If you’ve read my previous post, the one in which I describe my energetic examination of a doctoral student in Kuopio, you know that story ended with a critical question unanswered, with a mystery unsolved. I have just received further intelligence pertaining to that story, as I describe below. However, if you haven’t read my previous post, and if you prefer to know the background of a mystery before putting a finger on its resolution, I suggest you check out the previous post (or even the one before that which begins the story), before you plunge into the clarifying depths below.

Martti, who lives in Kuopio, provided the new information.. Martti is a good friend of mine and the professor with whom I traveled by bus, on another occasion, to Leningrad, the notable trip I described in two earlier postings. Martti was present for all phases of my “One on One” story, and for good reason. He had served as the major professor of the student involved, and he was the man who appointed me to be his student’s opponent.

Here is what Martti wrote after reading my One on One account. “It is exactly as you wrote it. It is an old tradition that doctoral candidate offers to the opponent a drink in the evening celebration ceremony which is always arranged in honor of opponent.” (I had forgotten that the dinner was in my honor.) Martti continued, “Knowing [name of doctoral student] for many years the drink offered was a quite regular one. I guess that you might have met a gastroenteritis virus, which has been around of Kuopio that time in summer. [Student’s name] has always told me that defending his thesis has been one of the most remarkable happenings in his life.”

So it does appears that I was struck by a sneaky virus at the worst possible time of my Kuopio sojourn as an opponent, a timing so precise that it interrupted my celebratory dinner, and, unavoidably I think, raised suspicions as to what had triggered that obnoxious illness and deprived me of a festive evening.