Reunion

I was back at my old college in Cambridge for a reunion dinner on Saturday. They hold them every year. Mostly it is the older people who come. It is over forty years now since I first set foot in the college, but the oldest person there had come up seventy years before.

It is surprisingly easy to chat to those who once were your fellow students - the years drop away. Most people do not change all that much. They retain the same personalities and eccentricities that you remember from way back. I happened to be sat next to someone who lived opposite me on the same staircase. He had spent his career with the UN and now was doing consultancy work for UNESCO. As I serve on the UNESCO Committee for Wales, we had a common point of contact.

The College doesn't change either; except perhaps in two regards - the gardens are even better kept than they were then, and it now admits women both as students and to serve in Hall.

I suppose for 700 years it has seemed natural that this should have been a male only college, just as other colleges were for women. Certainly the rather primitive bathroom arrangements - there were no lavatories in the building where I lived and you had to descend a staircase and cross a court to wash or take a shower - would not have suited women. Today, things have changed of course.

Now having women in the college just seems natural, though of course, there were none amongst our generation. I am sure that the move to co-education, to end this arbitrary gender divide should have been made far earlier. Times have changed and the college has changed too.

We might have been on the cusp of another change for this dinner was the very last at which it might have been permissible - by law - to smoke after the loyal toast. Today, I write of the 1 July, smoking is banned in all enclosed public spaces in England. It might be a moot point whether the College Hall constitutes a 'public space,' but as people have to work in it - serving dinner and clearing the plates - I suppose it is. Nevertheless the point is academic for there has been no smoking in the Hall for as long as I can remember.

What better way to work off the effects of a four course dinner then with a spot of rowing the following morning. I used to row a great deal when I was there and I still like to go out in a boat on occasions such as these. We are all a little rusty and of course unfit, but rowing is a little like riding a bicycle: you don't really forget how to do it.

This weekend I was in the baby in the boat. The combined ages of our four oarsmen and cox, must have totalled over three hundred and twenty years. The body is stiff and protesting at first, but gradually the old rhythm returns and provided you stop from time to time for the crew to catch its breath the experience is just like old times.

Posted by Peter Sain ley Berry