Before we left home, I got in touch with the helpful Churchill
College alumni office and asked if there was a network/society we could join to
kickstart us with some contacts that had something substantial in common with
us.
No society exists, but this email produced invites to
the HK-leg of a uni bigwig tour of Asia, including Churchill’s master and the
Uni’s Vice Chancellor.
So I spent lunch with the Master of Churchill (speaking above) and the
evening (with Claire) in a 43rd floor bar with hundreds of alumni and
this distinguished bunch. Some interesting snippets:
-
The Churchill Master accidentally got tipsy before lunch. This made his lunchtime anecdotes
more risqué than they might have been...
-
He bought some cracking historical morsels from the
college archives, e.g. a photo of Thatcher with Reagan with a personal note
from ‘Ron’ on it.
-
At both events, there were endearingly gentle,
if unsubtle, fundraising attempts (“we’ve replaced the chairs in hall, you
know, and for £400 you could name one after you…”)
-
Yes, that is ex-archbish Rowan Williams! Now
Master of Magdalene. His sonorous voice – the archetypal ‘what a bishop should
sound like voice – is impressive in person. It makes everything he says sound
incredibly wise, even if he does look like Owl from Winnie-the-Pooh.
Nice event, pleasant nostalgia, good contacts…but I
reflected afterwards that where this sort of event is a big deal at home, here,
it’s so easy to get invited to stuff and create great networks from scratch, it
did not feel quite so grand. Food for thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment