Britain is no longer a country for and says "Farewell" to an old Neuroscientist who unlocked the secrets of sight, called Michael Land

Page views : 469

Mike, who has died at the age of 78, as a casualty of the coronavirus, was born in Dartmouth in Devon during the Second World War, in the Spring of 1942, the son of Nora, a school teacher and Frank who was working as an Instructor Lieutenant at the Royal Naval College. Before he was born, his father had  graduated with a First in Mathematics from King's College, London and had gained his doctorate in 1937. After the War, between the age of 8 and 18, Mike attended the boys public school, Birkenhead School in the Wirral in Merseyside, probably as one of the 40 boarders, since, during that period, his father was working at in London as a lecturer at the College of St Mark and St John, 'Marjohn', in Chelsea with the biologist and educationalist, Cyril Bibby. 

When he recalled his school science Mike said : "The physics and biology teaching was terrific and the chemistry indifferent. I think this combination pre-adapted me for looking at things like the workings of strange eyes and away from the molecular biology that was then exciting others". In school he he led the choir and developed a life long love of singing and spent his spare time nurturing his life long love of hunting for rare local plants, especially orchids.

In 1960, Mike and fellow boarder, Crispin Wright, who later built a career as a philosopher, both won places to study at Cambridge University, Mike to read Natural Sciences at Jesus College and Crispin, Moral Sciences at Trinity College. 

Mike later said : "At Cambridge I developed  an almost Victorian passion for invertebrates, largely because of the superb lectures of Carl Pantin (Professor of Zoology), who managed to combine the taxonomy, physiology and ecology of each group in an inspired way. The colossal scale of evolution began to dawn on me too, and the realization that the vertebrates are only a small corner of the big picture". 

He was 20 in 1962, when his father, who had moved to Hull, where he became Professor of Mathematics at the University, published his 'The Language of Mathematics' the purpose of which must have resonated with Mike, when his father said its purpose was 'to give some idea of the intellectual vistas which mathematics opens up'. He saw it not only as a tool for scientists and research workers 'but a pursuit intensely rewarding in itself and everyday topics are see in a new light when considered in mathematical terms'. 

After graduating in zoology in 1963, in his research for his PhD at University College London, he was fortunate to be supervised by the Nobel prize-winning physiologist, Andrew Huxley. Mike chose as his focus ‘The Eye of the Scallop, Pecten’, and there was a rumour that there was, initially, some conflict of opinion between Andrew and Mike about what aspect of Pecten vision it would be most profitable to pursue. Andrew favoured neurophysiology, whereas Mike wanted to follow up the seemingly hair-brained notion that the eye of the scallop has a concave mirror behind its retina that reflects the light back to form a real image of the visual field by reflection. He had started by investigating how scallops evade the attacks of predatory starfish and was supposed to investigate what passed for the brain of this shellfish, but found its eyes far more interesting. In the event he won the argument with Andrew which apparently, was a very,very rare occurrence. 

Mike recalled that during the first year of his doctorate : "I had a stroke of luck. I looked into one of the 60 eyes of a scallop, the animal I was working on for reasons unrelated to vision, and saw an upside down image of myself. It dawned on me that something was wrong: the image was too bright and, as I was looking at it through the lens, it should have been near infinity and not actually in the eye. The answer turned out to be that this is almost the only example in nature of an eye that uses a concave mirror rather than a lens to form an image. My first real ‘aha’ moment. I’ve had three or four since, but that was the first and the sweetest". At the age of 25, he scored that first by showing that scallops focus light on the retinae of their 200 eyes by means of tiny mirrors, acting like a Newtonian telescope. 

His achievement in physiological optics caught the eye of Gerald Westheimer who invited him to visit the School of Optometry at Berkeley, California as an Assistant Professor of Physiology. Within a few days of arriving, Mike had set up an ophthalmoscope for viewing the eyes of jumping spiders, which he was then studying, and within a short space of time hordes of Alumni descended on the School of Optometry and were entertained and instructed in demonstrations and lectures. Mike had shown many sceptical American optometrists that the straightforward pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is certainly an interesting, enjoyable and possibly worthy occupation, in spite of the fact that the research was clearly not being done for its potential commercial rewards.

In fact, Michael had chosen these arachnids because they did not build webs but were visual hunters. He examined the anatomy of their eyes which were eight in number and all fixed to the carapace. Only the two forward looking eyes had high acuity vision and Michael showed how the retina itself scanned across the scene to enhance the eyes’ field of view in way that picked out important features like prey and potential mates.

His work in Neurophysiology, was to now take him on his lifetime study of an evolutionary and comparative approach to the study of animal sight and its underlying mechanistic control by the nervous system. In 2011 he said : "Vision has been central to my scientific career, first in the study of animal eyes, and then human eye movements". 

In 2009 the the 'Journal of Experimental Biology' made an assessment of his research when it said  : 'Out of Berkeley back in the turbulent 1960s, when Berkeley's nickname was `Berserkeley' and a young Englishman at the University of California, Mike Land, was carrying out his staggeringly elegant research on salticid eyes. In 1969, the year when, 380,000 miles away, people were walking on the Moon, these papers appeared as 51 back-to-back pages in the Journal of Experimental Biology and they have defined how we think about salticids ever since. ONE SMALL LEAP FOR THE JUMPING SPIDER BUT A GIANT STEP FOR VISION SCIENCE'.

On returning to Britain, after four years at Berkley, Mike took up a Neurobiology  Lectureship at the University of Sussex in 1971 and  joined a group of researchers assembled by the evolutionary biologist, John Maynard Smith, who were studying the brains and behaviors of simple animals to explore broad biological principles. Sussex, noted for its informality and openness to interdisciplinary collaboration, fitted Mike like a glove. 

Specifically, he worked on vision in flies and deep‐sea animals, especially shrimp, which also had reflecting eyes. His research revealed the many different ways in which animals saw their own versions of reality, often to find members of the opposite sex. His 1976 discovery that prawns focus light not by lenses, but with a structure of mirror-lined boxes, helped lead to the creation of a method to focus X-rays. 

His career at Sussex prospered : He was appointed a Reader in 1977, at the age of 35 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 40 in 1982 and in the same year began a two year stint at  Australian National University in Canberra as a Senior Research Fellow. Daniel Osorio recalled : "I was working there, and recall him in a heavy sweat one lunchtime – he had spent the morning observing the retina of a highly venomous red-bellied black snake, which, although sedated, was far too close for comfort". 

Michael invited a young Swedish researcher, Dan-Eric Nilsson, to join him in Canberra and together they found that under each facet lens in a butterfly’s eye was a complete Galilean telescope, 'collimating' or 'making into a parallel beam', the incoming light by means of an extraordinarily powerful 'eyepiece' lens with a focal length of a few millionths of a metre. 

On his return to Sussex in 1984, Michael was appointed Professor of Neurobiology in the Vision Laboratory, the 'Land Lab' at the Sussex Centre for Neuroscience and it was here in the 1990s that he switched from invertebrate eyes to human eye movements and commented : "It wasn’t that much of a change. I’d worked on movements of spiders, flies and mantis shrimps before, so I was really only extending my range of animals. Besides, it was nice to work on an animal you could actually talk to. More seriously, although eye movement recordings had been made for almost a century, up until about 1990 there was very little work on the eye movement strategies used by people doing ordinary things, walking, driving, preparing food, playing games and so on. There really wasn’t a 'Natural History of Eye Movements'". 

He also said that "after 1990 I turned to human vision, particularly the eye movements we make to obtain the information we need for actions. My current work on eye movements was certainly inspired by one picture in the book by Alfred Yarbus, 'Eye Movements and Vision'. The picture is of a painting ‘The Unexpected Visitor’, representing the return of a man to a family, with the eye movements of a viewer superimposed. The clever thing Yarbus did, was to ask his viewer different questions about the picture, for example, estimate : 'How long the visitor had been away from the family ?' and for each question he got a quite different pattern of eye movements, each clearly related to that particular question. This was the first clear demonstration that eye movements are not just reflexive movements to prominent features in the surroundings, but are related to the viewer’s thoughts. This seems obvious now, but it wasn’t then". 

In addition, Michael said : "About that time, wearable eye trackers became available, and there was an obvious niche to fill. It was interesting coming to the field from Zoology, because eye movement research had mainly been the province of psychologists and physiologists, both of whom like their experimental conditions to be tightly controlled".  

He developed a simple device to track humans’ gaze as they moved their eyes while doing everyday tasks and in that, he followed the old tradition, where researchers often worked alone and made their own kit. His eye tracker consisted of a small video camera and an arrangement of mirrors that recorded both the eye and the scene, and fitted on to the head.

Later, he used a similar naturalistic approach in examining how people deploy their eye movements, first in everyday tasks like tea making and driving and then sports and games. In 2000, for example, he and a colleague reported their finding that, within 200 milliseconds after a ball leaving a cricket bowler's hand, the best batsmen will take their eyes off the ball and look ahead to the point where they have calculated it will bounce.  His work demonstrated that eye movements are a window into how people attend to the world around them and the strategies that they use to accomplish skilled tasks, like hitting or catching a cricket ball and organising a sequence of actions like putting tea in the pot before adding water. 

In his tea making sequence he highlighted the eye's focus with a white dot : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtYFNsRcxY4  He described the process in his 2000 article : 'In  what  ways  do  eye  movements  contribute  to  everyday  activities?' 

It provided an insight into Michael's methodology : 'By studying where  the eyes fixate and observing what happens in the period immediately after  each fixation, one can get a reasonably clear idea of the roles of particular fixations in ongoing behavior. In the tea making  study we found that about one-third of all fixations  could be  clearly  linked  with  subsequent  actions.  The  remaining  two-thirds  were  made  after  an action  had  been  initiated  so  that  although  they  may well have had similar functions in guiding action, it was less  clear  how  they  were  related  to changes in motor behaviour'. For example : Guiding. 'Manipulations  often involve two objects, for example, a kettle and its lid, where  both  objects have to be guided, relative to each other, so that they make contact in an appropriate way. It is more complicated  than simple directing, and this is reflected in the associated eye movements'. 

In 2001 He collaborated with Benjamin W. Tatler to write : 'Steering with the head: The visual strategy of a racing driver'. They set out to study : 'The eye movements of a racing driver on a familiar track during high-speed practice to see whether he took will be driving largely from memory, only using landmarks in visual information in a different way from a normal such as curve apexes as timing cues, rather than having driver on a winding road'.

They included four frames from the eye movement record, with the white dot showing the direction of the driver’s 'fovea', the tiny pit located in the macula of his retina that provided the driver, Tomas Schechter, with the clearest vision of all. In (a) at Bend A, Scheckter's gaze was directed exactly on the tangent point. In (b) at Bend C, his gaze was off the track, with him possibly looking beyond the bend. In (c) and (d) his gaze alternated between the markers to the left of the track and the tangent point to the right.

They concluded : 'Finally, it is interesting that neither Tomas Scheckter nor the ex-Formula 1 driver, John Watson, whom we consulted, claimed any knowledge of what they might be doing with their heads and eyes and Taruffi, who gives textbook accounts of the way drivers should deal with different bends, does not once mention where a driver should look. As in other visually demanding activities, such as sight-reading music or playing ball sports, the oculomotor system learns to play its part in the activity without instruction or insight'. 

In 2002 he wrote : 'I am still active in the field of animal vision, but much of my work in that field was consolidated in a book 'Animal Eyes' with Dan-Eric Nilsson from Lund in Sweden'. Three years later Mike retired as a full time academic, at the age of 63, and before he did had said : 'As I approach what I hope will be an active retirement the opportunities for finding the small amounts of money I will need diminish further. Universities had that sort of petty cash once, now they don’t. It would be good if someone would address the needs of wrinklies who won’t go quietly'. 

He remained busy and The following year he published 'Eye movements and the control of actions in everyday life'. and in 2009, in his 'Looking and Acting', co-authored with Ben Tatler, he ranged over: where motorists look when they steer; the differences between first-class and village-green cricketers; how pianists move their gaze between music and keyboard and, of course, where we look when we brew a pot of tea. In this they illustrated where they had found subtle and specific rules about where people look and what they see, often unconsciously. 

In 2012 at the age of 70 he wrote : 'In the last few years I have become interested in the ancient problem of why the subjective world stays still in spite of the more or less continual shifts of our position and viewpoint within it'. Then, his final book in 2018, 'Eyes to See', was part memoir and part guide to the science of vision and ranged over : Early eyes; compound eyes and insect vision; vision in the ocean; where do people look? ; the mind's eye and the evolution of vision. He said : 'I have spent the last fifty years studying the eyes and vision of animals, including man. During that time there have been many discoveries and ideas from vision research that have intrigued me, most of these are known to other scientists, but not more widely.  Yet everyone who can see is interested, at some level, with the extraordinary processes involved in imaging the world around us, and in translating those images into perceptions and actions. For many, but not all, animals, vision is the most important sense for guiding action, and this is achieved in many different ways by animals at different levels of evolutionary complexity, from molluscs to man'.

'One of the strange features of our eye movements is that we are scarcely aware of them. Every time we make a saccade the images shifts dramatically across our retinas, and yet we don’t see this; rather, we see a stable world which our gaze roams freely across, but without the abrupt disconnections that occur to the images themselves. This raises many interesting questions about the way our brains “edit” the information from the eyes before it reaches conscious perception. Although it has been known for many years that different regions of the brain deal with different aspects of the image, such as form, distance, motion and colour, there is no single brain area that holds an image of the world as we think we see it.  This and other enigmatic features of vision continue to puzzle both philosophers and scientists'.

When asked once : "What is the best advice you’ve been given?" He replied : "When I was working at Plymouth on reflecting structures with the great marine biologist Eric Denton, we got a nice result one day. He said : 

"When you have a good result you should have a good dinner. That way, when you fail to repeat it next day, at least you’ve had a good dinner". 

We can only assume that, over his long career, Michael had many good dinners. 

Is Britain still a country for privileged old Lords like Jonathan Sumption, who believe that there is no place for equality in a pandemic ?

Born into a life of privilege, Jonathan, who is 72 years old was the son of Hilda and Anthony, a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy and then a barrister and a part-time judge. At the age of 11, he was packed off to the fee paying public school for boys, Eton College  and then studied History at Magdalen College, Oxford. In the 1970s he served as an adviser to the Conservative MP and Cabinet Minister Sir Keith Joseph. Together, in 1979, they wrote their book, 'Equality', in which they sought to show that 'no convincing arguments for an equal society have ever been advanced' and that 'no such society has ever been successfully created'.

Young Jonathan, having qualified in the law, then pursued a successful legal practice in commercial law. The 'Guardian' newspaper once described him as being a member of the 'Million-a-year Club', the elite group of barristers earning over a million pounds a year. In a letter to The Guardian in 2001, he compared his 'puny £1.6 million a year' to the vastly larger amounts that comparable individuals in business, sports and entertainment were paid. In 2012 he earned £7.8 million for his defence of Roman Abramovich in the 2012 case Berezovsky v Abramovich, which is believed to be the highest fee ever earned in British legal history. 

His success in his judicial career was rewarded in 2012 when, at the age 63, he was appointed a Justice of the Supreme Court and as such was accorded the style of 'Lord' for life. He said he thought it was wrong to get more women, too quickly, into the Supreme Court and that an attempt to rapidly achieve gender equality through quotas or positive discrimination could end up discouraging men from applying and so "have appalling consequences for justice".

Lord Jonathan, who had to follow the rules and retire from the Surpreme Court when he was 70, appeared last week on the BBC One show, 'The Big Questions on Sunday'. The Discussion centred around the question : "Was the Covid inspired lockdown punishing too many for the greater good ?”  In response he said that he did not accept that “all lives are of equal value” and he believed his children’s and grandchildren’s lives were “worth more because they’ve got a lot more of it ahead”. To this Deborah James, who has stage 4 metastatic bowel cancer and hosts the BBC’s 'You, Me and the Big C podcast', said: “With all due respect, I am the person who you say their life is not valuable”. He then interrupted her saying : “I didn’t say your life was 'not' valuable, I said it was 'less' valuable". https://twitter.com/bowelbabe/status/1350778543513460737

His was an expression of belief reminiscent of George Orwell's dictat from the ruling pigs in his great 1945 satire, 'Animal Farm'.

Deborah continued : “Who are you to put a value on life? In my view, and I think in many others, life is sacred and I don’t think we should make those judgment calls. All life is worth saving regardless of what life it is people are living. I’m fully aware and I’ve seen first-hand and said "Goodbye" to best friends in terms of the collateral Covid is causing, but at the same time I’m incredibly grateful to be somebody who is kept alive because of the NHS”.

Lord Jonathan was also challenged by Catherine Foot from the 'Centre for Ageing Better', who said she “shuddered” at his suggestion that all lives were not equal. She said that the crisis necessitated drawing “ethical red lines”, one of which is that “every human is equal”. His remarks were then widely condemned online, with the human rights barrister Adam Wagner describing them as 'inhumane, almost grotesque'.

Genevieve Edwards, the Chief Executive of the charity 'Bowel Cancer UK' said : “To describe someone’s life as ‘less valuable’ because they have advanced bowel cancer is callous nonsense. It’s also incredibly upsetting to people who have experienced disruption to their diagnosis and treatment because of pressures on the NHS, and insulting to the staff doing their absolute best for every patient they see. What’s important is to protect the NHS and each and every life that depends on it, not pit one person against another”.

During the programme, Lord Jonathan argued that only the “old and vulnerable” should isolate. He was challenged on this point by the host Nicky Campbell, who questioned whether his solution wasn’t “utterly simplistic” as vulnerability includes a broad spectrum of people, and people of all ages interact in society. 

Not done yet, he also claimed that Government action had “virtually no impact” on mortality rates and was roundly rebuffed by Calum Semple, a Professor of 'Child Health and Outbreak Medicine' at Liverpool University, who described it as “plain wrong” and underlined that “the value of life doesn’t change at the age of 70”.

Lord Jonathan later back pedaled and claimed that his comments had been misinterpreted, saying : “I object extremely strongly to any suggestion that I was inferring that Miss James’s life was less valuable because she had cancer. I thought she was responding to my earlier comments about older people being protected by a total lockdown which is causing immense harm to the young who are unaffected. That harm can be to their mental health or through cooping undergraduates up at university or through the loss of jobs. I was saying this should not be inflicted on the young to protect old people like me. If Miss James has misinterpreted that, then I can only apologise to her as it was not my intention to suggest she was less valuable. Sometimes on videolinks it can be difficult to hear what the other person is saying.”

For the record, Lord Jonathan has been an outspoken critic of the Government’s handling of the pandemic not arguing that it has done 'too little' to curb the pandemic, but that it has done 'too much' and that the measures taken to curb the virus have been an attack on personal liberties. Delivering the Cambridge Freshfield's Annual Law Lecture in October, he said the emergency measures taken by the Government in the Spring of 2020 were : “the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country”.

On January 18th Lord he was taken to task by Piers Morgan on 'Good Morning Britain'. 

Britain's Northern Ireland is a Province which says "Farewell" to its Giant among Diplomats and 'Wee Man of Larne', called Norman Houston

Page views : 1030

Norman, who has died in Belfast at the age of 62, had just finished his first year of retirement after a 45 year career in the Civil Service, largely spent in the highest reaches of government in the USA. He was born in 1958 in the the seaport and industrial market town of Larne, on the east coast of County Antrim, Northern Ireland and said his : "was a typically working class, council house background". A single child, he was brought up by his mother Margaret, a laundry worker. In an interview with the 'Best of Belfast' last year, he said : "I'm an only child, my mother had never married. There was only ever the two of us". His was a close Presbyterian family consisting of his mother and grandparents who were all : “hardworking people, who always encouraged me to study at school”. He also had "very kind and supportive relatives" in the shape of Aunt Helen and Uncle Fergus. 

He recalled : “I seem to remember Larne as being a bustling little town with the Woolworths store and the 'Regal' and 'Savoy' cinemas. My mother would give me money to go the matinee on a Saturday afternoon. Friday was pocket money day and my grandfather would give me half-a-crown; it seemed like a fortune at the time". He had happy memories of  walks with his mother to the Town Park on Sunday afternoons, irrespective of the weather and fond memories of the promenade by the sea. 

He attended Larne and Inver Primary School, which he remembered with affection as "a small school with very good teachers”. He must have passed his 11+ examination, but instead of going to Larne Grammar School, he attended Greenland Secondary School which was a mixed 'intermediate' school with 500 pupils, corresponding to a secondary modern school in England and Wales. 

He joined the grammar stream in the school where pupils studied, in addition to the usual range of subjects,  French, physics and chemistry. He recalled that his teachers at Greenland did much to inspire him. In particular, he remembered  : “Betty Mitchell, who drummed English grammar into us. There was also a truly wonderful history teacher called Archie Reid. He used to show us cine reels from his exotic trips to Egypt and the Holy Land. He would regale us with stories of the people he had met in those far away locations. It was Archie Reid who inspired my love of History. I ended up doing it for my degree. My son shares my passion for history and it is a subject we like to discuss when we are together”. 

Although Norman recalled his school teachers, he said nothing about his fellow pupils and given his diminutive stature and the fact that he grew to a height of 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 m), it is possible that he was subject to bullying. When interviewed by the 'Best Of Belfast' and asked : "What would you say to your 16 year old self ?" He revealingly replied : "Like yourself a bit more. believe in yourself a bit more and don't let other people put you down and have a bit more confidence in you own ability". 

Existing with his mother on her pay from the laundry and to help out financially, he took a part-time job at the age of 14 at the same time thatb work increased at school, as he began his 'O' Level studies. After he had taken his final exams, he recalled : "I had a choice to do my a levels at 17 and then go on to university, but we didn't have a lot of money in my family and I just decided I would look for a job". He applied for jobs with the Ulster Bank and as a clerk at the Northern Ireland Civil Service's Foreign Office n the Stormont Building, Belfast and by the time the Bank made him an offer, he'd already joined the Civil Service. 

Norman recalled : "I started in 1975 as clerical assistant, the first rung in the ladder, and worked my way up". He said, with typical self-effacement : "I was very lucky in my career, in that I moved up quite quickly through the ranks and I've always been lucky and I've always been lucky to have very good bosses who mentored me". His bosses clearly recognised both his ability and future potential. "One of my first senior bosses was Doreen Irwin, who still lives in Larne. Although I was on the bottom rung of the career ladder, she always looked out for me and gave me sound advice about the importance of public service."

He continued his education : "I didn't go on to Oxford or Cambridge or anything like that, which is what most of my diplomatic colleagues did do. I did my 'A' levels at Night Tech. and I did my degree through the Open University as well as working", He was in the early years of his marriage with two young children and it took 6 years of study before he got a First Class Honours degree in Modern History.

He recalled going to work in the Stormont Building in Belfast in 'The Troubles' : "It was a terrible time. You were home late from work because there was a bomb scare or a bomb had gone off when a building was bombed". Despite this, he recalled : "There was a sense of camaraderie in the Civil Service in those days, where everybody just worked together and the next morning you came in with a pair of thick gloves and took the glass out of your desk from an ornament. Looking back on it now, I think we were all a bit stoical". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_2tOfHiVyg

Living with his mother in Larne he commuted to Belfast and remembered : "My grandmother wanted me to get a job in Larne, but I wanted to work in Belfast and I travelled everyday on the bus. The weekly ticket cost £3.75 but it seemed exorbitant at the time. In those days we were paid weekly or very “weakly” as I used to quip. But by Christmas I was able to pay for my first holiday to Spain, take driving lessons and get us a colour TV”.

Norman said : “I suppose when I joined the NICS my ambitions didn’t extend much beyond the dizzy heights of Stormont. But life has lots of twists and turns and the occasional letdown but, on the whole, I have been very lucky". It was ability rather than luck which got him his first first 4 year posting to Washington when he was just 40 years old in 1998, where served as Deputy Director of the Northern Ireland Bureau, the most prestigious of the three bureaus registered abroad and then his second posting as Director, which ran from 2007 - 2019. 

He said of his role in Washington  : "Northern Ireland is a very small region and truthfully, in protocol terms, we are really not supposed to be in the Oval Office with the President. We are part of the United Kingdom, we are sort of strange in that way and we get a lot of 'profile', basically because, number one : various American Administrations have supported the 'Peace Process' and, in addition to that : there's a very large number of Irish Americans here who actually care about peace and prosperity in Northern Ireland. So because of these reasons, we get a lot more profile than other regions do. In fact we get more profile sometimes than other sovereign states". It was largely Norman's skill as a diplomat, in articulating the issues around Northern Ireland which allowed the Province to punch well above its weight.

Norman was in his third year as Deputy Director when, on September 11th 2001, the twin towers in New York were attacked and destroyed by passenger planes hijacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists. He recalled : "I can remember the panic in my building after the second plane hit the Tower in New York and the streets had all been closed down. I remember going home on the underground, because I lived, at that stage in Virginia and people were very, very nervous and cried on the metro system and remember thinking : ' I'm not feeling like that. I'm upset. I'm worried about what's going to happen and I suddenly realised that if you'd been brought up with that background of 'The Troubles', you sort of deal with it differently and I suppose, in a very bizarre, sort of perverse way, it hadn't done me any harm. 

When the guards came out on the streets the army came out on the streets (in New York), it reminded me of Belfast in the 1970s early 80s and it was just impossible for many Americans, particularly in the capital city, to envisage that their capital would have to have soldiers out on the streets. I suppose I was an outsider observing this and the anger and the frustration and the complete lack of understanding as to how this could have happened. It was the polar opposite to the way I looked at it and it probably got me through it quiet a bit". 

In 2019, Norman's lecture at the University of North Carolina about the end of 'The Troubles' and the signing of the 'Good Friday Agreement' demonstrated his consummate skill as a communicator. 

In 2007 at the beginning of his term as Director he was responsible for organising a meeting between the First Minister, Dr Ian Paisley and the Second Minister, Martin McGuinness of Northern Ireland's new power sharing executive and President George Bush. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDNsHezTZ3Y

Norman recalled : "I was in the job only about 8 weeks at that stage and I was really really nervous about getting this right. We were getting 15 minutes, that's all we were allowed. But what happened was that President Bush and Dr Paisley immediately hit it off, to the point that they were roaring and laughing. Mr McGuinness was joining in and the 15 minutes, of course, went by. 20 minutes went by. We got to 25 minutes and one of the Chiefs of Staff to the President kept looking at me and glaring. Doing a sort of 'guillotine thing' with his neck, you know : 'you need to break this up'. But I didn't feel personally strong enough to interrupt the President. So the meeting went on for almost an hour and it was just a brilliant meeting and the President was really engaged with Mr McGuinness and Dr Paisley and Mrs Paisley was there too. It was just one of those surreal moments when the china teacups are shaking in your hand because your so nervous. The conversation was so good President Bush was so warm and welcoming and of all things I've done here since, that's probably the one that I will remember with the most affection".  

Norman had been nervous because it was 'his visit'. He remembered : "when they were coming down steps at the White House, Mr McGuinness holding Dr Paisley's elbow to help him. As a Northern Ireland person who'd grown up in the Troubles, the best way I could describe it was 'surreal'. Surreal, but fantastic." He also had great respect for them and said : "When both of them got off the plane they'd one objective and that was to sell Northern Ireland and they did it. They were very easy people to work with. They weren't prima donnas or anything like that". By the same token, they had great respect for him which was evidenced by the fact that he said that : "they were very gracious to me at the end of the visit". 

After officially attending the Presidential Inauguration of three Presidents in his time in Washington, Norman said that he found Barack Obama’s First Inauguration in 2009, the most memorable. He recalled : "I was on a course at Harvard when Mr Obama was elected. The students just went berserk. The kids were out with their marching bands going up and down. I felt I was part of history. I always remember seeing an old man standing in the cold in a T-shirt that read 'My President looks like me'. I just found it all overwhelming".

In 2011 Norman found that his mother, Margaret, back home in Larne, was suffering from terminal cancer. He recalled : "I had a period where I had my Aunt and Uncle in Larne looking after her. Uncle Fergus phoning me every day. I remember phoning one day and spoke to the doctor and he said : "She's not going to last to Christmas and I said, like an idiot : "Which Christmas ?" and he said : "This Christmas". So I got really upset". 

Norman returned to Larne and spent her last month with her which he described as his "most difficult time". He said : "I remember at the funeral and I'm a Presbyterian the minister phoned me up and said Mr McGuiness and Mr Robinson wanted to come". Peter Robinson had succeeded Ian Paisley as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party as the First Minister in the devolved Northern Ireland Government. Norman hesitated and then decided to give the eulogy at her funeral because : "She was a very quiet, wee woman who went about her business and she never had a voice and I thought : 'I'm going to give her a voice and I just spoke about her very ordinary life. I didn't make her out to be some sort of saint or anything, but I decided I wanted to do it and afterwards I was glad I did".

In 2016 Norman met Joe Biden, who was Vice-President and gave an insight into how he, Norman,  'read' character. He said : "He's a very warm person. I think he has an avuncular character. He's very tactile and he'll put his arm on your shoulder. He'll make you feel welcome and he isn't in any way stand offish or aloof or patrician". He put this approachability down to the new President's Irish roots. "He's got all those skills that a politician, who needs to pump flesh, has, and if he comes to Northern Ireland, which I hope he will, when he's President, I think those skills will help him a great deal". 

On working with the Trump White House after 2016, ever the diplomat, Norman said : "Certainly the hands-on attention that we got back in the Clinton days, when I was in the junior post, has gone. If you look now at the broad band of what the Administration is currently dealing with - Syria, North Korea, the trade issue - there is obviously much less time in that for Northern Ireland. And obviously the expectation would be that, 20 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, we wouldn't need as much. But it's not gone totally. There are quite a lot of people in Washington who are very well-informed about Northern Ireland, so they keep the flame lit. A lot of people in the Trump Administration have been very helpful, even though they wouldn't have been involved before. We're very focused on key people who are going to keep the Northern Ireland message up there. There are some very good stories. Investment figures are good. Tourism figures are good. We get an awful lot of help here. We are basically an annex to the British Embassy". 

In 2018 Norman was present at the Annual St. Patrick’s Day Shamrock Bowl Presentation in Washington attended the Prime Minister of Ireland, LeoVaradkar on March 15. President Trump was present and in his speech, he specifically welcomed Norman when he said : "Norman Houston has been a great friend to the United States in his 11 years here. But he'll like this year the best." Then he repeatedly called out : "Where's Norman? Where's Norman?" Norman explained afterwards : "I'm only 5ft 5ins tall and I was standing in a crowd of 200 people. I did have my hand up waving, but he just couldn't see me. People were slapping me on the back. I have since written to Mr Trump to explain. I didn't want him to think I was being rude and didn't acknowledge it".

In the Spring of 2019 Norman was responsible for the arrangements behind the visit to Northern Ireland of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. He said : "The Congressional delegation to Northern Ireland, led by Speaker Pelosi, which was a fantastic opportunity for us, of course. The very sad thing about that is that we had the murder of the young journalist Lyra Mckee, which was very upsetting and I think they saw they saw the very best and the very worst of Northern Ireland in the space of 48 hours". 

The itinerary for the delegation's two-day visit to the Province bore testimony to Norman's understated brilliance as an organiser and and marked a suitable finale to his exceptional career as a diplomat. He had arranged for the delegation to : visit to the Northern Ireland-Ireland open border, which had once had been militarized with barbed wire and checkpoints; attend a meeting with Mayor John Boyle and religious, business leaders in the Derry-Londonderry Guildhall and a walk, arm in arm over the Peace Bridge with Pat, the widow of John Hume, a major protagonist of the Good Friday Agreement; attend a welcome to the Stormont Parliament buildings by the Speaker, Robin Newton and a meeting with young people of both traditions. It was a measure of Norman's success that in Nancy Pelosi's Press Statement said that her delegation had 'seen first hand the transformation and challenges in Northern Ireland'.

Approaching the end of his diplomatic career, none could say like Norman : "I've met Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, all of them. I'm sort of unique in that sense, that I've known all of them and known a lot of people on the Hill for a very long time. I have a lot of contacts with both Democrats and Republicans".

Much of Norman's work went unseen : "It isn't all meetings in the White House and so on, the swanky stuff. One of the things I've been most impressed with is people coming out here from what I'd call the grassroots, the likes of the Falls and the Shankill, people who are working in some very difficult areas. I've been able to set up meetings for them. For example there's a great woman called Debbie Watters who does fantastic work in restorative justice up the Shankill. She brought out people to work with groups in the African-American community in Washington and Baltimore. I do quite a lot of under-the-radar stuff like that, that people don't see. I don't want this to come across as too goody-goody, but I really get the most satisfaction out of working with those sorts of groups". 

There was also a side to Norman which few people knew about : "I do a lot of volunteer work with the African-American community here and I enjoy that. There's a homeless shelter and I also work with a charity which takes young boys from the age of four, from the 'hood as we would call it, and make sure they have an after-school programme. The people I work with, they're very warm people. They call me "Norm". They're very like people at home. They'll tell you to your face what they think of you". 

He believed in the importance of positive role models, in particular for underachieving young men and had himself in mind when he stressed the importance of : "People who have gone on, but haven't left the recognition of their working class origins behind them. It's saying to young people : "I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth either. And you can go on and do it too". It's showing them that getting on in life isn't just the preserve of the middle class". To this end he mentored young men in the black community and assisted with job applications. 

Norman left the USA and started his retirement in Belfast at the start of 2020. He had said : "Northern Ireland has always been home to me. I've always pined to get back and I will. And I'll get the free bus pass that everybody raves about". It must have taken some getting used to after being at the centre of American power and interacting with so many people for so many years. Relaxing must have also been difficult. He had also said : “In this job, a sixty-hour week isn’t unusual and, as you are representing your country, you are always on duty".

Of the many tributes made to Norman, on his passing, one of the most apposite came from Ian Paisley Jnr, MP for North Antrim, the son of the late Dr Ian Paisley said : "I have known Norman more than 20 years. In fact as Junior Minister I appointed him to his role as Northern Ireland Representative in Washington DC. This was a role that was made for him. He served Northern Ireland with distinction for 15 years in that position. In reality he had access to the Whitehouse and the Hill that many national representative offices were jealous of. He was our man in America and he did more to promote Northern Ireland there than anyone else. His like will not be seen again".

Norman said : 

 “I love the buzz of Washington and I love being Northern Ireland’s diplomat, representing the country. I suppose, at the end of the day, I still see myself as a 'wee Larne man', who had a solid upbringing based on a very strong moral code'. I have had a wonderful career, but the main lesson I’ve learned is : never forget your roots”.