He bubbled with ideas, he was ebullient, but there was this... this bubbling, this ebullition of ideas all the while. I don’t think he ever stopped thinking until that... until the final day, alas, last year when it happened. Kate, you and I had dinner with... with Richard. I think he’d had a small stroke then, and lost a little bit of visual field, but it... it made no difference to him. And... and I think that the two of us were both a bit bubbly, and... and we sort of, played ball together all the while. I have many, many letters to and from Richard, and I would... I would love to write about him some day. I miss him greatly. Not only that, there is no one like him, I couldn’t imagine anyone like him existing anymore. And of course, he came from a great, great line, Galton, Darwin’s cousin, wrote a book called Hereditary Genius, and here he mentions the Gregory family going back to James Gregory, who was Newton’s contemporary, and invented a... or devised, improved, the reflecting telescope. Interestingly, all the Gregorys for 300 years were interested in light, sight, vision, optics; Gregory’s, Richard Gregory’s father was an astronomer... was an Astronomer Royal. I think the interest sort of, sometimes went outwards to telescopes in the sky, or it sometimes went inwards to vision and visual imagery.

But I... I do think Richard was a sort of genius, and his very inventiveness and ebullience, I think might have retarded recognition in some ways. It... he did get his Fellowship of the Royal Society, and I think a Chair at Oxford, but this came later, later than it should be, but I certainly think his works will be read and absolutely memories of him will be... will be cultivated. Just as I used to make phone calls to him at any time, whenever I have illusions, and I have many of them now my own eyesight has become a bit questionable, I think: what would Richard have said. I don’t have anyone now to talk to about that except... except the still living, still bubbling ghost of Richard.