Remembrance and reminiscences

Occasionally something happens which takes you back to an important stage of your life, which helped to set you on the path that that life has taken. Two such events have happened to me in the last few weeks.

The first was when staff from British Embassies and High Commissions around the world were asked, during the lead up to Remembrance Sunday, to contribute to a project about “what the poppy means to me”. This was easy for me. I was born in Richmond-upon-Thames, just a few hundred yards from the Royal British Legion poppy factory, where the famous red plastic poppies are produced. At the time, many of the wounded veterans who made the poppies lived at the Star and Garter Home in Richmond (the home has now been re-located, and the imposing building overlooking Richmond Park is becoming luxury flats). Several of them used to go to the church where I was an altar boy, and it was a great privilege to push their wheelchairs from church to the Star and Garter after the service. This gave us an opportunity to learn more about these old gentlemen, and the life of service they had lived. A formative memory, evoked every November.

A week or so later, I was asked to say a few words at the finale of the British Film Festival, which has been taking place to packed houses in cinemas across Australia. While it was sad that the festival was finishing, I was delighted to be there, as the film being shown – The Man Who Knew Infinity – was particularly special to me. As a teenager, too many years ago, I was not sure which subject I should specialise in as I was approaching my A Levels (the Advanced level of UK schooling, where the student has to narrow down their studies to two or three subjects). Mathematics was in the frame, and I picked up from the school library a book called A Mathematician’s Apology, by G.H. Hardy. This enchanting book, which features a fascinating and moving section about Hardy’s friendship with the Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan, was enough to tip the balance, leading me to study maths – a decision which, through a wildly circuitous route, led me to the Foreign Office and the desk in Canberra where I am writing this. So in a sense I had been waiting to see this film, which is a biography of Ramanujan, for over 30 years. It was worth the wait.