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Dr Dreyfus was a brilliant scientist and a wonderful, inspiring lecturer. His students loved him. His university also loved him as the success of his department brought in huge financial contributions.

In every respect his professional life was as good and as rewarding as it could be. But at home it was a different matter.

Like many professors he had no interest in the mundane, and could not raise the slightest interest in domestic issues of any sort. But his wife and children loved him and so were able to put up with his rather eccentric ways.

Each day he would leave home, walk across the campus, spend the day in either his study or his lecture theater, and then return home by exactly the same route.

As time went by his family grew, and the time came when it was necessary to move to a larger house. His wife made all the arrangements. She found the new house, she arranged for the removals firm to come and collect the furniture and fittings, she did all the packing. She knew there was no point in asking her husband for help - his mind was always elsewhere, across the campus.

The day of the move arrived and Dr Dreyfus's wife was well aware of the level of confusion it could cause for her husband, as she knew he had just not taken in all that was happening around him as the contents of the house had been packed.

She told him over and over again at breakfast that they were moving house that day, and that when he returned home from the university it would be to a different house. But she was quite sure he was not taking it in.

So she wrote the new address on several pieces of paper and put each one into one of his pockets, and off he went to work as usual, kissing his wife and telling her he would see her later.

'I hope so,' she thought.

It was a particularly busy day for the professor and he hardly had time to stop and think about anything, and when the time came to leave for home he had entirely forgotten the conversation at breakfast time.

He took his usual route home and when he arrived he was pulled up short by finding the door locked and no curtains hanging at the windows. So he stepped back from the doorway, looked in each direction and thought as hard as his scientific mind could.

He had a vague memory of a large van parking outside the house as he was leaving that morning, and as he thought ever harder the penny suddenly dropped and he realised. They had moved house. But where to?

He thought some more and remembered the pieces of paper in his pocket, but then he thought, 'No. I am an intelligent man. I can work this out for myself.'

So he went back to the road and walked along a little way and saw a young girl approaching him with her dog.

'Little girl,' he said.

'Yes?' she replied.

'Did you know the family who used to live in this house?'

'Yes,' she said.

'Could you tell me where their new house is?'

'Of course,' she said. ' If you go just along the street and take the first turning on the left, it is the second house along, daddy.'

Learn more about this author, Keith Redfern.
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