Happy New Year

Tommy woke early and set off at six thirty to explore Sydney Harbour by ferry.  By the time we spoke on the phone he'd reached Watson's Bay (setting for a poem I wrote last year or was it the year before).  It has been a hot New Year's Day so I was content to be indoors, reading the early chapters of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

Front door, Andrew Stewart Hall:
made an arse of myself here once;
drunk, 19 years old.  Apologised next day
but I don't think the recipient was over-impressed.

After some telephone tag we made a plan to meet up with friends in Jubilee Park for an afternoon picnic.  By four-thirty-ish we'd gathered: Tommy back from his wanderings; Ian, Becky and Amy King over from England; Becky's father George; Jon Simpson, Rosie Birch, me and Spike.  I first met Ian and Becky in my first year at the University of Stirling in 1975.  Becky had the role of warden or maybe sub-warden of Andrew Stewart Hall of Residence where I lived during my first year (room 3/13 if I remember it correctly).  Ian, I later discovered, was Chair of the NUS Conference Steering Committee (before Hilary Scott took on the role), a body with which I became familiar a few years later.  We've been friends ever since those Stirling days, although not seen one another often.  Ian's visiting Australia on what he calls his "trip of a lifetime" on Facebook.  I know he's been seriously ill over the last few years so I'm hoping he doesn't mean it literally.  But banish that morose thought.  It's been a lovely start to 2011.
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