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‘Dude!’ Dr Cooper typed, with what he hoped was the right balance between the peevish and the cheery, ‘what do you mean you don’t think ethical non-monogamy is a good idea? It has the word “ethical” in it!’

Perhaps email was not the best way to be conducting this conversation. And perhaps he should stop sending personal emails and get on with preparing for his undergraduates’ tutorial. But the students were so unimaginative – seeing mathematics merely as a requisite for science or engineering and not as a creative art. Where was their interest in accelerated iterative blind deconvolution or the plurisubharmonic functions of logarithmic growth?

Jocelyn had agreed to go with him to Ibiza. Music was mathematics in sensual form. They would sit and watch the Sun sink into the ocean while Blank and Jones or Troels Hammer or the Redlounge Orchestra chilled the evening with soundscape beats.

He had talked to her about the Thue-Morse Sequence – how it conveyed his idea: the binary sequence obtained by successively appending the Boolean complement of the sequence obtained thus far, and about how Bram and Taylor had showed how it provides a fair outcome for discrete events – a sequence a, b, b, a, b, a, a, b, b, a, a, b, a, b, b, a …

‘The perfect illustration,’ he had told her, ‘is the song by Blur:

… following the herd
down to Greece
on holiday.
Love in the ’90s
is paranoid
on sunny beaches
take your chances
looking for
girls who want boys
who like boys to be girls
who do boys like they’re girls
who do girls like they’re boys.
Always should be someone you really love.’

 She had agreed to come with him. And now she replies to his last email with just three words – I’m not coming, then silence.

Would she even pick up the kids from swimming this afternoon?

Dhiraja