Autumn Break, Last Part: Walking the Past

UEA

‘I don’t know how you managed to find your way around,’ says Ma, ‘I would have been lost!’. We’re at my old university, UEA, making our way up from the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts through the campus, retracing a little of my past. I seem to remember my eighteen-year-old self was quite baffled by the concrete maze I found myself in too! First year students were accommodated at Fifers Lane, a former barracks at RAF Horsham St Faith, a bus ride away from the main camp. A mist, shrouding the place for most of my first week, only added to the sense of isolation, as did the trek to the nearest payphone to ring home. My worldly goods fitted in one small trunk and cooking and laundry (also involving a long and often rainy trek) were more logistical nightmares to overcome.

UEA’s celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and although my memories feel as they belong to another life-time, it isn’t actually fifty years since I enrolled there! Even so there are changes; accommodation blocks have come and gone - though not the iconic ziggurats of Norfolk and Suffolk Terrace - and the brutal concrete is softened now by climbing plants and tall trees. It’s not just the exterior of the buildings that are looking greener either; it makes me smile to see a house-plant sale doing a roaring trade. Not quite what I would have imagined in my day!

Power to the pot plant!

Our East Anglia adventures conclude with a crab sandwich in Cromer and a slow drive back through Cambridge, stopping off to visit Stepson Two's former college, Fitzwilliam.  The weather's been kind to us all week; we've barely seen a drop of rain and - even better - very little blood!

Proving that Ma survived more or less unscathed.