Looking back now, 1975 was a very happy year for me. I had stopped being an avid follower of the music press, as nothing new seemed interesting. I was of course delighted to buy “Rising for the Moon”, finding Sandy Denny still in the group and well integrated in it, as she had patently not been on “Fairport Live Convention” the previous year. I had no idea at the time that the group was faling apart again.
The first half of 1975 saw the second and third terms of my first year at university, in the days when there was still a student grant and course fees were unheard of. In a previous post I mentioned that the course I was doing was unusual in that the first important exams were at the end of the second term, and I had worked extremely hard to prepare for them. As a result, I did very well in the exams, which was most gratifying. This meant that the course featured a lazy summer that first year, doing just one topic as opposed to 1.5 topics every other term.
Most important, however, was the arrival of Girlfriend 27 (“The Mouse” – see above). This followed a classic romantic New Year’s Eve at the end of 1974, and we were the epitome of Love’s Young Dream. She was in her final year at school in Sheffield, I was at university in Oxford, and in the autumn she started at university herself in central Birmingham. Anyone familiar with the geography of England will know that this turned out to be a perfect way for the relationship to develop and flourish; as it indeed did.
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