A modest family reunion

Yesterday David brought his youngest son, John Last Jr and John's partner Emily to Ottawa; John, just returned to Canada after a year at Bogazici University in Istanbul, was en route from Kingston to Halifax, to return for his final year at King's College, Dalhousie University and leaves later today to fly down east to Halifax. Here's a small selection of the photos we added to the family albums.

Standing: Richard, Jonathan, John Jr
Sitting: David (with Marmite) John Sr, Rebecca

Emily and John

The old has-been John and the young comer John

Three generations together. David, John Jr and John Sr (and Marmite, trying to escape)

John and Emily looking at a family photo album










We had a magnificent Indian take-out meal delivered to my apartment door, then the family all departed.  It was great to see young John and Emily again, but we had nowhere nearly enough time to exchange the contents of each other's minds.

Just published ….

Just published: The IEA Dictionary of Epidemiology, 6th edition

I’m really chuffed to see how this book has grown in stature, size, and gravitas – with an occasional light touch or sly dig at pomposity. It’s nice to see my name on the title page too, this time as one of four associate editors.  It began for me in 1981 with a phone call from my former mentor, Kerr White, the president of the International Epidemiological Association: he asked me to compile and edit a dictionary of concepts, methods and procedures we use in epidemiological practice and research. My tenure as editor in chief ran from 1981 until 2003, during which there were 4 editions of the Dictionary, each more authoritative and informative than its predecessor.  It was translated into many other languages, including French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Farsi, Serbian, Slovakian, Greek,  Ukrainian, Russian. My name was soon known to epidemiologists all over the world. At IEA meetings I felt like the Eiffel Tower because so many wanted to be photographed standing next to me. This latest edition consolidates the reputation the work established when I was at the helm. I'm delighted to see that my successor as editor in chief, Miquel Porta (Barcelona and Chapel Hill, North Carolina) has strengthened the book in so many ways, including occasional deft and subtle humorous touches.

Bastille Day, 2014

Sixty years ago today I was in Paris, near the end of a 7-week back-backing trip through Europe, that began in Bruxelle, continued along the Rhine, through the Tyrol and the Alps, on into Italy to Rome, Assisi, Florence and Venice, the Austrian Tyrol, Switzerland, and Paris, which was in mourning, flags at half mast and festive lights off, because the fortress of Dien Bien Phu had fallen: France had decisively lost its colonial war in what was then called French Indo-China, now Vietnam. 

It was my fourth visit to Paris, and it left a long, sad shadow that wasn't erased completely until repeated visits, commutes by TGV from WHO/HQ in Geneva and Eurailpass holidays with Wendy, renewed my affection for the City of Light. We came close to having another Bastille Day in Paris under happier conditions but never quite managed to mesh exactly. 

My most memorable Bastille Day was in 1977 in New York, when I met my editor at Appleton-Century-Crofts, Appleton's for short, to sign the contract for my first go-around as editor in chief of the big reference textbook of public health now eponymously known as Maxcy-Rosenau-Last. That day New York was shut down by a massive power outage caused by overloaded generators burning out in a prolonged heat wave. The publishers, still flush with funds in those days, had booked me into a luxury suite on the 37th floor of the Sheraton near the top end of Times Square; I'll never forget that it was the 37th floor because that evening I had to walk all the way up - the elevators didn't work during the power failure, unlike those in my condo which are powered by an emergency generator. I walked up in a convoy, led at first by two chaps with little flashlights; one peeled off about the 20th floor, the other somewhere in the low 30s; after that I was on my own, feeling my way and opening a door on to the landing at each floor where a faint glow of distant lights in Connecticut that wasn't blacked out by the power failure told me where I was. Fortunately in those days my room had a key, not an electronic key card which probably wouldn't have worked in the absence of electric power. Next morning I awoke very early in time to have a cold shower while there was still some water in the rooftop tanks.  I walked down 37 floors that were dark as the inside of a cow, because the emergency lights in the stairwell didn't work. That was worse than walking up. I was carrying my overnight bag, very heavy with the weight of books I'd bought the previous afternoon. By the time I reached ground level, my legs felt like rubber.  

I met Rich Lampert, my editor, outside Appleton's office building which like everything else in Manhattan was closed; we had our business meeting on a bench in the little park beside the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, and instead of the customary luxury luncheon in a posh restaurant, we ate street food from a barrow, washed down with luke warm coca cola. The power came on again late that afternoon, when I was on a Carey bus to La Guardia airport. It was an inauspicious beginning to my 20-year stint as editor in chief of the Big Green Monster. Fortunately for all of us, things went fairly smoothly from then on. Almost everything did, anyway.

Bastille Day was good again this year. David was in town, and we spent much of the day in the National Gallery, visiting a superb exhibition of Gustave Dore's works.  I hadn't known than in addition to his brilliant drawings, illustrations of the Bible, Milton's Paradise Lost, Don Quixote, Rabelais, and many other classics, he  was a landscape painter, a sculptor, and designer of elaborate ornamental clocks and suchlike extravaganzas of 19th century civilized Parisian life. This exhibition was well worth seeing.      

And now for something completely different

Among the fragments of memoirs I've posted there was one - more than one, actually, including one consisting of excerpts from Wendy's diary - about the voyage home to Adelaide after my year at the MRC Social Medicine Research Unit in London in 1961-62. We traveled home the same way we traveled to London, on a Danish cargo ship that carried 12 passengers, including Wendy, Rebecca, David and me. Somewhere in the Indian Ocean about half way between the Red Sea and the coast of Western Australia, we ran out of reading matter for Rebecca and David. They were getting bored with Wendy and me rereading aloud to them from Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, The Magic Pudding and Charlotte's Web. Wendy and I were getting a bit fed up with rereading the same stories over and over again, too. 

So I made up a story to tell them. 

The story sprang into my mind fully formed, or so it seemed, even the names of the principal characters, fraternal twins Jennifer and Christopher, aged 9-10, their Dad and Mum, a 300-year-old parrot, the one that sat on Long John Silver's shoulder in Robert Louis Stephenson's wonderful adventure story, Treasure Island. I never wrote this story down. A few weeks ago, as a break from memoir-writing, I began to write down my story about Jennifer and Christopher, their Dad and Mum, the parrot whose name is Gloriana, several villains,  several other characters, and their adventures as the twins, the parrot, the twins' parents, hotly pursued by the villains, travel from Adelaide, South Australia through the irrigated districts beside the Murray River, the pastoral country of western New South Wales, the pineapple and sugar cane country of Queensland and eventually to the treasure island near the top end of the Great Barrier Reef. 

I set the story in the early 1930s, the time of my earliest memories.  It's not quite finished yet, but I have had that interesting experience many writers have described: as I wrote, the characters came to life in my head, did and said things I hadn't known about until they happened. I don't have the creative writing skills to do a very good job, especially with dialogue, but with patience and much rewriting I am fairly confident that I'll eventually write something I won't be ashamed of. The story has nine chapters. The first six are in good enough shape for me to send out to several children aged about 8-12 who can better judge than I can, whether I've managed to write in a style and language that will appeal to children in that age range.   

I've invited my grandchild Charles (formerly Christina) to illustrate the story. Charles has just had abdominal surgery, and I haven't heard yet whether he feels up to accepting my invitation. I hope he will. The story needs illustrations and I'd like to keep these in the family.