I spent an enjoyable day last week in Oxford with one of my boys, who is applying to go there to read medicine. After he’d done the dutiful things (attending talks in the Department of Medical Sciences, looking over some of the colleges he’s interested in, etc.) I asked him if it’d be ok if we ventured down memory lane. And so we went looking for this bust of T.E. Lawrence in the chapel of Jesus College.

I hadn’t seen it since one glorious late-August day in 1967 when I had visited Oxford for the first time. The whole place was deathly quiet (this was before the tourist boom) and the colleges, in particular, seemed like magical oases of scholarly peace. I had been reading The Seven Pillars but hadn’t known of Lawrence’s connection with Jesus (the college, that is. I later found that he had written a thesis on Crusader castles during his time there.) So the bust came as a delightful shock. Having grown up in the Ireland of the 1950s, a society which was not in the habit of honouring writers and in which James Joyce was still reviled as a pornographer, I was very struck — and touched — by it. And it led me to a critical decision that shaped my life.

At the time I was about to embark on the final year of my undergraduate engineering degree in Ireland. Insofar as I had a forward plan, it was to go to the US — maybe to MIT or to Berkeley. But sitting there in the sunlight shafting through the chapel windows on that peaceful August afternoon, I decided that I’d like to go to Oxford or Cambridge instead. In the end, I applied to both, and Cambridge made me an offer first. The rest, as they say, is (personal) history. It’s strange to rediscover the hinges on which one’s life turns. We lurch from one chance event to another, and then later on try to impose some kind of retrospective order on it. But in fact it’s more like what mathematicians call a ‘random walk’.

Flickr version here.

First, find some flowers.

This (plus most of the recent flower/plant pictures in my Photostream) was taken with a Panasonic DMZ-TZ6 camera that I picked up for a song in a sale. I bought it because it has a Leica Vario-Elmar lens which not only has a 12x optical zoom, but also a terrific macro capability. It’s a truly extraordinary lens. The only downside is that the camera doesn’t have a standard mini-USB connector. Why can’t camera manufacturers see sense about things like this? (And don’t get me started on to the subject of battery chargers. We have three Canon digital IXUSes in our family, each of them superficially identical, and yet each requires its own charger. Madness.)

Flickr version here.

Jeff Bezos’s Princeton Commencement Address is the best thing I’ve read today. Sample:

On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can't remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I'd come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, "At two minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life!"

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. "Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division." That's not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, "Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices…

In my gloomier moments I sometimes feel that a lifetime spent in universities has left me with the feeling that there’s a high correlation between cleverness and moral cowardice. At any rate, I’ve known some very high-IQ cowards, and rather more modestly-endowed heroes. Who was it who said that anyone with sufficient intelligence can think of a dozen reasons for not doing the right thing?

And I was fortunate to know one extremely intelligent man who was also a genuine hero.

The interview that Johannes Kuhn did with me is up on seuddeutsche.de. Bet you didn’t know I spoke such fluent German. Er, neither did I. Fortunately Johannes speaks excellent English.

… means something, said Pooh, or my name isn’t Pooh, er, which it is.

Spotted on a pavement near my office.

(With apologies to A.A. Milne.)