More Visits with People

Yesterday was family day. Today was friends, and coincidentally as it worked out, with one of my best friends from my Sale Grammar School days and then later with my favorite teacher from the same school. My friend Chris, see bgleyna’s blip came over to the Netherlands after we had left England and I was at school there and we embarked on a 2 week hitchhiking trip to Rome via Germany and Switzerland. We were held up at gun point in a remote field outside Rome and escaped minus Chris’s rucksack, passport and a little of our money. We have kept in touch on and off over the intervening 46 years and it we enjoyed a great time of quite deep conversation on the same walk we did at night the other day with lunch in the pub ‘The Bells of Poever’. In the evening we met with Dave and Sue - as seen in this photo. Dave graduated from Balliol College Oxford when I was starting at the Grammar school and he was persuaded to take up teaching at the school and apart from teaching me English and History was also my and Chris’s form master for the remaining 4 years at the school. We talked about restaurant experiences, the state of the world and Dave shared some of the enterprising things he had been doing in the last 3 years. They included a series of history exposés on different historical events, a book in hand production of King Lear and what sounded like a marvelous production of the opera Cosi Fan Tutte which he paid a troupe of semi-professional opera singers to perform and sold over 400 tickets for the performance. For someone over 70 he and his wife Sue have not stopped being very productive and I found it inspiring to hear of their exploits.