They know where I live!

Something strange was waiting for me on the doormat (outside) when I got home late last night - an alumni magazine from my old college.

A couple of weeks ago I received another letter from the college, that one inviting me to a farewell dinner marking the retirement of my old tutor (a man I frankly couldn't stand).

This after years of blessed anonymity, being underground and undercover, off the map and below the radar. I had never received any of this sort of guff from them before, even when I was still living in England. How ever did they track me down out here? Well, I strongly suspect (it's close to a certainty) that I was shopped by my good friend The Egregious Doctor P, a fellow alumnus who still has close connections with the college (although he's now joined the Senior Common Room at another place). I am a trifle miffed with him. If the College Development Fund comes a-calling with its collecting box, can the taxman and the debt collector be far behind? Well, I hope so.

Odd bedtime reading it made. The articles were as unremittingly dull as you would expect, but the 'zine was studded with familiar names. I noticed my occasional commenter JohnA (more often a visitor on the Barstool than here) among the list of benefactors on the back page. Oh the irony - he was more often considered a 'malefactor' back in the day: always likely to be in one of the Dean's notorious 'black files', topping the list of suspects whenever there was a late-night incident involving a shopping trolley or a fire-extinguisher. Now, it seems, he is a respectable pillar of the community - who contributes to college appeal funds in a spirit of comfortable ostentation rather than any sense of guilt, I'm sure. Funny how a career in accountancy will work changes like that in you!

In most cases, though, the names were just barely familiar. My college has always been the tiniest of all; and back in the '80s when I was there, it was substantially smaller than it is now: the undergraduates only numbered a couple of hundred or so. First years all lived in a handful of compact accommodation areas within or immediately adjacent to the college itself; we were living in each other's pockets; everybody knew everybody, at least on nodding terms. But not many of us actually became friends; and so, after 20 years, the names chime only distantly in the memory, recalling perusals of the address list in the college 'White Book' or of the wooden plaques at the bottom of each staircase that recorded the names of all its residents.

It was, I suppose, one of the most intense periods of my life; but it was so long ago - it seems like another world now, another life (not my own).