With Pip again, walking at Sea Walls, Bristol

At last I managed to visit my dear friend Pip M. and inspect his new flat in Redland, Bristol. He sold his big house more than a year ago and moved temporarily to Grosmont in South Wales, while he decided where to go next. Eventually the pull of the city brought him back to Bristol where he has many friends and family and after much house hunting he chose a wonderful ground floor flat up on the hillier parts of the city.

Pip and I met in our mid-teens in the mid-60s and we did a lot of growing up together. We’ve stayed in touch ever since. We had coffee and a guided tour fo the flat, which I love, and hope to stay in before too long, and then drove up to the open spaces just beyond Clifton where we parked by Sea Walls and then walked. I’d asked to go there as I wanted to look out once again down into the Avon Gorge and my blip is a view to the distant Clifton suspension Bridge designed by Isambard Kingdon Brunel.

It was great to chat and reminisce about growing up in Surrey. Somehow we ended up talking about friends from those times and noted how surprised we;’d been to discover independently that Sally G., who was the girlfriend of one of Pip’s great friends at that time eventually went on to great success as a theatre owner and impresario in London and currently owns the Old Vic, amongst several others! I now realise I knew virtually nothing of her background, which she revealed in this article. We haven't seen her since about 1968!

I left relatively early in the afternoon as i wanted to visit a large camera supplies warehouse to buy a replacement monopod, but sadly the one I wanted (the cheap one )has been discontinued. I’ll have to rethink. By then the intermittent rain (you can see the big dark clouds arriving into the picture) which had ended interrupted our earlier walk, returned with a vengeance and I drove home the pretty way, up the A46.

This wonderful view is looking the other way towards the Clifton Suspension Bridge. It was taken from a tour boat as we ventured from Bristol's Floating Harbour downstream and out to sea near Avonmouth. Great fun.