We married quite young, and she's been a very stabilising influence in my life, because I tend sometimes to follow things which are pretty pointless. I get diverted very easily, often by things non-scientific, and she... well, she's been the companion of my life, of the good and the bad, so I owe her a great debt. She's not a scientist at all, not in any way, although I once gave her a book on crystallography, on patterns, which she didn't read, but she did see that there were nice patterns you could see, trying to explain space groups and so on. But I gave up after a while, and she was also very helpful in, you know, the days when I was teaching at Peterhouse, running a group in the Lab, having two small children, and she was very, very tolerant. No, not overly tolerant, but reminding me of things.

[Q] Sufficiently?

Sufficiently... so I think that's my... my parents, of course. I think that must have influenced me in some way, and I also have them to thank that when I was... gave up doing medicine, they would have thought I was pretty young, and I was then just 16, and they might have intervened to say, 'This is a foolish step to do. If you want to do science, finish medicine first.' That's what a sensible parent would have said. But my father was rather tolerant. I think he had confidence in me. I'd had a very early start in school and life and things like that, I was quite young. So I think he really left me to it. He wasn't a scientist himself, but a businessman, rarely doing business, but... so I think... of course, I owe him a lot and my mother, well, my mother died when I was six years old. My father remarried, but my stepmother was also very, very good. So they were... they allowed me to follow my instincts which I think is terribly important.