"Do, Do, Do, Do, Do You Remember"

 I graduated from King's College London in 1969. I gained a B Sc in Maths and Physics - just - a third. At the time my mother was over the moon, which was appropriate because in the summer of my graduation year three Americans went to the moon and two landed there.

I had no idea what I would do after graduating. I spent three months on Brighton's  Palace Pier looking after the slot machines. I did an aptitude test for a computer company in Portslade and failed and finally got a job at Eagle Star's office in St James's as an actuarial student. My first and only job there was in the office dealing with insurance policies surrender values. Cranking the handle of an analogue calculator working out how little people would receive surrendering their policy after a life time of contributions.

I left that after a year and did temp work. At Unilever's film library I packed up reels of 16 mm promotional films and sent them off to schools, learned societies etc. Most of my time I'd spend re-reeling the films. I then spent an incredibly uncomfortable year as a copywriter for a small advertising agency off Fleet Street. We specialised in representing photographic businesses. I remember one of our campaigns "Leitz, camera, action" Centre page spreads in the Sundies in black and white. A campaign for the London Metal Exchange was less successful. The headline "The men of metal are coming together" I think illustrated how low we'd sunk.

Then I was a social worker or more accurately an unqualified care officer in a series of old peoples homes in the London Borough of Islington. At one home "Dorinda Lodge" we'd be visited by a policeman on horseback. One day he brought back one of our residents who'd ran off stark naked towards the Arsenal.

That didn't work out so I applied to the Civil Service and joined as an Executive Officer in the Civil Service Department (CSD) - a futile attempt by Harold Wilson to keep a check on the Treasury. That was in 1974 and the rest of my career was in the Civil Service. First with the CSD, dealing with the further education of civil servants -my boss then is still my friend all those years on. Then in the Treasury after the CSD was abolished.

The Treasury was for me a brilliant experience. First in Industrial Relations until the Thatcher gov't shredded that, then dealing with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the BBC External Service as well as the British Council and the Commonwealth War Graves. I then moved on to what was then called the "Territorials", Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I had a hand in the establishment of the Scottish Parliament - the review into the cost of the Parliament building had a letter from me approving the expenditure!  I still meet up with colleagues from those days.

In the late 90's I was dealing with European competition laws, e-commerce - before the dot com bubble burst - telecommunications and the UK competition bodies.

I ended my career running the Judicial Pension Scheme having been head hunted. After 5 years there I retired.

Why all this?

Because on Saturday 8th of June I attended an Alumni lunch at King's. I sat at a table of Maths graduates from 1969. The 50th anniversary of my graduation. King's has grown so that it now occupies much of Bush House in the Strand - opposite the old college buildings I knew in the late 60's. The lunch was on the 8th floor of Bush House West - which in the 80's was occupied by the BBC World Service.

In the 80's one of my areas of interest was the World Service. The World Service then, as now,  was an arm of the FCO. The FCO provided the World Service with a grant to deliver its programmes as part of our wider foreign policy. I had had a meeting with the finance team at Bush House and as a bonus was shown around the studios. There was Maureen O'Keefe. I had known her as a continuity announcer on Southern TV in the 1960's!

And in 2019 I was remembering life since graduating 50 years ago in a building I met someone linked to my childhood in Hove in the 1960's.

At the lunch I sat next to a 1969 Chemistry graduate. He'd worked in the petro-chemical industry and now retired to Brighton - where I was from (well, Hove actually). I don't know how it happened but I mentioned that when I was at King's my surname was Nelson - my mother remarried and I took my stepfather's name until I made contact with my dad and reverted to Coidan.

My chemistry companion immediately recognised me as one of the comedy team at King's that won the comedy competition in 1968. He had written and acted with me! I recall being in a flat somewhere, working on comedy routines and I have a vague memory of a comedy sketch we did. But I don't recall winning the competition or who were my fellow comedians.

I think the King's Alumni lunch  has unnerved me. First, realising how much time has passed, how old I am and how so many of the memories are covered over, to be exposed by a single encounter.

Fifty years on and as we sat around the table at lunch people were recounting trips to Brussels with the King's hockey team, their lives in New Zealand, doing a Ph D in the History of Mathematics at the Open University in the 1970's, and realising what a blessed generation we are. No tuition fees, grants and small classes and in the case of the 1969 Maths graduates individual tutorials with Prof Hermann Bondi!