triumphs and tribulations with him.

For the last eight years, I’ve been lucky enough to know this bloke called Tim. He was a colleague, and a friend. Each time he passed my office he’d put his head round the door and offer some truly awful joke, or a greeting in French, Spanish or Latin (or some mix of the three). Occasionally, just a rude noise. He made me laugh, but he was also one of the people I knew I could turn to for support, if I needed it. He was warm, generous, open and positive. Tim was a physicist, an artist (his work regularly featured at the Physics & Astronomy Art Exhibition – idiosyncratic semi-abstract paintings, and an installation involving apples at various stages of decay), a poetand a writer (as will be evident when his diary is published shortly), a musician, a gardener and passionate lover of the natural world – and above all a communicator.

Tim had terminal cancer. He was diagnosed back in June, and told that as the cancer has spread to his liver there wasn’t any chance to operate. Chemo could give him a bit of extra time. Tim reckoned he could beat the odds, that the time estimate the doctors gave was skewed both by the desire to not give false hope, and by the inclusion in the statistics of those whose life expectancy was already shortened by old age or other frailties. He found, along with despair and grief, a way of living in the world more intensely:

I’m looking