my new Polytechnic life

For whatever reasons, my friend and fellow writer, Andrew Simpson, haven’t managed to connect recently. We sent each-other’s families a Christmas card, commented on our social media posts, “liked” each-other’s blogs, but actually having a chat? Somehow we haven’t. So, hurrah! Today we managed to catch up with each-other, our lives, families, gossip and writing, as well as a good old ramble though the past and all the various funny things which have happened to us.

We were both students at Manchester Polytechnic, in the heady first year of its existence, doing a degree course at what was the College of Commerce, transformed into the Faculty of Commerce. We overlapped in some areas, but I was doing French as well as history and English, Andrew was doing Politics. We had both come from the south, he from London (sort of) and me the west country – although Cambridge was my original home town. He must have seen me around college, I had long dark hair then, I had certainly seen him and my new friends and I thought he looked very like John Lennon.

For the first few days of my new Polytechnic life, I lived with friends of a colleague of my dad, and then found a chum and we got a place together. Our first accommodation was rather far out, and we soon found a flat to share at the top of an old three story house in Withington. Withington was once a village, now a suburb of Manchester and in those days it was transforming from one to the other. There was a distinct high street with all sorts of shops, including the newsagents and stationers, W.H.Smith. It was what we would now think as an old fashioned shop, with shelves along either side, and a display down the middle with shelves of books, magazines, stationary and newspapers

I was in Smith’s one evening, after college, and rounded the end of the central display case and bumped straight into Andrew. We gazed at each other for a couple of seconds, I recognised him immediately, and might have stuttered ‘hello’. He probably didn’t recognise me from college, and probably said nothing – he doesn’t remember! We eventually ended up in the same gang of friends, and remained friends – at one point I lived in his house while I was without accommodation, across the years. We have been to each-other’s weddings, we are god-parents to each other’s children, and even though I no longer live in Manchester, we are still friends. Remarkable really!