The mid-eighties were very busy for me. I have recorded in these annals how a photograph sent me by a well-wisher cast me back to the end of 1987 when I suddenly left Cambridge to join The Submerged Log Company. Well, it happened again. I’ve just returned from some lab visits where a former colleague — a postdoc when I was a postgrad — dug up this photo:
It shows the delegates at the Symposium of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy that took place at Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1986. I shan’t embarrass anyone reading this who finds themselves in this photo, especially if they are still alive. I am unshockable, though — I am in the middle at the back, and the colleague who sent me the picture is not entirely unadjacent. Looking over this photo is bittersweet given that so many of the people here have shuffled off their mortal coils and gone to join the Choir Invisible.
I have many memories of this meeting, for all that some have been fogged by strong liquor time. This was the meeting where I gave my first platform presentation … at 9am, the day after the Symposium Dinner. I was not particularly chipper, and looked over from the podium at the smattering of green faces before me.
The journey to Belfast was especially memorable. Some people chose to fly, but me and my lab-mate (he knows who he is — yes, he’s in the picture too), being thrifty grad students, decided to go by bus. We went from Cambridge to Victoria Coach Station, looking forward to the adventure of an overnight coach journey to Belfast via Stranraer, and the suitably comfortable National Express conveyance that would get us there. Imagine our surprise and shock when what turned up to take us was an ordinary charabanc in the livery of I forget what, but it might as well have been Honest Ron’s Sunshine Holidays. The seats had no headrests, and during the long road north I would often nod off, resting my head on my lab mate’s shoulder. He got his own back much later as my Best Man, when, in his speech, he confessed to my bride, and the whole party, in portentous tones, that he had a confession to make. ‘I once slept with Henry’, he said, ‘and it was not a pleasant experience’.
The road back was possibly even worse, as the bus broke down at the Watford Gap Service Station on the M1, one of the oldest, and therefore shabbiest, of all rest stops, and did so at the graveyard hour of 4 am or thereabouts. The passengers de-camped while a new charabanc was sent for, during which time my lab mate and I found an early breakfast of toast and marmalade — making the marmalade palatable with dollops of Paddy and Bushmills whiskey that I had bought an off-licence in the Lisburn Road. This was during the ‘troubles’ and the offy was heavily fortified, though in general I found Belfast, and Northern Ireland more generally (as the conference party went on an excursion to the Giants Causeway), a happy and welcoming place. Perhaps I’d had too much to drink. Ah, Happy days.
