Doc Murray

Action stations at 5am for a 6 o'clock start to get to York for P, my daughter's PhD conferment. The drive was fine and Yorkshire was looking fantastic if a little empty. We arrived to a deserted campus that showed more signs of life as we got to the 'robing area' by the lake.

P emerged in all her splendour with an Elizabethan hat that was slightly too big and had a tendency to deflate. We wiled away the time taking photos, wondering at the other parents and finding quiet toilets away from the growing crowd.

With our tickets in hand we queued in the cooling window in deep shade and finally took our seats. The ceremony was smartly organised.

I was of course fantastically proud that a process that started five years ago and involved - for me at least - a terrifying time worrying about P in South Africa on her lonesome doing field work ('The Principal' claimed that I knew the bus timetable for the buses onto the Cape Town University campus by heart and the location of all the alarm points on the campus from my studies of Google Earth) was coming to its final conclusion.

Photos show P and her lovely partner letting off pre-catwalk nerves and getting the handshake from the Vice Chancellor who gave a nice talk at the end.

I drove us all back to Sheffield and Prosecco before a fab lunch at The Mediterranean in Sharrow Vale near Cowlishaw Road where we had lived before moving to Lady Downs on the moors above Penzance.

Later exhausted I was booked to see my grand mate Mike. We did some of Sheffield's best pubs including the wonderful Sheffield Tap at the station (that's the photo), the Riverside Pub (that's the River Don in the photo) a curry in an incredibly noisy restaurant where a big party of extremely muscled men looked like it was about to kick-off and then to the genteel Three Tuns for a last pint  (this time of Doom Bar from Sharp's brewery near Padstow in Cornwall and now sadly brewed out of county due to its popularity). A taxi home and in bed by 1 am.

It was a brilliant day and a hilarious evening in golden sunlight and more laughter than you could shake a stick at. As Mike said the next morning we nearly did 'a bucket' (8 pints) which would have been a PB for me. Such was the quality of the beer that our heads were clear and are voices strong lol.