The random numbers tables have thrown up 1st, 8th, 9th, 14th and 28th of this month as blogging dates.

I first met Bob Woods when he walked into the workroom that half the DPhil students in the School of Geography in Oxford shared.  I was just about to start as a postgraduate student and so was he - but whilst I was staying on at the university where I had completed my undergraduate degree, he was an exotic - he had done his bachelors degree at Cambridge and was now switching to Oxford to work with Ceri Peach - a rising star of social geography.  Ceri was rapidly building a research group working on ethnic minority communities in British cities, and Bob had come to join that, to do his DPhil on the changing distribution of immigrants in Birmingham.  Bob had a clearer idea of what he wanted to do than many of the rest of us, and we were impressed by him.

Not that we were in awe of him.  He had a great guffaw and chuckle, and he joined us every day for coffee in a local pub (research students were banned from the senior common room of the department in the morning - and on Friday afternoons when the librarian provided a cake which she did not feel research students were worthy to partake of.)

Bob was one of the key figures in that research room - advising everyone else on their statistical analysis (he mastered the 10cm high stack of cards needed to run principal components analysis on the single university mainframe computer much more quickly than the rest of us did).  Others drifted off at the end of each year - to lectureships at Keele, Queen Mary, and other universities. Bob got his first appointment, teaching statistical demography, at Kent while I was appointed to Sheffield (those were the days when 24 year olds, prior to completing their PhD, could secure university lectureships).  A year later Bob came to join my department at Sheffield and we extended our friendship into something more lasting.  He met and married a colleague in the department (although the students never caught on to the fact that they were being taught by a husband-and-wife duo).  Bob and I secured a contract together, and produced our first book - The Geographical Impact of Migration - which we originally dedicated to our wives but then added the names of our first-born daughters to because they came along between the manuscript being submitted and the book actually being published.  We wrote various other things together, and taught jointly on a number of courses.  We jointly superviseid a number of research students, winning studentships from Economic and Social Research Council to do so.

Ten years later, still in his thirties, Bob was appointed to an endowed chair at Liverpool. On the day he was offered the job he delayed telling even our head of department until he'd had the chance to tell me.  I went over to hear his inaugural lecture, as he later came back to Sheffield to hear mine.  His research field shifted a little into historical demography and he built a reputation as one of the UK's leading experts in that field - and went on to win honours and success from every quarter.  We occasionally met at conferences, and we kept in touch with news of our families.

Tomorrow I will be going to his funeral in Chester - cut down by pancreatic cancer while still working on mortality in Victorian England. Ceri Peach, the tutor at Oxford who he came to work with will be there.  Ceri eventually trained dozens of the leading social geographers in the UK and it was an immense honour for me a few years ago when I was asked to give a talk at his retirement conference in Oxford. And people all round the world who shared that research room with us all those years ago will be there in spirit - the ex-Pro-Vice-Chancellor from the University of South Australia, the head of department from Christchurch, New Zealand who has just survived the earthquake there unscathed, the Vice-Principal of Queen Mary at the University of London.

There's more to working in a university than simply having a job.  For many of us academia has provided us with a solid and caring community.  For me, that is something to be celebrated tomorrow, as well as Bob's life and contribution..