Photo: Me, User:Mholland, CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons
Gosh that was quite a fortnight at the end of my second term at Keele. But by the end of it, I was back at my parents house writing grumpy notes in my diary:
Allow me to summarise while I reflect. The first few days of March I spent, much in the company of Dave Lee, racing against the clock to prepare Concourse:
After the near death experience on the night of 4/5 March, a very different type of night on 6/7 March, written up as a short performance piece 40 years on:
Then the joy of releasing Concourse on Monday 9th March:
Then the peculiar events of the Easter Ball, including Robert Plant’s secret gig, which I wrote up some years ago and with which I solved a temporal anomaly in the Led Zep/Robert Plant on-line history
I’ll hold back on writing further about that Easter Ball, pending Dave Lee’s forthcoming book on Keele gigs, entitled The Keele Gigs!
I love my aftermath diary notes from that Ball, on 12 March:
Simon’s for coffee, Neil came back afterwards -> brekky, ballot box, FY Committee slept.
Simon would be Simon Jacobs. Neil I’m pretty sure must have been Neil Infield and I guess we all wandered over to Lindsay refectory for breakfast.
Ballot box that day I’m pretty sure must have been the election for Social Secretary that year. Eric Rose won that election, only to be bundled out of the job around the following Easter for financial impropriety and who at the time of writing (March 2021) is festering in a New York State prison for murdering his wife. Not cool. Not Keele at all.
I’d forgotten that I served on FY Committee that year. I served again as Education & Welfare Officer in 84/85.
I’m fairly sure the “slept” comment refers to subsequent behaviour and not the idea that I slept during the FY Committee…but there is an absence of punctuation in the diary note between the phrase “FY Committee” and the word “slept”. Subsequently, I did once fall asleep during a Senate meeting in 84/85 – understandable circumstances – which earned praise from several of the senior academics on that august body, not least Philip Boden who declared it to be the most succinct and incisive contribution to the meeting that day. A teaser until this “40 years on” series gets there, some time in 2025, all being well. But I digress.
Perhaps returning to the bosom of my family in March 1981 felt like a real anti-climax, or perhaps I was rather hungover by the time I returned to Streatham, but I describe a…
Rough evening
…on the Friday night of my return and…
not a good day
…on the Saturday, despite:
Taped. Went to Record & Tape Exchange…
…which was usually the stuff of very good days for me, not bad ones. Especially as I bought heaps of records on that occasion, which I shall write about in one or more music-oriented postings about “that vac”.
I liked Record & Tape Exchange shops so much in the 1980s I moved around the corner in 1988, where I can sometimes still be found!
No, I think I was probably arguing with my parents about politics and social affairs; them sensing that I was not quite the same boy who had gone off to Keele for the first time six months earlier and me sensing that my parents world and their attitudes were smaller-minded than I had previously supposed.
My relationship with my parents didn’t get too bad, but I suspect that hackles were raised a fair bit that time.
Further, I suspect that I was missing Keele already. The prospect of five weeks of office work in the West End of London to rebuild the coffers was nowhere near as enticing as the fortnight that had just passed at Keele.
Regarding former Social Secretary Eric Rose, readers may be interested to know that – even after many years in jail in the USA – he still protests his innocence of the charge of murdering his wife. Also there have been some serious issues raised about the fairness of his trial and the impartiality of the prosecution. I have no certain knowledge as to his guilt or innocence, but there is certainly reasonable doubt, and he probably wouldn’t have been found guilty in a UK court.