What does a group of old London uni friends get up to when they get together for one of their occasional reunions?
Well, they check out the Bayswater pub where they tended to hang out most evenings, some 47 years ago! (It hasn't changed much on the outside, though it's well renovated inside.)
And then there's the nearby budget hotels where they were billeted. Again, looking exactly as they had du temps perdu. Only their names had changed. I remember paying about £5 per week for accommodation and meals. Admittedly it was in a rather crowded 4-bed room, but somehow that seemed fine at the time.
Then what else to do but trek south across Kensington Gardens (and the Elfin Tree, where Spike Milligan was once sighted), to South Kensington, and Imperial College. This is where some of the assembled worthies ostensibly studied all that time ago, and where all of them partied frequently.
Again, all astonishingly familiar. We peered in at the old Union Bar, scene of so much past debauchery (by others, never us, I'm sure). We exchanged tales of yards of ale competitions, the men-only policy, and of raids by the newly-formed Women's Liberation movement.
We looked down into the subterranean digs of our recently fallen comrade, John. And we looked up at the roof of the Student Union building. A regular Saturday evening pastime, after downing a pint or three of Newcastle Brown in the Union Bar, was the infiltration for free of the regular weekly rock concert. We would start in John's block, go up onto the roof via a fire escape, across and down into a girls' changing room, through there and out into the concert hall, emerging under the stage curtains somehow! No idea who discovered that route, but I wonder if they know of it today. (Only if it's on Google Maps, I suspect!)
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