We returned to Scotland that summer, but I took off again for Sydney, Australia, in September 1983, where I organised a session on Circadian Rhythms at the International Congress of Physiology. I then continued to New Zealand, flying to Auckland to visit Bob Lewis who had been working on circadian activity rhythms in the weta, Hemideina thoracica and working towards a mathematical, feedback control systems approach to circadian rhythmicity. From Auckland I continued to Christchurch in the South Island to see Steve Goldson who had spent a year with me in Edinburgh. He and his girl friend Ruth took me on several interesting trips, including one to Akaroa on the Banks Peninsula, and another up to Hanmer Springs to bathe in the warm waters. I then faced the very long journey home, with flights from Christchurch to Auckland, Auckland to Sydney, and then back through Singapore and Bahrain to London and finally to Edinburgh. This exhausting journey took, together with time spent in various airports, a total of nearly 36 hours. In the summer of 1983 I also attended a CIBA meeting in London, on a topic that I had suggested to them earlier: the ‘frontiers’ between formal analyses of photoperiodism and the more concrete aspects of endocrinology. The proceedings of this very successful meeting were published in 1984 by the CIBA foundation as Photoperiodic Regulation of Insect and Molluscan Hormones. The meeting drew together many old and new colleagues working in these rather disparate fields and, although not forging any really firm links between them, certainly got the two sides talking in a constructive fashion.

My fifth decade came to quieter end but enlivened by a very enjoyable and stimulating meeting held in honour of Colin Pittendrigh on his formal retirement from the Stanford Marine Station at Pacific Grove. The meeting was held in the summer of 1984 at Mount Hood, Oregon, in a building erected as part of F.D. Rooseveldt’s ‘New Deal’ during the 1930s. It gathered together many of Pitt’s friends and past colleagues in a rather informal meeting, with scientific presentations in the mornings, plenty of free time in the afternoons, and parties at night. Jean and I flew out to San Francisco and stayed for a couple of days with our erstwhile neighbours in Aliso Way. We then hired a car and drove up to Mount Hood, over the Golden Gate Bridge, up Napa Valley, through northern California, and on through Bend, Oregon. I read a paper on our in vitro photoperiodic clock work carried out the year before in Chapel Hill.

At Crater Lake, on the way to Mount Hood

One evening we held a party in honour of Pitt. Before we left for the meeting we were all asked to make a costume representing our ‘research organisms’. At the party there were, therefore, a number of fruit flies, a silkmoth, a lizard and numerous mice and hamsters. I had constructed a costume out of a white sheet coming to a point above my head in a cardboard cone. This was supposed to represent a maggot of Sarcophaga, but only when I put it on at the party did I realise that it looked rather like a Klu Klux Klan outfit – it was fortunate that the meeting was held in the liberal north-west, and not in the south, where it might have caused some offence. The costume was also very difficult to dance in! A presentation was made to Pitt which included a spoof issue of the Journal of Comparative Physiology containing only blank pages – a wry comment on the enormous amount of unpublished scientific data produced by Pitt over his life-time.

Pitt’s retirement meeting at Mount Hood

When the meeting ended Jean and I continued on our journey. After a night spent near Yakima on an Indian reserve, we drove around Mount Rainier and down to Seattle to the Truman’s house. Lynn was away on the East coast attending a High School reunion, but Jim played the perfect host. We then continued on our way around the Olympic peninsula. Apart from the stunning array of wild lupines up on the top, this journey was rather an exhausting waste of time, with endless driving through dense forest, chased by speeding forestry trucks, until we reached Aberdeen for the night. Thereafter we drove leisurely down the Oregon and Californian coast with many fine views of the Pacific, staying in some wonderful beach-side motels. Eventually we re-crossed the Golden Gate, to San Francisco and our flight home.