WHATEVER HAPPENED TO...

From 1966-1969 I attended Edge Hill College of Education to train to be a teacher. To cut a long story short: I fucked up at the last hurdle and failed. I never wonder what my life would have been like if I'd passed. It never even occurred to me to even think about the idea of wondering what my life would have been like if I'd passed until now. The photograph above is of the main entrance which doesn't look any different from when I attended, probably because, as I've just checked, it was taken in 1962. 

(I've learned recently that Jonathan Pryce the actor attended around the same time I did. Wonder if I knew him at all?)

Lately I've been thinking about writing the occasional autobiographical piece but not neccessarily the ones that those who know me would expect. I'd been planning to write about an outdoor pursuits weekend I went on during my final year. Thinking of that made me think about people I knew then.

Cutting a long story short, my two best mates there were Rob Proctor and Dave Bell. I don't remember seeing Rob since I left (though my memory may be wrong on that) but the last time I saw Dave was in Nelson Lancashire, where he and Rob came from, in the mid-70's when I attended a party at his house (and the less said about that the better as I behaved not as well as I should -blame the drink) and Dave was, at the time, a Liberal councillor. 

At college, the three of us and a bunch of others in our merry band were all keen fellwalkers and Rob founded a college society so we could do just that. Rob was around my height (I think, maybe a little taller, my memory is notoriously unreliable), but Dave was an ectomorph, bespectacled, tall and lean suffering from a prematurely receding hairline and we got on really well.

From time to time during my last five years at work I attempted to locate Dave and Rob over the Internet with a complete lack of success. Then, two days ago, I decided to contact the local Nelson & Colne Liberal Democratic Party to see if anyone there knew anything about Dave. Within 24 hours I had both his email and his physical addresses and I appreciate the efforts of those concerned very much. I've since emailed Dave, or David as he'll have been called for many years now, making a general enquiry about how he is and briefly mentioning what I've been doing since I met Susan. That was a day and a half ago and still no reply. No reason why there should be. I'm probably someone he hasn't thought about in decades, just a vaguely remembered figure from a period in his life that ended forty years ago.

People play an important part in your life for brief periods of time and then disappear and become consigned to the past as new people and new important events change the shape of your life. It's the past, it's gone, just fading echoes. You've moved on. You rarely look back.

Perhaps that's as it should be.