Many colleagues have their own web pages, but I have been very slow in organising mine.

Looking at the list of my publications, you will see that a good proportion of them are joint, and that I have enjoyed working with many collaborators. Simply writing down a list of publications seemed rather cold and uninformative, so I began to write a few jottings about the background to the origins of the ideas behind the work, and how the publications came about. Although I have tried to be brief, the story has turned out to be quite long, and a few anecdotes have crept in. Writing it has unearthed many memories, but these go back over 50 years. I am sure that others will have different recollections of the same times, but I hope that my memory has not led me too far astray.

Two things that I already knew have been brought home to me by writing these notes: first, how large a role chance plays in all of our lives; and second, how fortunate I have been both in my colleagues and in my marriage and family life, the two entangled threads which have formed the main pattern of my adult life.