Getting my college degree

I recently reconnected with a college friend though our shared experience with cancer. I am re learning about myself and about my values, and thinking about our time together in college.

When you go through the British education system, you start in primary school and work your way through the years. At age 13, you get to secondary school. It is now that you choose or test into your path for life: grammar school, where you follow an academic path, or comprehensive school, where you follow a less rigorous and academic path, training ground for the British class system. I ended up at the grammar school, more thanks to my persistence than any smarts of mine.

Despite being from the wrong end of town, I got through my teenage years reltively unscathed and with a new found social conscious, much to my fathers disgust.
This article says it better.
Great music and movies came from and about this time: The Beatles, Elvis presley, Woodie Guthrie, just do a search for protest songs and movies. You will find some classics.

It is with this backdrop that I discovered that there was some concern for the future of the planet and found myself as an environmentalist. My friend Diane and I started a campus, campagn for nuclear disarmament group (CND). When Margaret thatcher began to close the coal mines we stood with the miners, chanting “COAL NOT Dole”. I was hugely jealous of Diane’s coal miners donkey jacket, with N.C.B. on the back. Watch the full monty for visual context. The town in the movie looks just like the place Diane and I lived, with Jen and Pete just down the road and the working men’s club further down the hill.

We often woke to the sound of hob nail boots of the miners going to work at the Elsecar colliery or the sound of coal being delivered down the back yard coal chutes. I still hear those sounds in my dreams.

A link to the Elsecar and Holland colliery.
https://hemingfieldcolliery.org/pits-hoyland-silkstone/

In what today would be called freshers week, I met fellow students and room mates who would become lifelong friends and follow almost similar paths in life.