Durham has an exceptional romanesque cathedral, a river that loops beautifully around the town centre, a railway viaduct from which most tourists get their only brief view of the place as they hurry up the line from York to Edinburgh, and the third oldest university in England, in which I spent a penniless but happy postdoctoral year in 1980-1.

The picture on the far left shows some building facades in Old Elvet, where the Philosophy Department is housed.

1981-2 was spent as a temporary lecturer at St Andrews University on the North coast of Fife. Surprisingly, this was the first time I had set foot in Scotland.

The department of Moral Philosophy and that of Logic and Metaphysics occupy Edgecliff (middle picture), a wonderfully suitable edifice with towers in all the right places. It is perched, as the name suggests, on the cliff above St Andrews Bay, with a distant view on a clear day of the Grampians to the North. Clear days do happen, occasionally.

'Brisbane,' wrote my wife in a letter back to England, 'has the most modern-looking and glossiest city centre in Australia. The rest of it looks like Dodge City on stilts.' Our apartment was in one of those "Queenslanders", built up on stumps so that the wind can blow underneath in a futile attempt to cool it down. The subtropical spring is thoroughly beautiful, with jacarandas flowering first, giving way to frangipanni. Unfortunately, it is followed by the subtropical summer, which is no joke in a small apartment with a baby (born the previous year in Fife) and no air conditioning. I still remember the relief of the night when the temperture dipped below 20 degrees for the first time in months and we were able to sleep in comfort.

My daughter's first full sentence: "Bats eat fruit."