A voice from the past.

A bird's eye view of Nottingham University campus - Trent building and the lake are what I remember most.

The famous Trent building

Hi again,

On Friday my dear friend Adele Brierley rang me. Adele and I went to University together and lived in the same flat with friends in the second year. Adele went to live in France while I went to live in Spain and she had 4 boys while I had 2 girls. The most dreadful thing is that we haven’t seen each other since her first child Jonathan and my first daughter Susana were born. That was at her parent’s house in Boroughbridge nearly 23 years ago!!! We have written to each other every now and again over the years and have had the odd natter on the phone and always with the promise of making the effort to see each other again some time. But time goes on and the time to see each other never comes.

Last week Adele wrote to me to tell me her new email address and she wrote that all was fine but she was so busy and had no time to write. It was lovely to hear from her but I wanted to know how she was, what she was doing, how her boys were – so I wrote back to say we had to make time for each other. And lo and behold, the darling beautiful, curly, smiling red haired 1.75cm tall Adele rang me on Friday afternoon and we chatted for at least one and half hours as we had so much to catch up on. We also had time for University day memories such as when we had chocolate egg eating competitions or one of our flat mates, Wombat, got lice in her hair!

She is fine, remarried to her psychiatrist (that is a story in itself) Bernard and they live in a town house in Orleans. Adele is a teacher of English and goes to her lessons by bicycle which compares very favourably for her with my 50km away office which can take a 2 hour drive to get to! Her boys Jonathan, Ben, sorry I can’t remember the 3rd boy’s name and Tom are all at different stages of their studies.

Ever after the conversation she has remained very much in my mind and I really hope that they do come and see us sometime soon. I told her about my reunion with Sandie – another mutual University friend – a few months ago. It’s so funny to have known each other as students and to meet again as mature ladies (a euphemism for middle aged).

Darling Adele, thanks for ringing and coming back a little into my life. You were never forgotten!

As I had no photos of Adele I decided to illustrate this post with pictures of our old University and when I looked it up in Google I was pleasantly surprised to see that Nottingham University is now in the top 10 of the British league of Universities which is something to be proud of I suppose. I also looked up our old Hall of Residence, Florence Nightingale, of the famous British nurse fame. It looks just the same except that it has been mixed since the year 2000. People like Adele and I made sure there were plently of boys there in our time and I remember one memorable fire drill that took place unexpectedly during the middle of the night and how all the boys caught there walked sheepishly out into the grounds, covered in blankets! In our day the bedroom walls were painted purple! What a good time we had!

Florence Nightingale Hall, our Hall of Residence in our first year at University.