On Sundays we fall into our normal routine which is the Politics programs at the start of the day followed by a visit to Waitrose solely for the purpose of picking up our Sunday newspaper and culminating in a visit to the park. Then we return home and I cook the Sunday dinner, we view another episode of 'Pilgrimage' which somehow seems especially appropriate for a Sunday.
My first year at Manchester University was quite hard work and I typed up my lecture notes every single night. This had the advantage that at the end of the year I had a comprehensive (and much sought after) series of lecture notes that could be further day-glo'd or annotated and, in any case, fixed their content in my mind. We allowed ourselves to slip out to a local pub sometimes for an occasional half pint at the end of the day and for a bit of relaxation but the main focus of our leisure activities, apart from the Student Union, was the institution of the student party. At this time, in 1965 in Manchester there were no night clubs to speak off largely because of the very repressive policies of the then Chief Constable. I did in subsequent years work as a barman at Tiffany's, run by Mecca but the admission charges were very steep (at about £55 per person at todays prices, £2.00 then) So the student party was 'the scene' of the moment. The pirate radio stations were to come along later - Radio Caroline was founded in 1964 but could be received in the Medway towns for example. So the music that we had consisted of portable record players and collections of Beatles and Stones records. Via one of my flatmates, I did listen to an acquire a taste for the folk songs of Joan Baez, a Mexican-American folk singer, well known for her protest songs but not particularly well known in 1965 in the UK. But party goers brought along their LP's and someone acted as a DJ whilst the rest of us drank cans of beer, bottles of cheap wine and occasionally stuff sold cheaply from a barrel in some off-licences such as peach wine. The satisfying party always consisted of three stages. The first stage consisted of much drinking and the occasional bit of dancing if space would allow. This stage went on until about midnight after which there was always a certain degree of pairing off and this stage could last from a few minutes until about 3.00am in the morning. The final stage consisted generally of us sitting around on the floor, nearly always in semi darkness and engaging in arguments and discussions in which we believed in the Latin tag 'In vino veritas' This is a Latin phrase that means 'in wine, there is truth', suggesting a person under the influence of alcohol is more likely to speak their hidden thoughts and desires. For example, I remember having a very long and completely inconclusive discussion with the girlfriend of one of my school friends whether a true understanding of society and social conditions was best appreciated by a study of the social sciences (my position) or by a study of Literature such as Balzac and Dickens. Neither of us convinced the other but the argument went on for a long term. We had quite an interesting pecking order when we came along to discuss and argue with students on other courses. In general terms we quite liked the lawyers and the town planners with whom we could always have a good discussion but a low opinion of medics who we felt, with some justification, were unable to talk about anything much outside of their field of study. This was interesting, really, as the medics were generally much better qualified than we were in terms of A-level grades. So the party petered out by about 6.30 or 7.00 or certainly dawn when one would make one's bleary way home. But one usually had a great sense of satisfaction when all of one's thirsts and desires physical and intellectual had been satisfied. Now one of my flatmates also rode an Lambretta scooter as I did but mine was in Leeds and his was in Croydon. We decided that I should collect my Lanmbretta from Leeds and we would then share it on a 50:50 basis. This proved to be invaluable at the weekends because we very quickly discovered that whoever had the scooter that night got the girl (who being streetwise, realised that a male with transport could give one access to a generally empty flat for the evening) The one of us who did not have the scooter stayed behind quietly drinking the night away as it were. All of this was, of course, in the term although I had been introduced to Meg we were not actually going out with each other until about February of the following year when we paired off at a Rag Ball during the rag week celebrations in Manchester. Meg and I gradually made our parties a little more sophisticated by having cheese and wine but we were to discover that scraping off ground in cheese after a night's activities gradually took the shine of all of this. At one famous or perhaps infamous party (as our fame and address seemed to spread)we had more than 70 people crammed into nook and granny of a three bedroomed terrace house. After this, we rather felt that we had done the 'partying' bit and got it out of our system but as the popularity of our parties grew, we had to introduce a ticketing system and a series of whistles by the means of which we as the host could mobilise support from each to throw out gatecrashers, the more so if they were completely unknown to us. One occasion, we took a very drunk stranger that no one knew and hung him over the fence overlooking Platt Fields park outside our house. In the morning he had disappeared but we did not know how. We even had a party at out house in Leeds when my mother happened to be away for the weekend but this, too, turned out to be a disorderly event and was yet another reason to have done with partying. But in many ways the part of the party scene I enjoyed the most was the lengthy discussions in the wee small hours of the morning when we were anxious to put the world to rights.