Over the Easter weekend I saw the first bluebells opening in the woods around Rye. There are many more waiting to open but with their flowerheads still curled up. Another blue flower now spreading vigorously along the edge of cornfields is veronica agrestis otherwise known as green field speedwell. It has masses of white-eyed bright blue flowers on every plant. By the time MayDay arrives the woods will be carpeted in blue. My horoscope tells me I am due for a strange but pleasing week. If this pans out I will be in southern Sweden on the first of May.

A hundred years ago a foreshock rocked the San Francisco Bay area in California. The great earthquake erupted half a minute later with violent shocks punctuating the strong shaking for about a minute. Most of the damage was inflicted afterwards not by the quake but by the fires that broke out. Roads folded up like paper and gas lines underneath ruptured setting off an inferno that tore through the city. Winds generated by the blaze created a firestorm that sucked air out of buildings and whipped up giant flames. Most of the water mains broke during the quakes. Six thousand people died and 300 000 people were left homeless from a population of 400 000.

I was in San Francisco for a few days in 1981 visiting the ex-boyfriend of Linda Blitz who had a small trust fund he used to fund good causes…small by American standards. My expectations were not high…ex-boyfriend didn’t strike me as quite the right connection…and I turned out to be right. With me in my briefcase was a project I had been working on with a Harvard Law School graduate friend David Halprin.

We felt a need to set up a Center for Conspiracy Studies. David took the idea to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University while I was dispatched to the West Coast to do the rounds. I would have ended up spending ten years of my life on the project so it was just as well that no West Coast funders showed an interest. But somebody took our ideas and ran with them because I have in front of me The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Studies which is very much the end result David and I had in mind 25 years ago.

A strange thing happened to me when I arrived in East Africa in 1972 after a three month trek by long wheel-base Land Rover from London in the company of my Swedish wife Ingrid, my Cambridge flatmate Robin Garnett and a young bookseller and barrow boy from Manchester Les Smith who I had met on my previous trek to South Africa.

Ingrid had a degree in microbiology and soon found a job with the Wellcome Trust at a laboratory in East Africa. With Ingrid’s job assured I then went job hunting and ended up with a part-time posting at the University of East Africa alongside a full-time job with Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners…a firm of civil engineering consultants.

It was at this juncture that Ingrid found she was pregnant with our first child which led to something of a moral dilemma for her. There would be no sign of her pregnancy for several months…by which time she would have made herself indispensible…so my advice was for her to officially discover her pregnancy in a couple of months time. But being young and naïve and Swedish, Ingrid felt distinctly uncomfortable taking up her new job under false pretences and resolved to confess all to the Wellcome Trust. She never got the chance.

Wellcome called her up and told her they had changed their minds. Their job offer was withdrawn. Ingrid was delighted with this outcome but I thought it a little strange and wanted to push for an explanation. With hindsight I conjectured that they changed their minds because Ingrid was young and naïve and Swedish…and not necessarily in that order. Ingrid had learnt in her interviews that the laboratory was doing research on green monkeys.

AIDs or Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome is the final fatal stage of infection for people with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Sufferers have their immune systems wiped out which makes them susceptible to diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis and Kaposi’s sarcoma…a form of skin cancer common in the end stages.

The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Studies informs me that the precise origin of HIV remains unknown but according to one broadly accepted scientific theory the disease originated among green monkeys in Africa and somehow become transmitted to people, possibly because they hunted and ate the monkeys as ‘bush meat’. However not everyone goes along with this explanation. Many link the higher prevalence of AIDs in Africa to something more sinister.

In late 2003 the Catholic Church instructed people in AIDs-stricken countries not to use condoms. The head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family Cardinal claims HIV was small enough to pass through the net formed by condoms. The WHO says this is nonsense. But then what does the World Health Organisation know about pins and angels?

Men and women cope with cancer very differently. Men seek information about their illness and the latest treatments whereas women mostly seek emotional support and advice about the impact of cancer on their family and friends. The report in Social Science & Medicine was based on a study of internet postings.