Recent mention of sober spaces brought to mind memories of Alfred Philpott Sober, whose sad death from liver failure five years ago ended a long career in topology. Though largely unpublished, it was his work that underlay the notion of what are now known as sober spaces. In Sober's view, points of topological spaces are essentially blurred and hazy: however hard you try to focus on them they always seem to jiggle about a bit - to him "focusing on a point" meant to find it within some _open_ neighbourhood, and these almost always left some room for manoeuvre. He understood the points to be exactly their open neighbourhood filters, and the spaces that would now be called non-sober were trying to impose an over-clear view of reality, making artificial distinctions between what was actually the same thing or trying to deny the existence of something he could see with his own eyes. On the related subject of continuity, he saw its essence as that of a function was that was not unduly upset by this jiggling: as long as the argument didn't jiggle too much, the result wouldn't either, and he liked to demonstrate the idea by carrying a tray of drinks across a crowded room. Though not one of the founders of locale theory, he was aware of the idea and greatly sympathetic to it - though he couldn't see any reason for using the French spelling and pronunciation. Once when in the midst of explaining his ideas the lattice structures started to become manifest and he would excitedly talk about "getting down to the local". He studied initially at Cambridge under the influence of Charles Wells (the Bedford Charles Wells, NOT the well-known category theorist) and his thesis, starting off on Klein bottles, soon took in Gross bottles too. He made his academic home in the University of Portsmouth and was much loved by both his colleagues and his students for his parties and for his never-failing warm welcome "Come in and what'll you have?" He is much missed by all who knew him. Steve Vickers.