A Tabuk imam has forbidden the making of snowmen. Quite right. Snowwomen and snowcamels too. Anything that has a soul may not be represented in crystalline water. As a theologian, I’m aware of a large corpus of literature on the souls of camels, as well as a little aphorism about the use to which camels can be put that I cannot print here, for children might be watching.

Reading about the fatwa took me back to the 1980s and 1990s when from time to time I went to Saudi on behalf of the College of Knowledge in Dublin to teach (two weeks at a time) or to examine (5 days or so). I was in Tabuk only once, but today’s news puts me more in mind of other Saudi trips, most particularly to Buraydah where I served a few sentences.

The culture in Buraydah is sooo relaxed, for this is where the Saudi religious police are trained. They patrol the streets eagerly seeking out infractions of dress and behaviour codes, a bit like Irish priests are said to have done in the past. Men may hold hands, women may hold hands, but man and wife may not. Under no circumstances may any female skin below the chin be visible, and preferably only that around the eyes. Ankle skin, frightfully erotic, drives men in Saudi into a frenzy. Being caught in contravention of any of these rules draws verbal abuse and a lash or six from the cane that every religious policeman carries. Female companions of mine were spat at on several occasions for daring to show a bit of trouser leg below the chador.

We were housed in apartments in the hospital compound. I noticed that local inhabitants rose about 5 am to turn on their car engines so that by the time they left the house two hours later the AC had the interiors nice and cool. The air was fragrant with he heady mix of Saudi incense – petrol fumes.

Apart from five or six hours teaching a day, life was a social whirl. The liturgy that gave shape and meaning to the day was that of oral hygiene: setting aside a good 10 minutes for cleaning my teeth. In those days I was obsessed with exercise (I’ve grown out of it now) and so by dint of disciplined running round the central green area morning, noon and night I became quite lean and very fit. Much like now.

Each morning I filled in a form indicating my supper choice from a reasonably comprehensive menu. Each evening it was rice, peas and a scraggy avian leg. That little exercise became for me a parable of a country where, it’s rumoured, whisky turns to water as it enters the oesophagus of the King.

We disembarked from Sealink’s St Columba on 3 January 1988. There were four of us: Victoria, Edward, Susan and me. Southwell Minster School term began later that week, so we left Hugh lodging with a friend. It was dark, nowhere open until 9.30 or so, so breakfast at the Royal Marine seemed like a good idea.

Our new home was up the Old Long Hill between Enniskerry and Roundwood. The removals van wasn’t arriving until next day, so we had a barren sort of a day. I wondered what the hell I’d done accepting this job in a foreign country, agreeing to move house in January, and leaving our two boys at cathedral choir schools in England. Madness.

Ye Gods, it was cold. Thin walls, large windows. The only bit of the house with carpet was the small hall, so there we slept in sleeping bags, five hearts (we had a dog) huddled together.

The week after, Edward went back to school in Ripon: Fokkers to Leeds/Bradford. Victoria, secondary school age, stayed with us. I used to stand in the kitchen and watch the St Columba on its way to Holyhead and ache for the boys. That memory does not dim with the passing years.

The house was in a wonderful position with lovely views to the main Glendalough road across the valley, and to the sea and the Kish lighthouse over the roofs of Bray. But what a money pit. Everything that could be rickety was rickety, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Water pumps, leaky roofs, failing heating system, wonky electrics, wobbly floors, inspissated sewage pipes leading to a jerry-built septic tank. Ah, that’s why the vendor refused to let our surveyor go into the roof space and take up the carpets. There’s a moral there: don’t buy from a solicitor who is acting for himself. Caveat emptor. When you’re dealing with the well-being of a young family in insecure times, though, other concerns predominate.

We found a builder – well, he called himself a builder – to mend the leaks, but every hole plugged meant a larger one in the bank balance as money flooded out. He taught us to ask ‘which Tuesday?’ when he said he’s be with us on Tuesday.

It was lovely in summer. It was a wonderful place for adventurous children to grow up. But life was complicated.

Harold with two of his sons

This is Harold who died earlier this week. He is the only person I know who had a lecture theatre named after him while he was still alive.

Unusually for a Dublin surgeon, Harold was not one of the Dublin medical ‘masonry’. He was one of nine children born to Fred and Nellie Browne of County Longford, and earned his medical and surgical qualifications through application and skill rather than family connexions and the sense of entitlement that comes with them. He was one of the first Irish surgeons to collect a BTA qualification (‘been to America’ – in his case the prestigious Mayo Clinic), after which he had a long and distinguished career at The Richmond Hospital in Dublin. He retired from full-time surgery in 1987.

Harold’s care for his patients was exemplary and his surgical ‘nous’ second to none. Those who knew him in those days describe him as a hard taskmaster. Severe is a word that has been used. His standards were high and his expectations higher. I suspect that such demands would cause him problems in today’s more precious environment. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, there is no doubting the affection, admiration and respect in which he was, and is, held by those now eminent professionals who have been through his hands.

This is the man I met in when I arrived at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in January 1988. In retirement he had been given the job of Surgeon Prosector involving teaching anatomy to students two days a week in term time. I was told on the grapevine that he’d been appointed partly to keep the new Professor of Anatomy in line. That did not augur well for our relationship. Not only did I bridle at the prospect of a restraining hand, but also I doubted that a famous surgeon would be famous for being willing to submit to a 38-year-old pimply youth from Albion.

The country boy from Cumberland met the country boy from Longford. The sport-averse young Englishman met the Arsenal obsessed sagacious Irishman. We loved each other. Harold never once admonished or contradicted me, never once disagreed with anything I said or did. And so I confided in him. He admired my propensity to call a spade a bloody shovel. He loved, nay admired, my intolerance of gobbledygook: ‘we’re right behind you, Stanley’ he’d say grinning widely when I was fulminating about the latest manifestation of jargon-laden managerialism, and his face creased with laughter at what he called my ‘Rabelaisian wit’.

He was not without his own ‘Rabelaisian’ tendencies. In his teaching there poured from him a stream of aphorisms and mnemonics that would certainly have him up before the politically correct thought police today. There was plenty opportunity of course: hernias, breasts, the naughty bits, back passages and so on. A particularly memorable one was his likening the descent of the testis into the scrotum to the Israelites being led to the promised land. And this to a substantially Muslim student body still having wet dreams, or their female equivalent. Did they object? They did not. They regarded him with the same filial affection that he inspired in the rest of us.

I knew only the Father Christmas, teddy bear Harold. And I am so glad I did. My spirit will be at Merrion Church in Ballsbridge on Friday for his obsequies.