This was the most exciting time ever: I can still feel the THRILL of excitement that I felt at Fresher's week in Newcastle! I joined the Gilbert and Sullivan Society and the Fellwalking Club as well as the folk dancing and Morris Ladies team and Scottish Dancing too!
Work hard and Play hard was the motto, and as medical students we had lectures 5 days a week from 9 to 5 pm unlike very many other subjects and the only free time was evenings and weekends AFTER we had done the studying and learning/ memorising of anatomy or physiology details or principles.
I was in Halls of Residence for the first year and at 58 Wolseley Gardens and 89 Brighton Grove in the 2nd and third year, for the fourth I was in student flats run by the University- 6 sharing and a poxy triangular shaped modern room- and the final year I had a postgraduate room in a terraced town house overlooking the park With high ceilings and being really huge that was the best of all....
Clearing out the garage to make room to store some furniture from the childhood home I found these:
Christmas 1978 saw the production of the Demon Alcohol in which I had both a part as one of the ''three little girls from school are we'' and a chorus role in the rest.
We went for social outings as above which included jousting in front of the student union building
and a tug of war in medieval dress
Then there was Iolanthe to rehearse and perform that summer term:
the Fairies
Did the lads make better fairies ?
The lads obviously made much better ''maids from school'' than we did !
But it was not all dancing and singing, though I did also sing in the Newcastle cathedral choir for Christmas , all those carol descants are still remembered so fondly!
Every other week you could order a packed lunch from Halls and we'd all leave very early on a coach which took us out to the countryside, sometimes local, sometimes the Lake District or Derwent Valley near the resevoir.
There's be three walks: the over 12-16 miles, the 10 mile and the 5-8 mile walks and we'd all meet up at a pub at the end to eat before boarding the coach home again.
It was always on a Sunday so you could get all your work done beforehand.
We always went to
Allendale in the autumn to see the colours of the trees there and the sequence of walks was similar for a number of years.
Walks included Skiddaw and a number of other well-known peaks as well as gentler meanderings across Moors and Fells.
I did every walk for about 2-3 years and then had to walk less in year 4 and 5 due to placements away and being buried in study and revision, but also many walk-mates had left after the 3 or 4 years to start work etc.
Walkers tended to be engineers, town planners and IT students, not many agriculture students and very few medics.
