ABSTRACT
About once every five years, my ex-teacher and later friend, Richard Gregory, used to ring me up to ask some slightly odd but interesting questions. I miss these contacts greatly and am sad that this can no longer happen. He was extraordinarily brilliant and genial, his great intelligence, amiability and sense of fun warmed lecture rooms and the halls of the “Science Exploratoriums” that he set up in Bristol and elsewhere. Because I had revered him while I was an undergraduate, it was still deeply flattering when I reached my seventies for him to hint that I might know something that he did not. His last question arose because, in his eighties, he had become uncomfortable that his personal time now seemed to be passing much faster.
