Sentimentally last summer 3

The next day was also filled with calls, including from Morar Lucas, who had known my uncle Lakshman when he worked in the East End of London. She had married the brilliant philosopher John Lucas, who was at Merton, and they had both been immensely kind to me during my time at Oxford. They had been in Rose Lane when I went up, and I still remember visiting them there, on the way into the Meadows, which I had walked round in my first week, not knowing where I was, and amazed when after less than an hour I was back in Rose Lane.

Morar is now in a retirement home, but her mind is still sharp and her health good, so that to my joy she accepted the invitation to my party in Oxford this year. My nephew Amal Abeywardena and his enormously kind wife Amrita picked her up and brought her, and she was great company for those of my friends who spent time with her.

Last year, on my first afternoon, after lunch, I walked round the Meadows, on my own, melancholy about the fact that I would probably never walk round them again with Leslie Mitchell, Dean of the College when I went up, and a friend now for over half a century. We had walked there together year after year when I was back, but a recent letter said that he now had to stop and rest in the middle of the circuit, and a later one said he would no longer go into College for lunch. This time, it was before lunch that I walked, but again when one door closes another opens and the former Classics don at Univ, Chris Pelling, who later became Regius Professor of Greek, gave me lunch in the Senior Common Room.

Memories when I walk in the parks are pervasive, many many times over many many years with Leslie, that first walk with John Lucas when he expanded on the threats to the Meadows, rating the Department of the Environment as more dangerous than Dutch Elm disease, several times with a host of friends after Communicants Breakfast on Sundays, an exercise repeated after breakfast when I last attended a Gaudy.

I had lunched that afternoon, after a morning on the computer as well as the phone, with the former Deputy Representative at the British Council, Clive Taylor, the last person for whom it had been a pleasure to work there. He had taken early retirement, unhappy with what was happening to the Council, and we reflected again on how sad it was that that glorious institution, which had done so much for so many, had been perverted by the Thatcher philosophy of financial gain. It was a theme that occurred later too in my discussions with friends, of how British aid, which had been so much appreciated in the first few decades of independence, was now so obviously commercial in conception.

Clive came to Corpus at noon, and we walked down to the Head of the River, which had become a favourite venue for lunch in the last decade, for it was next to Folly Bridge, and allowed pleasant views over the Isis, as the Thames is known in Oxford at this stage of its journey down to London and the sea. Sadly he had to leave then so could not go round the Meadows with me.  

The pictures are of Morar Lucas when I visited her in Somerset in 2017, of Clive Taylor on an earlier visit to Oxford, of Leslie Mitchell on a long ago walk round the Meadows, and then three pictures I took last year, of ducks on the Isis and punting on the Cherwell, with in between a long view of the spires and towers in the distance.