I was a registerd union van driver from my first year. We ran a bread and cheese charity lunch every Tuesday. I drove for the soup run on Wednesday - collect veg, peel and cook in afternoon, deliver from 10pm till midnight. Disco on Thursday, gig in Salford on Friday, gig in Manchester (or Liverpool) on Saturday and then unlike the rest I was up on Sunday to go to church. Actually in the early days we used to get up around lunch-time, have a Sunday lunch of a Mars bar from the corner shop, perhaps a lunchtime drink at the Seven Stars and then off to Meth Soc for tea which I made on a rota two or three times a term.
Revs Lemmon and Charles were key and important influences in my life.
The other influences centred around Student Community Action. I made some good friends through that side of student life. Val introduced me to meditation and Rose Lewis was a solid mountain climbing, ecothinking person.
I also got plugged in to some of the Manchester side of activities. One active group at the time was Third World First (3W1) and I spent some time with Peter Philipson and his wife Mary who were Manchester medics who pointed me in the direction of resources that I used to run some small activities in Salford. The Salfor activities operated under the heading 'Training for Global Development', can you tell I was ambitious using such a title for small conferences and activity weekends. It seemed relatively easy to get very good speakers such as the people who were setting up the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales (little more than an old slate quarry in those days), and some of the authors of the books from Grass Roots (but not Schumaker himself).
Sebastian Charles introduced me to an American Christian organization who were existentialists. I was impressed by one of the four guys visiting England because he had been to Woodstock, yes the Woodstock. They took me to their annual get together in Boston for four weeks, an absolutely crazy time I must blog about later.
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