Old Uffingtonians
Association (1994) |
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Russell Cleaver (for a picture pro-tem - look at my brother's picture - we are still fairly similar!) Oh memories leave me alone! School days I thought I had forgotten - except I find this site has unlocked half remembered feelings. Partial pictures that are at once so fresh yet incomplete. Looking back I think I played football and daydreamed my way through school. It wasn’t until I went to art school that I woke up – then realised art education at WCGS had been entirely recreational. But school had imparted more than mere education as, dear reader you will know. Girls for a start! They seemed so self-assured, mature and terrifying to me then. Tony and I had to separate thereafter to discover more. And so to art college in the 60’s, a liberating time to be a student. But as for sex, drugs and rock & roll? Well we were all there and there seemed precious little of the former at the time. It was an impressionable time. Later teaching art proved the only outlet, a decidedly less enlightening experience. Luckily a college education in Wales had left other lasting lessons on a Willesden schoolboy. The countryside had worked its quiet magic on me. So years later here am I, having been a countryside ranger, now a manager of a historic park in Hampshire. Along the way, rich but not with money, geographically separated from my twin but attached to a lovely wife and 3 boys. Disconcerted to find that school life and adolescence, which seemed a world away, is so disturbingly accessible via the internet. In my mind I am once more saving penalties for the Old Uffs… Today I still play football, but it’s now ‘5 a-side for the over 50’s’! Oh, Roll over Doc Roberts and Let it Be! |