A Blast from the Past

I was in amongst the stored paperwork the other night, hunting for some of Mike's old family photos, and came across bundles of my old letters.

When I moved up here in 1977 I started keeping all the letters that were sent to me. Over the years I stopped keeping them all, just the odd important or particularly interesting or poignant one, but by the time Mike and I moved here, four years ago, there were boxes and boxes of them. As this is a compact and bijou cottage with limited storage space and it was a new start and I didn't want memories from the past hanging over me, most of them were ceremonially burned in a big bonfire on the beach. Very cathartic and highly recommended, by the way! The ones I kept were primarily from my sisters and my brother, and these are a selection of ones from him.

They begin when he left home and headed to Newcastle University to study Spanish and Portuguese in 1977, and the last one in the bundle is dated 1981, when he was working in Madrid, teaching English. He settled in Madrid, married the wonderful and lovely Aurora, and now their daughter is an assistant professor at the University of California in Berkeley, teaching Spanish! She will have a whale of a time reading his letters, seeing what her father was like at 18 - but I'd better ask his permission first!

ps I do still have the "I didn't vote Tory" badge!