Still amazed at my great good fortune to have been married to Jane for fifty years. Two great children and three adorable grandchildren.
Moving on to the less important details. For the first 2+ years at medical school I was sure I was on the wrong course. Then Jack Stevens arrived, I heard his inaugural lecture and was hooked. Trained on the Northern Region training programme and became a consultant orthopaedic surgeon in Carlisle 1987. Three of us to deal with all the trauma and elective orthopaedics for the whole of North Cumbria, some of SW Scotland’s trauma, and visitors to the Lake District. Absolutely crazy, very hard work and long hours. Fortunately, by the time I was fifty we were nine consultants, and I was able to come off the trauma rota and just do elective hip surgery. I managed to get two and a half days operating per week and got the waiting time for THR to six weeks while having by far the most enjoyable ten years of my career until I retired in 2012.
Along the way did some research with Alan Purvis, a great bloke who was a professor of engineering at Durham University. We never managed to change the world as we had hoped to, but a couple of graduates got their PhDs on the back of it, and I was made a visiting professor at Durham for the last three years of my career.
In retirement Jane and I walk in the Lake District hills to try and retain a little fitness. I play walking football twice a week when we are at home. Jane has written two novels in retirement published by Bluemoose publishers. The first was short listed for the Comedy Women in Print Prize 2021. We seem to spend a lot of time on the bastard M6 as our children live in Oxford and Surrey. Our friends are mostly in the North so no plans to move South, (I hope!)