The mighty Leith

Or at least so the locals referred to it during my student days in Dunedin. When I was a young man and with a beautiful young woman , who remains with me still.

My run this morning was deliberately around parts of the central city of Dunedin and as far as the Botanical Gardens. Initially, there were the old buildings of central Dunedin; the Prison and Law Courts built next to each other in the 1890s. The Victorian Dunedin Railway Station.

Then through the old university where I first attended lectures in ancient stone buildings. Ancient by New Zealand standards. The old main building with its clock tower still appeals to me as what a university life should be about. Marama Hall, in which I sat many an exam in those years gone by.

After a brief look at the Rose Garden within the lower part of the Botanical Gardens, I returned towards the city centre. I had already gone past my first ever student flat in Dundas Street. The old terrace of 6 houses, all used back then as flats, and looking much as if that is still so, appears unchanged. Nø 92 is in better condition then when I and my flatmates had to vacate; the floor od one upstairs bedroom had given way, and bricks in the end wall had fallen off when a drunken student (actually not one of us) had tried to climb up one night.

In Great King Street heading back to the central city. I paused at Nø 757, where S and I spent the first years of our marriage. This old building (semidetached) was in far worse condition than when we left those many years ago, and is still being used as student accommodation.

Further along Great King Street I went past the Medical School, source of many memories. On the other side of the street from the Medical School was where I was to spend the day; the Dunedin Hospital.

So many memories. So many potential blips. I've chosen this one of the old cast iron footbridge across the Leith at the Northern end of the old university buildings. Many were the times I walked over this bridge. Many many more are the students and exstudents who have done so and are still doing so. And the Leith keeps on flowing.

It has never flooded so badly that it has (as residents of Dunedin warned when the University first built a building across the river) washed away the evidence of the temerity of those University types.

When I get some time I will put up some of the other pictures I got in my blipfolio.