Drinking to the memory of a great scientist, and the perils of caller ID and pizza salesmen.

Yesterday, I visited some friends in Cambridge. In the evening I was in no great hurry to go home, so I went for a stroll around the colleges and other attractions in the city centre.

The centre of Cambridge in August is a little strange, as most of the university students have gone home, but the town is none the less still bustling with tourists and language students. The many pubs and restaurants are full of people, but the feel of the town is entirely different to how it is at other times of year.

Wandering around the corner from Trumpington Street, I found myself passing The Eagle, described by the sign outside the door as “The most famous pub in Cambridge”. This is likely true, although these days it is not a pub frequented much by university people, as it trades on its fame, selling rather overpriced beer to visitors to the city.

This pub is famous for two things. One is that it was a favourite pub of RAF airmen based nearby during the Second World War. Much of the ceiling of the pub is covered with graffiti writen by airmen prior to dangerous missions. There are various other pictures, model aircraft and similar things in the pub commemorating this aspect of its history.

There are also pictures of assorted other famous Cambridge people (Newton, Byron, and others) on some of the walls, but there somewhat oddly there are no pictures relating to the other reason why the pub is famous. In 1954 two men had some lengthy conversations about a certain scientific matter in one of the bars. At the end of one such session they announced to the barman and fellow drinkers that “We have discovered the secret of life”.

These men were of course James Watson and Francis Crick. Oddly, the proprieters of the pub seem to lack a proper sense of the significance of all this, as the only mention of Watson and Crick anywhere in the pub is a small hand-written sign next to the bar noting that this was the bar where they made their announcement. (However, the significance is well known by others, and the role of the pub was mentioned in many of the obituaries of Francis Crick upon his death just a few weeks ago).

And it was this recent death I think that led me to walk into the pub, buy myself a beer, and raise my glass to the memory of the scientist. I was just considering the question as to whether the discovery that was announced just near where I was sitting was indeed the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century (on reflection quite possibly) when my mobile phone rang.

The phone did not show the number of the calling party. This usually means a business call, making it a slightly curious thing to receive at half past eight on a Saturday evening.

“This is <incomprehensible> pizza and kebabs. You ordered a ham and mushroom pizza”.

“No, I didn’t. You have a wrong number”.

“No. I am calling the number that came up on the phone when you called me.”

“In what city are you? I am in Cambridge. If you are not, it is unlikely that I ordered a pizza from you”.

“You ordered a pizza”.

“I am in Cambridge. Where are you?”

“You ordered a pizza from me”.

“No. You have a wrong number”.

“No. Your number came up on my phone. Don’t ever do this again.”

He was starting to get angry. At that point, my choices were to either get upset and start insulting him, to continue playing a game of “Where in the United Kingdom is Carmen Sandiego?” in the hope of convincing him that I could not have possibly ordered a pizza, or to just hang up, and I chose to hang up.

As it happens though, I now rather wish I had not done so, and that I had instead asked him some questions about his telephone. (At least if I could have got him to calm down). Either he manually transcribed the number that came up on his caller ID, and then made an error recording or dialing the number of his customer, in which case there was no mystery. Or, he had a system that automatically logged the number and then dialed me back without the number having to be entered manually. In this case, I do understand why he might not have believed me. This would have had to have meant that there was a bug or malfunction in his equipment or somewhere in the phone network. Which for simple things like forwarding numbers is not something we expect these days.

But as a disruption to the general karma of my day, this was a curious one. Not perhaps as curious as being stopped in the street by a teenage girl and asked if they had ice cream in Victorian times, but still curious. Somewhat sadly, it did completely destroy the solemnity of the drink I was having to the memory of a great scientist.