1977

[chickenfeet]

gillo asked about 1977.

I began 1977 in one of the university's less satisfactory self-catering buildings. The place wasn't great but it did release me from the horror of Collingwood food. I had the room underneath my best friend's, now a senior education bureaucrat. This was unfortunate as the soundproofing was poor and he and his girlfriend extremely enthusiastic.

I was by now well established in both student and local politics; secretary of the university Labour Club becoming Chair later in the year, PEO of the local CLP etc. Politics had become time consuming. This was, of course, the time when Militant was trying to take over NOLS and much time and energy went into that particular bun fight.

Academically I was learning that I was much better at some areas of mathematics than others. I was a very good probability theorist, a more than satisfactory pure mathematician but not very good at all at certain types of applied mathematics which bored me silly. I suspect that, as a result, I did very badly on one of the finals papers that I sat at the end of my second year.

1977 was the first summer that I spent in Durham. I moved out to Belmont to live with some friends in a house. I had a small motor bike so the distance from town wasn't too much of a drag. Most of the summer I worked on some industrial engineering and production planning projects at the International Paints plant in Felling on Tyneside. Oddly enough, I did a bunch of consulting work for their Canadian sub a few years later. The other option would have been a job on the line at Jaguar in Coventry. This had been offered by Geoff Robinson when we had taken him out to dinner before a Labour Club meeting. I remember it well because it's the only time I recall a guest speaker insisting on paying for dinner.

October meant the start of my final year at Durham. I was by now living in a rather nice house off Claypath which three of us were renting from Wojtek Zakrzewski during his sojourn at CERN. We made good use of his extensive collection of home brewing equipment.

Work and politics were my two main occupations with the odd folk club thrown in for light relief. I had an essentially free choice of courses from an extensive list and ended up taking Theory of Differential Equations, Functional Analysis, Numerical Methods and Optimisation, Numerical Analysis, Stochastic Processes and Bayesian Statistics. This worked out much better than having to do mathematical physics. I would have loved to do Quantum Mechanics but my performance on the precursor courses suggested that might not be such a good idea.

By now I had a non-trivial place in the Labour Student world regionally and nationally. I turned down the Clause Four candidacy for Treasurer of NOLS but was treasurer of Clause Four and the NUS Broad Left. I was on the NAC of the ILP and was eventually to be treasurer of that too. I was chairman of the Labour Club and of NOLS northern region and of the very active university Anti-Apartheid Movement. That's how I met Ruth First. She declined a BBC interview and suggested that I was the person they needed to talk to.

I was seerius kat in those days and I doubt I was much fun to be around. I've always been a bit intense and I suspect 20 year old me was fairly horrid. I also discovered how peculiar it is to be, even in some limited sense, 'well known'. People who I absolutely did not know would greet me in the street! On one occasion I found room for myself in the DSU cafeteria one busy lunchtime and could hardly help but overhear the two girls at the same table who were disparaging me in no uncertain terms. We chatted briefly without exchanging names until the point at which I asked them if they still thought I was so awful.

At some point that autumn term the late lamented Robin Cook came to speak to a lunchtime meeting of the Labour Club. Things went on a bit and by the time we were done the only chance of grabbing anything to eat was the the Student Union. By the time we arrived the entire inventory of hot food amounted to one pie. We shared it.

I remember we brewed a most excellent strong winter ale that year much of which was consumed at Hogmanay, a festival celebrated very much in the Scottish fashion in Durham.