Red Star Causewayhead

What a pleasant surprise I received this morning on my Facebook page.  Tommy Geddes, friend from my days at Stirling University in the late 1970s, posted a photograph from almost 40 years ago of our six-a-side football team.  We entered an intramural football competition, played on Wednesday afternoons as I recall.  We were not very good; might even have been bad but we enjoyed ourselves.  That was the point.

I have no recollection of the photograph being taken.  I couldn't even begin to guess at who took it.  But I'm very happy Tommy found it and shared it.  Nor can I remember much about the football; none of us can.  But that's not important in any way.  We played to win at the time because what's the point of entering a competition if you don't try - at least try - to win.  We are petty sure we lost but we would have enjoyed ourselves enormously regardless.

What a team we were (from left to right, back row then front)

• Malcolm Jenkins, Students Association Permanent Secretary
• Neil Roden, Secretary of the local Communist Party Branch
• Me, Vice-President of the Students Association
• John Reid, former President of the Students Association, 
• Harry Adam, President of the Students Association
• Tommy Geddes, Immediate past President of the Students Asociation

And what a mixture of previous, at that time and future parts we played or would go on to play.  Among us there were or would be:

• 3 members of the Communist Party (at that time)
• 1 already former member of the Communist Party
• 1 former member of the Scottish National Party
• 4 current members of the Labour Party
• 1 who would become a Member of Parliament, British Cabinet member and now Member of the House of Lords
• 1 would be awarded an OBE for services to education
• 3 of us would serve on the Scottish Executive of the National Union of Students.
• 1 would become the National Secretary of the National Union of Students
• 2 served as members of the Steering Committee of NUSUK
• 1 became Chairman of Glasgow Celtic Football Club
• 1 supports Glasgow Rangers and Southampton Football Clubs
• 2 support Partick Thistle Football Club
• 1 supported Wrexham
• 1 supported Motherwell (maybe)

Of course, all of us had and have so very much more in our lives; relationships, loves, jobs, hopes and dreams (realised or not).  But we look happy in the photograph because we were.

News from the colonies to the old country

So my name cropped up in a Facebook wander down memory lane by some old friends peppered across the UK now.  In the late 1970s and early 1980s we were part of the same student politics organisation.  There were ups and downs, as I recall those times, but it was fun to be involved.  They were exciting times in which we helped to move the world forward in some areas, were beaten back in others.

I felt no real need to enter into the nostalgia but then my name came up.  Someone then asked, "is Dougie Herd still alive?"  Time, I thought, to intervene.  So I added these words to the conversation:

Call this living comrades? Call this alive?

I'm in a Tory Hell with a Prime Minister that thinks the 16th Century was a bit advanced, that global warming is a left wing conspiracy, that Prince Phillip needed a Knighthood from the Australian people, that women have a place but only one of them is good enough for that place to be in his Cabinet, that it's ok for his sister to be gay but not ok for his sister to marry the woman she lives with ... and that football is played with a rugby ball and goals with no nets. 

I could go on but then I look at home and see George Osborne is considered by some to be an economic progressive and free-thinking, intellectual power house.

If that's all not bad enough .... and it is ... we have three types of spiders in our back garden that could kill you if you look at them, brown snakes that'll stop your heart beating if you even think to breathe in the same space as them and a giant chicken-like bird called a Cassowary that could rip your lungs out in five seconds. And that's before we even mention the sharks, sting rays and crocodiles.

All things considered though ... one mustn't grumble.

A luta continua!! A luta continua.

Further thoughts on Colin Doyle

From an e.mail to my friend Yvonne Strachan ...

I’ve been trying to write something for a couple of days but it’s an odd exercise in a way.  Memories, as in hard and fast recollections of events, times and places, are less easy to set down in a meaningful way than to think of the feelings that bubbled up to the surface when I read that he’d left the world into which we’re all born.  There was immense sadness, of course.  But that immediate reaction was quickly supplemented by an echo of the fun, banter, laughter of our engagements; his sometimes mad schemes and what I think of (then and now) as Colin’s Peter Pan-like enthusiasm for virtually everything he touched: his beloved Arsenal; the rich vitality of London at its best; the potential of building membership benefits in the NUS card (of all unlikely things); his time running coaches for Galleon; wine; his apartment in The Barbican; those 1970s suits with wide lapels; laughing at someone’s outrageous stories in a bar full of overconfident bright young things who intended to re-shape the universe (some of whom may even have achieved some of those intentions); telling his own tall tales; his giant white Audi 100 car that her knew he ought not to possess but which he couldn’t resist.

Our last e.mail exchanges were filled with the unmistakable affection, pride, love, exasperation of a father for his children who clearly meant just about everything to him.  He wrote as he spoke, as I think he lived; seventeen to the dozen, never in a straight line but with exuberance and optimism forever.  I think I met him for the first time when I was a sabbatical officer at Stirling University, so that’s 77 or (more likely) 78.  We were in a bar (as almost seems inescapably likely for that period) in CC2 (as it was known).  Like the first contact with some people one meets (I have been more fortunate than others in that regard) he captured a place in my heart immediately.  I miss him and always shall, which is no bad thing.

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Colin Doyle

I received an e.mail this morning with the news of my friend Colin Doyle’s death.  That hurt quite a bit.  We were very close for a while and kept in touch sporadically over the years.  His last e.mail to me was a typically Colin account of life as a mad dash, full of commitments (to his children) and plans, hopes, ideas going off in all directions.  His writing seemed as full of the energy and the rather boyish enthusiasm he had in person.  He often played a bit of a wide boy, the Arthur Daley of NUS at times but he was always bright and intelligent and creative in his field; always committed to making things materially better for those he saw as his constituency – students when he was with NUS Marketing, pensioners when, later, he ran Galleon Coaches (I think that’s what it was called … Ellenor always referred to them as Col’s buses, which was how we came to think of them).  I recall being taken on a tour of Colin’s favourite bits of London – me and Jeane – when we first settled in the big smoke after I moved to NUS.  He toured us round the City and the east end (Aldgate and Mile End Road), past his beloved Highbury.  The river was never far away; The Thames not simply as a river but for him, I think, an artery along which beat the pulse of a great place of infinite possibility that he loved dearly.  The river was present in every sense.  At one point he took us to an old Jewish restaurant to pick up huge salt beef sandwiches to take away; bright pink, steaming-hot meat with pickled gherkins and fiercely hot mustard between enormous wedges of soft white bread with crisp, golden crusts.  It was in Bow or Poplar or somewhere in that direction.  We crossed the road to lean on an embankment wall, the Thames behind us and the Jewish community before us going about its business as it had done for decades, perhaps centuries in that part of London.  He loved it, loved life, loved showing it to us, laughed a lot and always shared his enthusiasms with anyone who was willing.  I miss my friend already.
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