(no subject)
The end of this month marks my official retirement. As from the first of October I shall have no further obligations to the university, though in truth I have not had any for the past eight months anyway, so it won't make a great deal of difference to me. I expect I'll still go in once a week or so to meet colleagues and to attend our research seminar.
Some months ago, a couple of colleagues offered to organise a short conference to mark my retirement. I was a bit diffident at the prospect, knowing that this would mean that I'd have to stay awake through all the lectures and probably make a speech at the conference dinner. But vanity overcame apprehension and I agreed to let them go ahead with plans. I envisaged a fairly small-scale meeting, but they had more ambitious plans. As you can see from the conference announcement on the Department's home page, the meeting will spread over three days and has a dozen very eminent speakers, including my old research supervisor and several distinguished mathematicians from Germany and America. I'm still feeling a bit apprehensive about it, but I suspect that I will actually enjoy it a lot, and I'm very flattered that people have gone to such lengths to lay on a really special event to mark my retirement.
[Abrupt change of subject.] Photos from the trip to Spain are now on the family web site. There are lots of them (five pages) but I'm disappointed with the quality. A lot of what I thought would be the best shots turned out to be hopelessly out of focus and I couldn't use them. I'm going to have to work out what went wrong before the next trip (which will be a week in the southwest of England next month to stay with Liz and visit various friends in that part of the country).