Bad-mouthing your country, I'll bet

It was only a joke, but it could have led me into bad trouble. After I did my MPhil at Cambridge, I sometimes frequented the University Centre, widely renowned as one of the ugliest buildings in Cambridge. It was built in 1967 at the height of Sixties concrete brutalism, and serves as a graduate centre, with meeting rooms, bar and restaurant. The bar then was depressing, chrome and bright lights with televisions blaring. However, it was usually empty and it was central and fairly near to Pembroke College.

I was in the bar once, when the bartender, knowing I was President of the Adam Smith Institute, said, "Here's someone you should meet. He's the Liberal Democrat organizer for Cambridge."

I humourously put on my best Lou Gosset drill sergeant voice from "An Officer and a Gentleman" and asked, "Where you been, boy? Bad-mouthing your country, I'll bet, and listening to punk rock music." It did not go down well. The man put down his pint and said in a shocked, incredulous voice, "What did you say?"

It turned out he'd never seen the movie, and I had to explain the scene from the movie very rapidly, and that it was a joke. Fortunately he saw the funny side of it, and thought his lack of knowledge of it, and his reaction, made it even funnier.

People who lost dogs in World War II

The BBC used to send personal SOS messages on its radio stations, often naming individuals and alerting them to the news that one of their relatives was "dangerously ill" in hospital. They would often come just before a news broadcast, and were a regular feature of my childhood listening. There was a ritual air to their content. Typically, one might hear, "Now here is a message for Ivy Sutherland, believed to be on holiday with her family in Yorkshire. Will she contact York General Hospital, where her mother, Sarah Sutherland, is dangerously ill."

In the years immediately following the end of World War II, when I was 6 or 7 years old, many of the broadcasts concerned people who had lost touch with relatives in the confusion of war. Some might have been killed in bombing raids. Again, there was a ritual to the messages. "Will anyone knowing the whereabouts of Jane Smith, last heard of five years ago in Glamorgan, please get in touch with her mother by telephoning the BBC." There were very many such broadcasts at the time.

It might have been the posh accents that all announcers had in those postwar days, but as children, both myself and my sister misheard the phrase "last heard of" that appeared in every such message. To our young ears it sounded like "lost her dog," and we wondered how it came about that all these missing persons had lost their dogs years previously before going missing, and why the BBC was reporting that.

Fascination with Sherlock Holmes

I first came across Sherlock Holmes as a teenager. I listened to the BBC radio serialization of "The Hound of the Baskervilles," and was hooked. I read the Holmes short stories, and later the novelettes, and was as gripped by Conan Doyle's character as his early Strand Magazine readers were. I was fascinated by the combination of keen observation and deductive logic to uncover the wrongdoers, and later learned that the character was loosely based on Joseph Bell, the surgeon for whom Conan Doyle had worked as a clerk at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

When I taught logic at Hillsdale, I sometimes used Holmes stories to illustrate that logic can bring out the implications of what we already know. I once drove the three hours to Detroit to see a performance of "Sherlock Holmes," starring Leonard Nimoy. This was good casting because Nimoy's Mr Spock from Star Trek was characterized by cool, unemotional, logical thinking.

My colleague, Eamonn Butler, and I amused ourselves by writing a musical, "Holmes in Whitechapel," that featured Holmes and Jack the Ripper. We abandoned the project when a movie appeared based on the same premise. We co-wrote "The Sherlock Holmes IQ Book," which was published by Pan Macmillan, and held a splendid Holmes-themed launch party with the Baker Street Irregulars, a society for Holmes aficionados.

The Sherlock Holmes pub in Northumberland Street features a recreation in the restaurant upstairs of the study shared by Holmes and Watson. It sits behind a glass plate so the entire room can be seen. I sometimes dined there, always asking for a table next to it. And in the mid-80s I watched every episode of Granada TV's "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," starring Jeremy Brett, who many thought to be the best ever Sherlock.

When I pass the bronze statue of the great detective outside Baker Street tube station, I often cannot resist taking another photo of it. Sometime I must include it in a selfie.

Coping with a Michigan winter

Michigan had colder winters than I was used to. Sometimes the temperature would fall below zero Fahrenheit, that is more than 32 degrees below water's freezing point, or lower than -18C.  I did not have a car during my first winter there, and it was when I first set out to walk to the shops that I realized I was not going to survive if I continued. I managed to warm up briefly by pausing in different shops as I headed home to thaw out and warm up. 

By the second winter I had my old Cadillac. Many residents of the state fit chains on their tyres to cope with icy roads. I never did that, but I did fit winter tyres with extra deep treads. I also routinely used dry gas, an alcohol-based additive you put in the tank to prevent any moisture in the fuel from freezing. Sometimes condensation from the air ran down the sides of the tank, and dry gas stopped it freezing.

I thought jet start was more remarkable. Basically it is an ether spray you squirt directly into the carburettor. When I did this and turned the key, the engine would explode into life. I regularly used both on really cold days, and also carried a stout tow-rope in the boot in case I, or anyone else, needed a pull.

One day I encountered some students by the roadside, next to their car, which had swerved slightly off the road and wouldn't start. I stopped to help, and managed to pull them back to the road. I then squirted dry gas into their engine, and they managed to start it. One said as he thanked me, "Wait till I tell Mom. Last year at Michigan State University, my professor was a small figure on a screen in a room full of hundreds. Here your professors start your car for you!"

Shooting a rocket over the roof

Unusually, at St Andrews the students elect a rector to be the chairperson of the University Court. This happens every 3 years amid a great deal of hoopla and campaigning. Posters are used, banners put up, and stunts are performed to attract attention to, and promote the name of, the preferred candidate. 

We wanted to drape a banner bearing our candidate’s name down the sloping roof of one side of the buildings around the old quad of Salvator’s College. If we did it at night, it would be there for all to see next morning. The problem was that, lacking expert mountaineers, we couldn’t get up there. Someone suggested throwing a line over and hoisting up the banner from the other side, but it was too high. Someone else suggested using a firework rocket to carry a line over the roof, but it was impossible to aim them in the right direction.

I raised a laugh by suggesting we should tie a firework rocket to an arrow, and use a bow to aim it at the top of the roof. After the laughter died, one of the group said, “That might actually work.” So we tried it, tying the rocket to one end of the arrow and a thin line at the other from a spool that rotated around a pencil. It was somewhat dangerous, in that the archer had to wait until the rocket ignited before releasing the arrow. There were tense seconds as the blue touch-paper burned through. The rocket ignited with a “whoosh,” and the archer fired.

It worked at the second attempt. The arrow, trailing its thin line went over the roof. We collected it from the other side and used the thin line to pull up a thicker one, which in turn raised our banner. We tied the string to a drainpipe on the other side of the building to keep it in place. The next morning the name of our candidate was there for all to see as they went to their classes. Alas, rival supporters eventually worked out how we must have done it, found the string that held it, and cut it down. But it did have its moment of glory.

Secretary of Mensa

I first joined Mensa, the high IQ society, when I was 23, and attended some of its local meetings. One of the society's aims is to provide a forum in which people with high IQs could meet and talk rationally about intellectual matters. To become a member one has to score in the top 2% in a monitored IQ test, which is not all that exclusive, given that over a million people in the UK could qualify.

I let my membership lapse, and only rejoined over a decade later when I returned to the UK. Many of the London meetings were quite ordinary affairs, with perhaps a dozen or so members meeting in the upstairs rooms of pubs to discuss current issues. At some of these meetings I befriended Victor Serebriakoff, its chairman, and Clive Sinclair, the inventor. I was asked by them to stand as Secretary with their backing, and was elected. Clive Sinclair became its chairman, with Victor moving up to the post of President of International Mensa, and the three of us acted in concert to improve the society.

We introduced a colour magazine to replace the rather tatty "yellow pages" that announced club meetings. We staged upmarket events like black tie dinners, introduced a lecture series featuring well-known authors and academics, and staged a residential "Mensa at Cambridge" each year. We also recruited members by advertising Mensa tests in newspapers. Gradually the numbers increased. During the 13 years in which the three of us constituted its top officers, UK membership went from under 2,000 to just shy of 40,000.

I tried to leave the committee several times, but was persuaded to stay on and keep the team together. Finally I managed to leave because I contrived to be in the US at the time nominations had to be submitted. I thus left the committee, and allowed my membership to lapse shortly afterwards.

We loved the pirate stations

The BBC had a monopoly of radio broadcasting, and was in thrall to the Musicians' Union, which limited "needle time," the playing of pop records. The Union insisted that the BBC employed live musicians instead, and programmes featuring pop music were few and far between. Young people who wanted to listen to the hits resorted if they could to Radio Luxembourg playing pop from the Continent.

Onto that scene in 1964 came Radio Caroline, broadcasting from a ship moored offshore in international waters. Its non-stop pop interspersed with ads and DJ banter proved an immediate hit, and it gathered a huge audience. It was quickly copied, and 'pirate' radio ships were soon scattered around Britain's shores. In St Andrews the best reception was of Radio Scotland, which gained a massive market penetration in Scotland. Its signature tune, The Black Bear, was heard everywhere. Radio London was similarly popular in London and surrounds.

The Labour government of the day defended the BBC monopoly by passing the 1967 Marine Broadcasting Offences Act, outlawing the supply of and communication with offshore broadcasters. As the Act came into force, the pirate stations closed down, with the exception of Radio Caroline, which opted to continue broadcasting illegally. Reception was not good in St Andrews because the ship was based off the Frinton coast down South. However, I managed to rig up an aerial by connecting my radio to chicken wire strung around the picture rail in my room, and earthed against the wire frame of my bed, so I could continue to enjoy pirate radio. It was extraordinary to hear their signature tune, Caroline, coming from across the waves and making their young listeners feel part of a rebellion against authority.

When the other pirates were gone, the BBC opened Radio One, imitating the format of the pirates, but the genie was out of the bottle, and young people resented the government's removal of their freedom to listen to offshore stations. The Conservative opposition pledged to introduce commercial radio into the UK, and did so after they were returned to office.

Picturegoer didn't like Elvis

I was a keen movie fan as a teenager, and subscribed to the weekly magazine "Picturegoer," full of stories about the latest movies and their stars, and pop stars. Amongst its regular reviewers was Margaret Hinxman, arguably the most influential critic of her day. She was bemused when rock'n'roll made its appearance in the mid-50s, and by no means enamoured of it. Her favourite genres had been the Hollywood musical and traditional gangster movies.  

She reported on the Elvis Presley phenomenon in 1956, saying, "Look out, girls. The cat is here," pouring scorn on his singing and decrying his taste for pink Cadillacs. At the year's end, the magazine ran a feature entitled "I'm sorry I said that," in which its writers could regret errors they had made. Hinxman chose to regret her introduction of "the cat," but not because she was admitting any errors. On the contrary, her regret was that "someone with so little talent should scoop so many of the prizes of show business."

She reviewed Presley's first movie, "Love Me Tender," in which a small part had hastily been written for Presley in a near-finished Western. She described it as "a crashing bore," saying that because it featured Presley, it gave the fans "long, lingering close-ups that sadly show up his ineptness." To be fair, it was the studio bosses her fire was mainly directed at, for exploiting Presley. I myself didn't think much of Presley's string of movies. They seemed to be vehicles to showcase the star, and had little in the way of script, acting or plot. I wonder if Hinxman, who died last year aged 94, ever regretted her initial disdain of Elvis. I suspect not.

Buying my first dinner jacket

I bought my first dinner jacket in St Andrews, where there were occasional "black tie" events. The decision came after I had borrowed one from a lecturer friend for an Edinburgh dinner and had to struggle through the evening in a dinner suit that was at least three sizes too large. Since I couldn't afford to buy a new one, I went to Fordyce's on Market Street (long gone) to view their ex-hire selection. They hired out dinner suits, and after several such hires they had recouped their investment and were happy to sell them off and replace them with new ones.

Since I was a fairly standard size, a ready-to-wear one presented no problem, and I found one whose jacket and trousers fitted me perfectly. It cost me £7, a very low price even in those days. It was good quality, though, and showed no signs of wear. It came with a plain matt black unpleated cummerbund.

Since black tie outfits look pretty much the same, students sometimes chose to express individuality by wearing coloured bow ties and cummerbunds, maybe in red or blue. In my case I asked a talented female student to embroider the plain cummerbund with a gold double-headed eagle spreading its wings across it. It looked spectacular, and started a minor trend as a few of my friends began to have theirs embroidered with different patterns.

It is a testament to its quality that I was still wearing the dinner suit 25 years later, and it still fitted. When I finally bought another one, it was from the "previously worn" department of Moss Bros – their euphemism for "second-hand" or ex-hire. I still have the embroidered cummerbund, and still wear it occasionally, but only at student functions since it would be out of place on more formal occasions.

Grandmother's clock was 5 minutes fast

My grandmother had been given a lovely clock as a wedding present in 1900. It sat on the mantelpiece, with a face resembling that of a grandfather clock. It had a marble finish, and sat on four gilded legs at the corners. On either side were gilded lions, each with a huge ring suspended from its mouth. It had to be wound with a key, and had a large lead pendulum inside which ticked loudly as it swung. It chimed the hours, with a single one for the half-hour, and the chimes had to be wound separately.

It sat on the mantelpiece throughout my childhood, present every day and at every meal. It was always 5 minutes fast because my grandmother kept it that way. Her reasoning was that if you needed to do something at a certain time, such as heading off to school, the clock would make you hurry because it looked later than it was. Of course it didn't work like that. My sister and I built that into our reckoning and mentally subtracted 5 minutes from what the clock said.

When my grandmother died, it went into storage for 25 years until I decided to locate it and retrieve it. It was full of dust, with the gilt tarnished, and it no longer worked. I located an elderly clock repairer in Cambridgeshire, who lovingly cleaned and repaired the works, and regilded the gold finish. When it came back, it looked and worked as it had once done, and took pride of place on my sideboard. Alas, a further 25 years took their toll, and the mechanism has deteriorated somewhat. It still works, but now I set it 5 minutes fast, as my grandmother did, not in my case to fool myself about the time, but because I know it will gradually lose 5 minutes over the course of the day.

Learning to make jam and marmalade

I first learned to make jam from Dorothy Gash, wife of the distinguished historian, Norman Gash. Both were friends of mine. I had rented a cottage in St Andrews for the summer vacation, and found it featured a beautiful rose garden at the back, and several raspberry bushes. While I was there the berries grew plump and ripe. There were more than I could eat, so I rang up Mrs Gash and asked her how to make raspberry jam. She was much amused and told me her recipe, which basically involved boiling up equal weights of raspberries and sugar, and testing after 7 minutes or so by putting a spoonful onto a saucer. When it forms a skin you can drag with a spoon, it is ready.

I followed her instructions and found it worked. I made several jars of the most deliciously fresh raspberry jam, far better than any I've ever had from shops. I've used her recipe ever since, with the small addition of a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice, which I learned makes it set a little firmer and gives it extra zing.

There was no learned instructor to teach me when I graduated to marmalade, so I had to learn from books. Legend tells us it was invented in Dundee, just across the River Tay from St Andrews. A Spanish ship laden with Seville oranges was caught in a storm and put into Dundee harbor for safety. James Keillor, a small-time merchant, bought the cargo cheaply, and his wife turned it into marmalade to preserve it.

I like my marmalade very tart, so I use less sugar, which means I have to boil for longer and add a little pectin. I learned to leave the peel quite thick cut, and to include a grapefruit or sometimes a lemon with the oranges. Its taste was so distinctive that my friends queued up eagerly for jars every time I made it.

Writing children’s science fiction

Writing fiction was totally new to me. I’d written several books in areas such as philosophy and economics, but had never attempted fiction before, or written for young adult readers. I knew it was a different skill, so I read a couple of books that told how to do it, and absorbed their lessons. 

First, I leaned that you should stick close to your protagonist and don’t write much about things that happen in their absence. Second, you should use all five senses to take readers into a scene. Don’t just say what it looks like; bring in smell, touch, taste, sound. Third, I read that children these days won’t tolerate pages of description that their Victorian forebears absorbed. They now prefer dialogue. These were lessons I determined to apply.

I mapped out the characters and the plot, and wrote a paragraph about what would happen in each chapter, and then I began to write. I called it “The Waters of Andros,” about the children on a distant water world who bonded with the giant sea-creatures they called plesiosaurs, and who rode them through the seas. “Andros” was an oblique reference to St Andrews.

When I’d finished it, I knew it was too long, and that there were sections of it that dragged, so I engaged a professional editor to go over it and prune it. After several such exercises the book was finally done, and I began on the second. My aim was to recapture the hard science fiction of my youth, as opposed to the fantasy that dominates young adult reading today. I was, in effect, writing to my 12-year-old self.

I’ve written one roughly every 18 months since then, with 9 currently in print and a 10th on the way. But, as always, there was a magic about the first one, and the feeling of having acquired not only a new skill, but a thoroughly engaging one that still allows me to become lost in faraway worlds.

The only time I was snowed up in Hillsdale

 Hillsdale, being in Michigan, had large quantities of snow in winter. Very often the snow that fell in December was still there in April, albeit covered by more snow. It was common in the winter semester from mid-January to early May to wake up to snow a couple of feet deep. I had a small yellow house just across the road from the campus, and kept clear a two-foot wide trench from my front door to that road, and from there had entry into the college buildings, which were contiguous.

I was only once snowed up completely. I woke up to realize it was darker than it should be, even for a February morning. When I drew the curtains I saw the reason. The snow was above them, several feet deep. I could not see the top of it, and I could not open the door because the snow came almost up to the roof.  

I telephoned the college to explain I could not get to my classes, and they were very sympathetic, pointing out that some other professors and lecturers were in a similar position. I did not have the day off, however. Not much later that morning I heard a muffled commotion outside from my front garden, followed by a knock on my door. I opened it to find that some intrepid students from a nearby fraternity house had come to dig me out. They had cleared a pathway through snow that was many feet thick. Indeed, it was about as tall as I am because they had shoveled it and thrown it to each side, piling it on top of the settled snow. They all had broad grins at their achievement and happily escorted me to the college, where I gave my classes to an only slightly depleted audience.

A solemn school announcement of a king’s death

It was in February of my second term at grammar school that an unusual event occurred. At 11 am in the middle of one of the lessons, the classroom door opened, and into the room swept the imposing figure of the head-teacher, Colonel Thomas. He was, as usual, in his black gown and mortar board, but had a very grave expression on his face. The teacher looked startled, wondering what was happening, as did the class. Col. Thomas took off his mortar board and faced us. 

“I think you should know,” he told us, “that at 7.30 this morning His Majesty King George VI passed away. I think we should rise for a minute’s silence.” 

We all stood up as he left, and duly kept the minute of silence, realizing that we now had a young queen on the throne. We later learned that the King had in fact died in his sleep and had been found dead in his bed, apparently from coronary thrombosis. In those days the monarchy was more remote than it is now, but was held in awe and affection by a patriotic nation whom the King had ruled through the Second World War. He had earned the country’s gratitude by opting to remain in Buckingham Palace throughout the German bombing of London.

As we resumed our seats when the minute’s silence ended, one boy put his hand up and asked, “Please, Sir, who’s dead?”

The pheasant who came to call

Before I lived in Cambridge I had a house built in the village of Boxworth, about 8 miles out of Cambridge. It was very much rural, surrounded by farmland, with a small stream behind the house. I had to get used to the sound of owls hooting in the darkness, and of small muntjak deer leaping from the hedges as I drove from the main road to my house. I once found a dead badger at the back, which the locals informed me had to be reported to the local authorities for removal. I had to have a grill fitted to my chimney to prevent the birds who perched on it from flying down into my house.

One of the most engaging local creatures was a pheasant whose neck feathers featured a white circle. It lived in or near the village, and was dubbed “the parson” because its white band resembled a clerical collar. It was a pet of the village and was often seen strutting along its streets and lanes.

Once I heard knocking at my front door, and when I went to answer it I saw the pheasant pecking vigorously at its glass panel. When it saw me it glared at me with what looked like an angry look. I didn’t let it in, and it was several minutes before it strutted off. It happened more than once, and I guessed that my house might have been built along one of its previous regular walkways, obstructing its passage. Either that, or maybe it saw its reflection in the glass and was telling the supposed interloper to clear out of its patch.

A St Andrews house without electricity

Some of my friends shared a house in St Andrews that had never had electricity. It was thought bizarre that there should be such places in the mid-1960s. It did have gas lighting, though, with two gas lights on either side of the fireplace, which itself had a gas fire. It was like entering a time warp. The gas mantles in the lights were fragile, and often had to be replaced. This was quite a rigmarole since the mantles came as flat, soft pieces of perforated fabric that had to be shaped by hand into the traditional bulb shape before they could be fixed to the lamp and hardened.

I often visited, as did many friends, and it was a virtual salon most nights. I used to work there at the table, colouring my engravings under a Tilley lamp, a paraffin pressure lamp that had to be pumped up occasionally when its light dimmed. As a table lamp, it gave me enough light to work by, where the wall gas lamps did not. The student girls who lived there had a battery-powered record player for entertainment because, of course, there was no power for a television.

By gaslight we talked and drank coffee on innumerable happy evenings, sitting on ancient armchairs and an uneven sofa. The place is long gone. Indeed, the surprise is that it lasted as long as it did. A new development sits on the site, but when I visit St Andrews I sometimes take a detour to where the old house used to sit, on the road on the rise of a hill, and I recall many memories of those times.

Adopting a house lizard

Small lizards are very common in the Florida Keys, as elsewhere in the state. I have seen them in many places, including Vietnam, Greece, the Seychelles, Nicaragua and Cuba. Usually a few inches long, and greyish-brown in colour, they lie on flat surfaces soaking up the sunshine. The little geckos and anoles are often called "house lizards," and they eat things like grasshoppers, crickets, cockroaches and spiders, along with ants and insects.

One took up residence in my house on Ramrod Key. It would scuttle up the walls or across the ceiling, usually interspersing periods of rapid movement with long rests. I grew quite attached to it. Floridians generally leave them alone, regarding them as cute, and valuing their role in controlling insects.

I never gave my one a name, though a friend told me that his children who stayed there had christened it Lizzie. I never knew whether it was male or female. I often let friends stay at my house in my absence, leaving a set of instructions on how everything worked, and in capital letters one of these instructed them not to harm the lizard. No-one ever did.

Addicted to science fiction

 I acquired a taste for science fiction from an early age. It began with comics such as the Eagle, and movies such as “Rocketship XM,” which I could only see by asking an adult to escort me into the cinema. There was “Destination Moon” and “When Worlds Collide,” which came out when I was 10. I loved them all. There were lurid pulp paperbacks which I occasionally bought for pennies second-hand out of my pocket money.

I was 14 when I read Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation,” and was transfixed by its breathtaking sweep of a galactic-wide empire. I read most science fiction books either from the school library or the local public library because I couldn’t afford to buy any. They included everything by Asimov, plus Arthur C Clarke and Robert Heinlein.

I never supposed I would ever personally meet any of the authors, but I met Isaac Asimov at a Mensa conference in New York. I met Arthur C Clarke at a London hotel before the premiere of the movie, “2010: Odyssey Two.” I met Harry Harrison, author of “Soylent Green,” at a pub in Cambridge while at a conference there. And I met Anne McCaffrey, author of the “Dragonflight” series, in a Cambridge bookshop. I regret that I just missed meeting Robert Heinlein, who died before a mutual friend could introduce us. What characterized the ones I did meet was their mental youthfulness. They were like kids.

Escaping Hurricane Andrew

I reached my house on Ramrod Key on the day before my birthday in 1992. I knew there was something wrong when I turned on my TV. The local channel was showing a picture of a hurricane offshore, and its predicted path showed it could hit the Lower Keys. There was a warning to prepare for possible evacuation. I headed for the nearest filling station to fill up for the possible 100-mile drive to Miami Airport, and found a huge line of drivers waiting to do the same. It took me over half an hour to get fuel.

When I woke at 6 am next day, the evacuation order had just been given, so I headed for the mainland. US Highway One has only two lanes, one each way. I joined the huge line of cars and headed off in a giant convoy making about 20 mph. At the mainland we speeded up, with all the toll gates open and personnel frantically waving us all through. When I eventually reached Miami Airport I dumped my car in long stay parking and went to buy a ticket. There were no seats to New York or Washington, so I asked what they had and was told they had one seat left for Dallas. I bought it and boarded the plane. By now the hurricane was only a few hours away and the winds were picking up. We sat for two hours on the runway, and eventually took off, to a mighty cheer from the passengers. I believe we were the second last flight out.

I watched the hurricane on TV at a Dallas Airport hotel that evening. It devastated Homestead, just North of the Keys, and caused extensive damage in the Upper and Middle Keys. I went to stay with friends in Dallas, and had friends I'd invited to stay at my house pick up my car a few days later from Miami. When they reached my house they reported all was well, though debris was scattered about. It was then I made the decision to sell up, and rent places when I visited in future.

When the lights went out

When I was doing my PhD at St Andrews in the early 1970s, blackouts were an occasional feature as militant unions of nationalized industries used industrial muscle to force governments to capitulate to their wage demands. They would picket the power stations to deprive them of coal and oil, so power cuts were implemented. 

In 1970 hospitals were forced to function on batteries and candles during a "work-to-rule" strike. The worst was in 1973, when an oil shock combined with a miners’ strike. Petrol was rationed, there was a 50mph speed limit on roads, and there was a heating limit of 63F (17C) in office and commercial premises and a reduction in street lighting. A 3-day working week was introduced, and a 10.30pm shutdown for TV. The electricity often went off, leaving us with no heat or light.

Naturally we improvised. I bought a little calor gas stove and a calor gas lamp, both powered by small cylinders of “Camping Gaz.” When the power went off, we could still boil water for tea or coffee and cook, and we had enough light to avoid total darkness.

When I returned to the UK after my stint as a professor in Hillsdale, Michigan, the unions were still rampant, so I took the portable stove and lantern to London to cope with power cuts. After the famous “Winter of Discontent” of mass strike action in late 1978 and early 1979, Mrs Thatcher was elected, and introduced measures that gradually brought the unions within the law. There were no more power cuts. Forty years later I took the dust-stained stove and lamp from the cupboard under the sink and cleaned them up. When I turned them on, astonishingly both still worked.