The last ten years
Time passes.
Today, as I find myself another year older, I was thinking back over what things of a personal nature have happened in the last ten years. In that time I moved from Cardiff to Sussex and back to Cardiff and then here to Maynooth.
When I was chatting to John Ellis over lunch at the ITP meeting last week he said to me “You move around quite a lot, don’t you?”. I replied “Yes, that has been remarked upon”. He seemed to think that was funny.
I don’t think I’ll be moving jobs again. Sometime in the next ten years I’ll be retiring, hopefully sooner rather than later. At any rate in less than three months I’ll be stepping down as Head of Department, hopefully spending more time on teaching and research and less on pointless bullshit.
Another notable thing that happened in the last decade was that I had a nervous breakdown. I spent a few weeks in a psychiatric institution but recovered well enough to return to work quite quickly. Fortunately, and contrary to my pessimistic expectations, and despite the stresses caused by the pandemic, I have suffered no significant recurrences and am now not even taking any medication (unless you count wine). So that’s all good.
The last ten years also saw my Mam cruelly taken by dementia; she passed away in 2019. Now all my grandparents and both my parents have gone.
The other thing I realised today is that I am now older than my late collaborator and colleague Francesco Lucchin, with whom I wrote a cosmology text book, was when he passed away twenty years ago, in 2002.
Time passes.
Anyway, I’ve done very little today except relax, read and listen to music and to complete the self-indulgence I’m now going to cook dinner and drink some wine while I watch some football on the telly.
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