19 May 2013

I Was A Number...

As I am moving house, (don't ask), I've been having a clear-out, and decided to finally throw out my old university lecture notes. But not before going thru them one last time, mainly to remind myself what a lazy bastard i was. It was a harrowing read!
Came across an old gem though... one of my lecturers, well quite a lot of them really, was a stuffy old tweed-wearing mutton-chopped curmudgeon, (well it was pure mathematics!), who i loved. He had a penchant for saying 'Its time for a quick cough and a drag'. He said he used to go to london uni back in the day, and he and his fellow nerdy friend used to sit opposite each other on the tube train and slowly shout out random chess moves across the carriage, merely to baffle the other commuters who would stare on desparately trying to follow this imaginary game!


Aaanyway, he used to give us a weekly homework sheet of maths questions.
Nothing out of the ordinary there, except that question number six was always either a picture of a penny farthing, or a rather nice picture of Patrick Mcgoohan. This made his class the only one worth going to! (Possibly a clever ploy methinks!)
Remember this was in the early nineties, before internet and windows, so this would've involved him physically cutting out a picture and literally pasting it onto a homework sheet in order to photocopy it.

Hats off to you Mr Humphrys!!! You were a gem!! (probably well dead by now...)




For those of you similar to most of my old maths class who simply do not get the reference, then go click HERE to be educated!