Cheerful in the face of adversity

My former colleague John has cancer, and is confined to a wheelchair. The details are too miserable to rehearse here. But John himself is not miserable, as I hope is apparent here.

This day is John's 75th Birthday, which he was determined to reach and enjoy. After an afternoon of scientific lectures presented in his honour (a Nobel Prize winner flew from California in order to participate), here we are gathering for a celebratory dinner. In this photograph, John is amused in a conversation with the octogenarian former Head of Department.

(Lady) Mary Archer, a former member of John's team, organised a Cabaret before the dinner that was highly professional, highly amusing, highly un-PC, and highly focused on the personal qualities (?) of staff and colleagues in the Department. In addition to John's outstanding scientific abilities and achievements, he was a writer of scripts for TWTWTW and similar programmes, and of some very successful musicals, publicly performed. Every year while he was a member of our Academic Staff, John would write and put on a similar Cabaret for our Christmas Party. We all used to wait in trepidation to find out which of our foibles and misdeeds would be revealed.

At the end of the dinner itself, John was presented with a bound volume of the papers that had been delivered during the afternoon, with, included at the end, a series of personal reminiscences and appreciations from his many friends. John was obviously most moved by this gesture.

Additional photographs from the evening can be seen here. The last two show John admiring his special presentation volume, with Mary Archer besdie him.