I am Geoffrey Sherrington of Melbourne, Australia.

Although Sherrington is an uncommon surname, it has been known since the 1100s in England and later in Scotland. Maybe the nuclei of Sherringtons are slow breeders, but fast reactors. Herewith, some history.

In 1539 Sir William Sherrington commenced restoration of Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, West England. He had no children and was followed at Lacock by his brother Sir Henry. Henry's youngest daughter Olive married Sir John Talbot of Salwasp in Worcestershire (which no American can pronounce). Sir William was deputy of the new mint at Bristol at a time when King Henry VIII was stripping Catholic churches of riches to make coins. Sir William was a massive swindler, counterfeiter and embezzler. (His brother carried the better genes). The chief cleric of the time, Latimer, addressed King and Parliament and saved Sir William execution as well as his ill-gotten gains, as one can read from the record even today.

Sherringtons were thus major, early coin dealers. Had stamps been invented, no doubt that would excite them also.

After several generations, Lacock was owned by Henry descendent William Henry Fox Talbot. Some say that Fox Talbot was the inventor of photography, but the consensus is that it was a group effort in several locations. Fox Talbot invented the means to make a negative, from which more copies could be made. His first image was of a window designed by Sir William Sherrington.

A Sherrington descendent was thus a critical pioneering photographer.

Sir Charles Scott Sherrington was a medical researcher who achieved the triple Crowns of Knighthood, Nobel Prize and Presidency of the Royal Society London. His entry in ho Whowas longer than any other at his death in 1952. He studied the relation of the spinal cord to the brain and many other pioneering medical matters and was above all a philosopher who wondered about the meaning of Life. Unkind friends once gave me an autobiography "Sherrington: His Life and Work", with a card saying it was the world's shortest book.

Sherringtons thus included an eminent scientist.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle almost had a different name for his most famous of detectives. Pearson suggested that Watson was based on Conan Doyle himself and Stashower raises the possibility that Dr James Watson of Portsmouth or Dr Patrick Heron Watson of Edinburgh were models. Doyle thought long and hard about Holmesname (trying Sherringford Holmes and Sherrington Hope before arriving at Sherlock Holmes).

Sherrington appears once more, this time as a potential inquirer and sceptic.

. o O o - .

As for myself now retired, my career was spent in Science and management of large resource developments like mines (including uranium) and paper making and printing. Without much prior knowledge of the above, my hobby interests came to include stamps and coins, photography, computer imagery and design and I studied some aeronautics and joined the Australia Sceptics.

My wife loves and has shown prize-winning Burmese cats and home-bred camellia blooms, and me.

Put together (and with regards to James Lipton and his book n Exaltation of Larks we can summarise that Sherringtons have been included collectively in /P>

A click of photographers

A complex of psychoanalysts

A litre of chemists

A stampede of philatelists

A cage of miners

A goggle of aviators

A mass of priests

A fifth of Scotch

A nucleus of physicists

All of these are more sonorous than the correct term murmuration of starlings Our lives are a five-fold concatenation of Cats, cameras, collections, computers and camellias.

Clearly, therefore, in any dealings with me, you should remember that you are not treating with a simple mind, but an eccentric one, which has shown great moments of unsolicited human kindness, compassion and relief (in 1947, once).