I’ve just returned from a reunion of the St Edmund Hall engineers class of 1979. Covid, or suspected Covid, left us two short. It always amazes me how we fit back together after forty-three years as if they had been a few weeks. Of course time and illness leaves a mark, but not on the spirit. St Edmund Hall, or Teddy Hall as we affectionately know it, is famous for its Hall Spirit.
We dined and wined exceedingly well, and had an excursion to Ely on Saturday. I was very impressed by the Jubilee Black Oak table in Ely Cathedral. Black Oak are ancient oak trees that grew to an extraordinary height in the Fenlands. When they fell, they demolished everything in their path and became buried deep in the peat, which accounts for their perfect preservation.
The Jubilee Oak is over 5,000 years old. That helps to put things in perspective, doesn’t it. My hero, Sir Anthony Standen, was doing his bit as The Spy who Sank the Armada around 434 years ago, less than a tenth of the age of that oak.
You may wonder what a bunch of Oxford Engineers were doing in Ely. We normally have a reunion at Teddy Hall, but Covid seems to have stopped that, hopefully not for long. It’s good to talk to current engineering students as well as old friends. Anyway, one of our number has MS, and lives near Cambridge. So the venue was chosen to be near to his home. AIRBnB did us proud. Hopefully we will be all together again soon. There are certainly advantages of the class of 79 small reunion, spending more time with each other being at the fore. It’s also fun to be back in college though. Perhaps we can up our game to two reunions a year.