20 years!
I can't quite believe it, but it's been twenty years since I started university, where I met my good friends Alex, Andy, Ben and Jonny. The experiences and vitality of those college days always burn brightly in the memory, but this was a particularly special group of people, we lived together and worked together and we've stayed close ever since.
I've been particularly thankful for frequent get-togethers and re-unions, even as we spread as far afield as Scotland, China and Germany. It's funny to me that after all that three of us now live in the Westcountry and two in Manchester. Given our greater proximity and the fact it's a special "Emerald" anniversary, we had to have a proper re-union. And what better place to have it than at our Alma Mater, Trinity college.
I spent four years at Trinity, and another five years elsewhere in Oxford as a post-graduate and working. Oxford is an amazing city and a sometimes other-worldly place and I loved living there - but those early years in Trinity really were something else. When you are a callow teenager from Devon, who grew up with a single mother and very little money, to then be transported to those ancient distinguished places, full of honey-coloured stone and dark wood and seemingly everybody pressing a glass of port into your hand, is quite the formative experience. We climbed across the rooftoops, we ate kebab-van chips in a room decorated with hand-painted William Morris wallpaper then raised points of order in union debates, we dressed up in ridiculous get ups and sat next to world-class scholars in a medieval dining hall, we pulled all-nighters to get our work done in the absurdly short term times. Somehow everything was payed for - for me there were no fees back then.
I can't really adequately describe the singularity of the place: I was a good study, but what really made me feel at home was the oddness of the environment, and how that oddness in the college and its people chimed with my somewhat unclassifiable constitution.
Here are some ridiculous photographs of that era.
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Because it will be out of term time in September, we have three rooms booked in the most dramatic part of college - where three of us used to live (not me, I had a hobbit hole above the porter's lodge). It's a bit further than the previous reunions, but this one's a special one - and probably merits a ride from the Westcountry.
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