Remembering my father

Yesterday was my father’s birthday and – had he not passed away nine years ago – he would have been 99.

I think of him every day now, less in terms of loss, more of legacy.

He was a wise, gentle man, a superb, much-loved and respected doctor by his general GP practice as well as his private patients.

I have lost count of the number of people who have said right now we could have done with his calm wisdom and deep knowledge and experience of epidemics.

He was the Chief Vaccination Officer at the Hospital of Tropical Diseases.

With typical humility, he said his colleagues were much cleverer than him but pursued their research in tropical climes – losing their lives – whereas he never proceeded further than St Pancras Way, where the rambling hospital was situated and is now a fashionable piazza of shops and flats.

He had little time for those so-called experts in the “Science” who would scare us with fear stories based less on knowledge and more on media attention seeking.

Forever the optimist, he would be saying that just when an epidemic is at its seemingly worst it means it’s getting to the end.

As to his research, in 1962 he finished and published his thesis on staphylococcal infections, concluding that Pasteur’s theory that germs “swim” to a wound was wrong – rather they always exist in the body and then re-surface.

His theory was based not on lab work but his experience as a doctor drawing upon his patients.

Now I understand his theory is accepted as correct by immunologists.

It’s never an easy day, but was made more difficult by sorting out a delivery, not to my home but to a newsagent 2 miles away.

Later, at my adult centre of learning a class member, appropriating authority, rudely demanded I wore a mask.

Even later, just as I was trying to get to sleep, my cat had a minor turn which required attention and delayed my slumbers by a further 2 hours.

It’s sod’s law that, when you are looking for some upbeat news, you have to deal with tedious stuff and overbearing types.

I do miss my father – the more so when the bossy class member sets herself up, as many have, as an expert when my father would have forgotten more information on pandemics in a month than this person had known in her lifetime.