Vienna Boys Choir

I first saw the Vienna Boys Choir not in Vienna but in London. They are famous ambassadors for Austria, even though not all of them are Austrian, and they do international tours. The occasion was that we had nominated F A Hayek, an Austrian, as our "Man of the Century." This was because we thought him the one who had left the most lasting positive legacy. The Austrian Ambassador invited us to a champagne reception at the Embassy in honour of our choice, and laid on a small group of the Choir, clad in their traditional sailor suits, to sing for us.  About 100 of them are divided into choirs, all aged 10-14, all sopranos or altos. I later saw a larger group of them sing a modern opera at the Royal Festival Hall. 

The most amusing time was the third. I was on an Austrian Airlines flight back from attending a conference in Vienna, and saw that the entire back half of the plane was filled by the sailor-suited choirboys. They were running around, playing jokes on each other and laughing, just like most groups of youngsters do.

Working for psychiatrists

When I was 20, I spent the summer working for three research psychiatrists. I’d walked around George Square in Edinburgh looking for a summer job, and was hired by a Medical Research Council unit based there to process the statistics on their findings. The team was investigating the epidemiology of psychiatric illness, including attempted suicides. Professors Carstairs and Kessel and Dr Kidd were all lively intellects, and I learned much, including techniques of hypnosis, which I’ve practised several times since.

On my 21st birthday they took me to a few pubs after work and presented me with a clever hand-produced birthday card that featured a poem they had written, largely done in mathematical symbols. “Now UR 21, life has 0<b-gun,” it began, but with a tiny drawing of a gun instead of the word, and meaning “life has nothing less than begun.” There were about ten lines of it, giving little homilies about life.  All three of the researchers radiated optimism and humour, making my summer a very pleasant one. We remained friends afterwards.

Roman triumph

When I went down occasionally from Scotland to London, I would usually take in one of the new movie releases, preferring to see it on the gigantic screens London offered rather than the small ones at St Andrews.  It was on one such visit that I saw “Patton: Lust for Glory” starring George C Scott.  He gave so impressive a performance that it lifted what might have been just a war movie into a classic. I particularly liked the closing, voice-over, lines about how the Romans honoured their victorious generals.

 "For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade.”

The sequence closed with the line,

“A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting."

When I stayed at my Florida Keys house I used to buy books commissioned or reissued from Barnes & Noble and acquired a small library. I was surprised when I opened “Rome Triumphant” by Robert Payne. First published in 1962, eight years before the movie, its introduction was word for word identical, bar a phrase or two omitted for brevity, with the movie’s closing lines. It resonated as well in print as I remembered it spoken in the movie. I hope the movie’s producers acknowledged Robert Payne’s contribution and paid him a fee.

Pearl Harbour from above

Returning from Australia, I usually preferred to go round the world rather than go back the way I came, and would sometimes stop in Hawaii and San Francisco to break the journey. I had read about a helicopter flight over Pearl Harbour, and thought it sounded better than taking several hours with a bus-load of tourists to see it on foot. The hotel told me that the big tourist helicopter flights had ceased, but I found I could charter a small one at a very reasonable rate. It landed in the grounds of my hotel to the bemusement of the watching guests, and took my friend and I towards Pearl Harbour in what seemed like about ten minutes.

We toured over the harbour, with our pilot giving a helpful commentary through the intercom. We wore headphones because it would have been too noisy to hear anyone talk.  We saw the sunken USS Arizona from above, quite clear in the waters. It has been designated as a war grave with a national memorial on top.  

There was a final surprise as we headed back. The pilot told us we had time left that had been paid for, so would we like to go into the volcano? Seeing our nervous glances, he explained that it had been long dormant. We readily assented, and went up the sides of it and down into the crater. Surprisingly it had been dormant so long that the inside of it was thick with vegetation, much safer than molten lava, we thought.

Falconry

For a time Amazon was regularly offering deals rather like Groupon, giving big reductions on advertised goods and services. One that intrigued me was falconry. A half day's experience of it was on offer at just under an hour's train ride from London. A friend and I decided to try it out. After the initial briefing for the group we were with, we got to know the birds, including owls, falcons and eagles. It was with some trepidation that we handled them, but they were quite used to humans and would sit on our shoulders or arms in a relaxed fashion. We wore big leather gloves when they sat on our wrists, to avoid injury from their talons.

It's not for the squeamish because we fed them dead chicks, supplied frozen in their hundreds from local farms. Finally it was time to fly them, starting with the horned owls, and moving on to the falcons and eagles. The birds are trained to land on the wrist, and are rewarded with a dead chick when they do so. The friend with me took a superb video of an owl taking off from a fence and swooping low over a field. Right at the end of it I suddenly came into view as the bird landed on my outstretched wrist.

One of the birds slightly missed my wrist and tore a slit on the sleeve of my padded jacket. I later sewed it up and showed it afterwards with a nonchalant, "Oh, an eagle did that."

Tae-kwondo

I was 39 when I took up my first sport. I'd never liked them at school, largely because I wasn't any good at any of them. I particularly didn't like team games, not wanting to be the weakest player who let the side down. I opted for tennis and cross country as the permissible alternatives on sports afternoons because they were individual. Now back in London from the US, I wanted something that might keep me fit, but disliked the idea of street running, so I chose tae-kwondo, a Korean martial art.

I trained two nights a week in London's Jubilee Hall, and sometimes one night elsewhere with the class. I quickly became very fit and very flexible because of the stretching exercises and the jumping around. I could never manage a full splits, having taken it up so late in life, but I could bend down to put the flat of my hands on the floor, and I did achieve a chopping kick above head height. My hands became strong. I could break a stack of four blocks of wood, each three-quarters of an inch thick, with a knife-hand strike, but that is about technique and self-confidence rather than strength.

I was utterly dedicated to it for seven years, and I finally stopped doing it only when I had ceased to improve at it.

Train over the Rockies

My colleague, Eamonn Butler, and I were due to attend a conference in Vancouver. We thought it might be quite an experience to take the train that crossed Canada and went over some spectacular scenery in the Rockies. The full journey took 5 days, over mostly flat country, so we opted for the last leg, catching it at Calgary to enjoy the scenic day and a half ride through the mountains. We flew direct into Calgary and enjoyed breakfast at the top of the tower before catching the train next morning. 

After we'd settled into our cabin and enjoyed some spectacular scenery, we headed to the bar for a pre-lunch drink, only to be told that because it was a Sunday, the bar would not be open. Oh dear. This looked as though it might be a long journey, but the waiter helpfully told us that they could serve drinks with meals in the dining car. We spent most of the day in the dining car, having lunch there, then afternoon tea, and then dinner. The scenery was awesome, as were some of the gradients we climbed, but at least we had something to do as we watched it unfold. We reached Vancouver early next morning without a trace of jet-lag.

Caesar's Gallic Wars

Our Latin teacher, Eric Roby, managed to make the subject full of interest by teaching us not just the language, but the events and legends of Ancient Rome. Our Latin text was Caesar's Gallic Wars, which included his invasion of England. Early on in the course, Mr Roby popped his head round the door of the classroom and told us that for our homework that evening we were to translate just the first sentence of Book VIII, the section that covered that invasion. The class was elated to have got off so lightly, and we congratulated ourselves that we'd have most of the evening free. When we looked at that first sentence, however, we discovered that it was two pages long! He must have been amused at his joke, knowing what our reaction would be when we discovered it.

I soon developed a liking for Latin, admiring its logical structure and predictability. I once asked the teacher if we could have dictation included as part of the exam. The class groaned, thinking I had asked for more work, but Mr Roby smiled, realizing that I had asked for less, and told the class why. The point is that Latin is pronounced as it looks, so we could have been confronted with any unknown piece of it and effortlessly pronounced it correctly. If this had taken the place of some of the translation it would have given us an easy ride.

Cold comfort

We used to say that St Andrews had three weathers: windy, cold and windy, or very cold and very windy. Sometimes we would add, "and indoors it was even worse." The flat I lived in certainly had all three, but cold dominated. There were two electric heaters, but they were very expensive to run, and a shilling in the slot of the electricity meter did not last long. We had a coal fire, but were often unable to afford coal. The house was cold.  My bed was cold to get into unless I had used an electric blanket to preheat it. It kept warm during the night, but I have woken up to find a glass of milk frozen on the bedside table. It required real effort in winter mornings to emerge from a warm bed into a cold house.

It was certainly unhealthy. I was described as "chronically susceptible to bronchitis." This was not the same as chronic bronchitis, nor as bad, but it plagued most winters. When I left Scotland to live in Washington DC, it left me within a week, and it has never returned. Looking back, I think I may have been allergic to Scotland.

Calligraphy

I changed my handwriting when I was 15, replacing my rather childish hand by a more flowing adult style embellished by flourishes. I adapted it from the written style of a movie actor, and it took just a couple of weeks for it to become my natural handwriting. It saw me through my school exams. I changed it again when I was 19, but it took longer because I changed the entire style from a round-hand script to an italic hand. I bought fine quality writing paper, chisel-tipped pens and calligrapher's jet-black ink. I developed a chancery cursive script, originally based on that of Ludovico Arrighi, who wrote the first manual on handwriting in the 16th Century, but updated by the American calligrapher Paul Standard. The basis is to hold the chisel tip of the nib at 45 degrees, so that the strokes made upward at that angle are thin, while the ones made down at 45 degrees are thick. Ones made horizontally or vertically are of medium thickness. I practised my lettering every day, sometimes for hours at a time, until my hand ached and there was a deep impression on my finger where I had gripped the pen.

It took me about four weeks to acquire a fluent script I could write at speed, and more weeks to improve it. It remained my natural hand, even though university note-taking at speed degraded it somewhat. I bought a Waterman ‘Calligraph’ fountain pen that had to be stripped and cleaned periodically because the ink would clog it. Sometimes I would illuminate capitals in red at the beginning of a piece, even pen-drawing little animals within them. On special occasions I lettered and illuminated parchments.

Brussels sprouts

I disliked Brussels sprouts intensely as a child, and still do. They were produced every Christmas as if they were some kind of delicacy, a treat to be enjoyed only rarely. I was never fooled. I thought them nasty, bitter little things with no merit. They went with the Christmas bird, usually a goose, the roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, and sometimes carrots or peas, and the gravy that made up the Christmas dinner. All of these were delicious, but not the Brussels sprouts. I remember reading somewhere that selective breeding from the mediaeval cabbage had given us modern cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and Brussels sprouts, and thinking that sprouts were the only failure on that list.

Years later I concocted a dish I called "Madsen's revenge." To make it, the sprouts are par-boiled, drained and halved, and the halves are gently fried, first in butter, then with a little maple syrup added, and turned occasionally. As they are put onto the plate, they are sprinkled with finely chopped walnuts. The point is that the sprouts have been denatured by this process, and no longer have the characteristic bitter taste. My friends who have made this dish out of curiosity say they find it pleasant. Mind you, they never liked Brussels sprouts either.

Mosaics

I was 21 when I developed a fascination for mosaics. I read several books about them, including how-to-do-it books that taught how to cut the small tiles that make up the pattern or the picture, and how to lay them and grout them. I used plywood as the background medium to stick them on. I rapidly opted for vinyl tiles rather than ceramic ones because they were easier to work with, they came in brighter colours, and they were a fraction of the cost. I taught myself by copying from books, learning how to follow the flowing curves of what was to be depicted. I liked to picture waves because they needed a flow of various shades of blue, green and white. And I made a copy of the head of Justinian from the Ravenna Mosaics. 

Sometimes I would put a picture frame around a finished one, and screw a picture-hook on the back, so that it could be displayed on a wall. Sometimes I bought screw-on legs so that one could be made into a coffee table. I adapted a design showing three fish vertically above each other, all brightly coloured, and produced several different versions of it to present to friends. It was an enjoyable, if somewhat messy, hobby that engaged me for a few years. I never continued it beyond my 30s, though I maintain an interest that even today has me admiring mosaics and respecting those who made them.

The Prisoner

In 1967 we sat glued to our TVs every week to watch each new episode of "The Prisoner." Patrick McGoohan's character, Number 6, had been kidnapped to a strange and colourful seaside village, presumably on an island somewhere. Week after week the mysterious people in charge tried to break him, and week after week he resisted. Each episode began with his defiant declaration to his captors, "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own." Each week he insisted, "I am not a number, I am a free man," only to be met with mocking laughter.

The series became a cult classic. It was enigmatic and surreal, and had a libertarian subtext that appealed to young people. And the village had charm. Its Italianate buildings were pastel-coloured, and the sun shone. Each day the bedside loudspeaker called out, "Good morning! It's another beautiful day, here in the village."

The series was shot in Portmeirion in North Wales. It was built in the 1920s and 30s by Sir Clough William-Ellis in the style of an Italian village. It's a tourist attraction, somewhat out of the way, which keeps the numbers manageable. I went there and stayed in its ornate hotel nearly 20 years after the TV series had put it on the map. Everything was very much smaller than it had seemed on television, and some of it is fake, like the boat moored by the jetty. Still, it was quite something to walk among the scenes of those epic conflicts of years earlier. Even today I sometimes wear a dark blazer edged with white ribbon, as did Patrick McGoohan's character in the series, though I don't wear a badge with a number 6 on it.

PhD flag

While I was working on my PhD at St Andrews, I befriended a young American professor who spent a year there on an assignment involving a few lectures. He later went on to work for a group of US Congressmen and Senators on Capitol Hill. When I went to Washington myself, I stayed at his place for a time. He presented me with a remarkable gift. It was a box containing a US flag. Accompanying the flag was a letter on headed paper from the Architect of the Capitol to Congressman Philip Crane. It testified that flag had been flown on the Senate building on the Hill "at the time Dr Madsen Pirie was graduating in St Andrews with his PhD." It was indeed dated with the day of my graduation. I still have the flag hanging on my wall, with the framed letter alongside it. It was a handsome and memorable gift.

When soon afterwards I gained employment working on the Hill alongside my friend at the Republican Study Committee, I remembered how impressed I had been with his thoughtful gesture, and assiduously bought souvenirs of Capitol Hill for friends back home. These included congressional decals to add style to luggage, pens, cuff-links, and medals of the US seal complete with wooden mounts. In a UK that was somewhat bleak and drab at the time, these were a much-appreciated touch of the exotic.

Eagle and Hotspur

David Middleton and I exchanged comics from the age of 10. I had the better of the deal because I bought the Hotspur, which was cheaper. It was printed on rough paper and featured school stories plus wartime exploits or tales of grit and bravery. The little colour it featured was lurid. The Eagle, on the other hand, had beautiful colour on high quality paper and had fascinating features in addition to its regular comic strips. When we had each read the latest issue, we swapped. Since David's father owned Clover Dairies, while the grandmother who raised me made trawler nets, his purchase of the expensive comic seemed appropriate. The advantage was that I got to keep the Eagle, and stored all its back numbers in my bedroom.

The Eagle's lead strip was "Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future," who thrilled us every week as he journeyed to Venus in search of food for a hungry Earth. There he encountered Treens, the green men led by the evil Mekon, and the benign Therons. More gripping still was his second adventure to combat the menace of the Red Moon, an asteroid that had wiped out life on Mars long ago, and now seemed to be headed for Earth.

All tastes were catered for. There were cowboy stories, detective and police stories, and sponsored strips featuring Tommy Walls who always made the Walls lucky sign, a W with his hands when in trouble, and Harris Tweed, the bumbling detective. The comic's centre-fold featured detailed cut-away drawings of ships or aircraft or other works of engineering. Both comics ultimately folded, but the Eagle outlasted the Hotspur by 10 years, as it deserved to.

Bed-ridden voter

At a local election campaign in Edinburgh, the team helped identify those likely to vote for our candidate. Supporters were motivated by leaflets directed exclusively at those likely to vote for us, and encouraged to get out and vote on polling day. The average turnout for a council election was about 30 percent, but we wanted all of our supporters to vote, so we sent cars throughout the day to whisk them to the polling stations and back, some still in their carpet slippers. 

One supporter, who lived on the 4th floor of a tenement block, apologized for not voting because he'd been bed-ridden for 30 years, he told us. Undeterred, our team offered to take him to the polls, and six burly students manhandled his mattress down several flights of stairs and into the back of a 4 by 4. They drove him to the polling station and carried him inside, mattress and all, and took him back after he'd voted.  

He told us that was the most exciting thing he'd done in 30 years, and was ecstatic to leave his home for the first time in decades. He must have been pleased next day to read that the candidate he'd voted for had gained an unexpected victory that he'd helped to achieve.

Summer at Herstmonceux Castle

I spent a summer in a castle. I was 19 years old and one of 12 chosen to spend 6 weeks of work and study as a trainee Astronomer at Herstmonceux Castle in Surrey. It was then the site of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, and had several major telescopes on site, including a 30-inch refractor, a large Schmidt-Cassegrain, and the 100-inch Newton telescope. It was a fascinating and fun experience. To take long exposure photos at night the domes could not be heated without causing air turbulence, so we had to wear electrically heated suits that plugged in. We would ride in the moving seats located at the principal focus of the telescopes. To correct drifting by the equatorial mounts that followed the Earth's rotation, we had to manually move target stars back to the sight's crosshairs for hours at a time. 

We bonded socially, being the castle's only residents, apart from the Astronomer Royal, Sir Richard van der Riet Woolley. We played Wagner loudly at night, and picked the succulent peaches that grew on the castle's walls. We held a party for the astronomers and set a puzzle for them to solve by deciphering slogans posted along the walls. They read "Tug it rebel," "Bitter glue," "Gutter bile," amongst others, all anagrams of "Utter bilge," which is how the Astronomer Royal had described space travel before Sputnik 1 was launched. Sir Richard taught me to play croquet, which we played every day,

We successfully overturned data that suggested a pair of stars was a double system, and we were the first group to photograph and calculate the orbit of Echo 1, the US balloon satellite from which radio and TV signals could briefly be bounced. It was one of the most fun and worthwhile summers I had ever spent.

Sun precognition

I was on a late train to Huntingdon when I saw someone reading the Sun and was struck by the front page. The headline was "PC's MISSUS HAS SIX OF THE BEST," and reported that a policeman's wife had given birth to healthy sextuplets. Photos of six babies, side by side, were underneath it, each with a policeman's helmet superimposed on it. Underneath it said, "Hello, hello hello. Hello, hello, hello." It was very clever and funny, and I found myself wishing I worked for the Sun to produce ideas like that. In the following week I told several friends about it.

About ten days later I saw the paper lying around in the office, and reproved the staff for not throwing out old newspapers. They told me it was that day's paper, not an old one. I stared in disbelief. Yes, it was that day's paper, and had the front page I had seen, except that the "Hello, hello, hello. Hello, hello, hello" was not there. It was otherwise identical. The friends I had told confirmed that I'd done so, and were bemused. How was this possible?

I suppose many people would have rated this as psychic, a case of precognition. Being more anchored in the real world, I tried to think of a rational explanation. I'd worked part time with a newspaper and seen how they work. Stories that are known to be coming are prepared in advance so they can be rushed out when the event occurs. Obituaries of celebrities, for example, are on file for when they die. Maybe the Sun had signed up the policeman and his wife for an exclusive, and prepared the story for when she gave birth? Obviously they would only run it if the babies survived. It could have been one of the Sun's staff on his way home, reading the mock-up they had prepared in advance. I dread to think what the alternative explanations might imply.

Public Library

In my first year at grammar school, aged 11, we had Tuesday afternoons off and school on Saturday mornings. It was then I discovered the local public library on Isaac's Hill. I would cycle there and leave my bike propped up by its pedal against the pavement curb while I spent happy hours inside. The bike was always there when I came out because people didn't use to steal them in those days, at least not where I lived.

The library was a treasure trove, and it was free. It was there I discovered science fiction, and feasted my imagination on Asimov, van Vogt, Clarke and Heinlein. I read through the set of Scarlet Pimpernel and Biggles books, then the Arthur Ransome series about Swallows and Amazons, and later graduated to Tolstoy. Children are serial readers of authors they like, and I was no exception.

There was a reading room upstairs with bound copies of old newspapers and Keesing's Contemporary archives, and I spent hours reading through news coverage of past events such as World War II and the dropping of the atomic bombs. It was a formative experience, the time when I develop a lifelong love of reading, slipping away into a world of my imagination as I turned the pages.

Pentax

I was a photographer from a very young age. The first camera I owned was a box Brownie by Kodak, which had the viewfinder as a small glass square you looked down into while holding the camera at waist height. The film came on a roll you had to wind into the camera and advance manually, looking for the number to appear behind the tiny red window on the back. I graduated to a curved plastic Brownie with the viewfinder at eye level. My first real camera was a Hunter Gougo, which required the lens to be pulled outward on a small cylinder before photos could be taken.

When someone put a Pentax into my hands in my early 20s, it was the beginning of a longtime love affair. It was a 35mm single lens reflex, and took 24 or 36 photos from a cartridge that had to be slotted into place and wound until the teeth engaged. I learned about shutter speeds, f-numbers and depth of focus. Alas, I could not afford to keep it, so for years I made do with a Russian Zenith 3, an inferior but very much cheaper, similar instrument. What a joy it was when I finally made it to a real Pentax. I must have taken thousands of photos with it. One of my great acquisitions was a catadioptric 500mm lens for taking close-ups of distant objects. It was like a long telephoto lens, but with internal mirrors that cut its size to about 3 inches.

My final Pentax was a 105 automatic, with sensors that measured the distance to the subject and set it automatically. I could point it at a dolphin leaping from the water and take a photo in perfect focus. After a lifetime of Pentax, I finally graduated to a Leica Digilux 2, which looked retro, like a 1930s single lens reflex, but which had up-to-date digital innards. Then came the iPhone...