and falls in.

Something similar happened to me yesterday, except I was in a medieval theme park and it was a well.

Luckily just as I started my descent someone strong caught me by the ankles. Phew, I thought, lucky escape! But then they started talking. They went on and on. I tried to keep my end of the conversation up, in difficult circumstances, I have to say. But this went on for ages and ages - imagine it! -  and the person who had hold of my ankles was a crushing bore and wouldn't let me get a word in edgeways. Just when I was losing hope they uttered the words I welcomed but dreaded.

"Well, I'll let you go then".

"Remove that colander at once", Tom said dismissively.

At the fencing school I couldn’t get anyone to speak to me. They were all touché.