Boredom became interesting thanks to my good friend

MOST of us, most of the time, go along with the crowd.

- Ron Beadle

This is perhaps the first thing that students of group behaviour are taught. They will learn of classic experiments, such as those by Solomon Asch, where 75% of participants literally disbelieved their own eyes rather than disagree with others about the lengths of lines drawn on paper.

They will learn about experiments conducted by Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram demonstrating that people will abuse and even torture complete strangers when authority figures tell them to.

They will even learn from Darley and Baston’s experiment that trainee priests will ignore someone writhing in pain if they are late for a lecture about the parable of 'The Good Samaritan'.

But not everyone is like this, and it has been my good fortune to count among my colleagues many for whom conformity is a crime.

The best of these, Dr Martyn Dyer-Smith, died last month at the age of 78. You might think that this is an age at which death would hardly be unexpected, but Martyn was so vital, so full of life, that it is hard to believe him gone. The weekend before his death he was jumping over seats to get to our row watching Heaton Stannington play in the FA Cup.