Brian J Ford with one of his books
HERE'S a problem for scientist, journalist, TV pundit, author, university Fellow, ex-rock band player and former King's School pupil Brian Ford: why does one 25-year span seem much shorter than another? (He can have Colton's Law as a start: Time speeds up as it runs out).
Considering he has a whole page of the 1993 International Who's Who of Intellectuals to himself, it seems certain that he will soon explain all. It hit him with the publication in German of one of his books, German Secret Weapons. The English edition has sold about three-quarters of a million copies since it was published in 1969.
"When I wrote it I had access to research carried out 25 years before that," he said at his home in Mayfield, Eastrea. "That was typed on paper: yellow and crinkly with age, and seemed to belong to the distant past. Twenty-five years later I look at a copy on my shelf, and it seems like yesterday that I wrote it."
I can't see Brian being held up for long by this little flying time teaser.
After all, his breadth of mind can be gauged from the fact that his son and daughter have both used dad's text books, at Peterborough Regional College and at Manchester University - one reading catering and the other, human anatomy.