This is the event I was at last weekend, I did mean to write it up earlier, but came up a bit short on the spoons side of things.
Grizedale was my college when I was at Lancaster University in 1982-85, and a line I heard several times over the weekend was 'At other universities, people's first question at reunions is 'What degree did you do?', but at Lancaster it's 'What college were you in?' And it's right, the colleges were very much the hub of university life.
My trip up started with a pleasant surprise when I bumped into a friend I hadn't seen in 18 months at the station. We only had a couple of minutes to talk before her train, but good to catch up.
London was a little more stressful as I've never been through Euston in the chair, and it's well over a decade since I used it at all. Getting there was annoying, for an underground station with level access to the trains there was an awful lot of up and down in Kings Cross/St Pancras! And I hadn't appreciated quite how far I'd have to push, it must have been a significant proportion of the half mile between the two stations. The tube trip itself was so short I barely had time to put my brakes on. But I got there in the end. Passenger assistance at most stations is a couple of people who'll go fetch the ramp if you catch them, at Euston it's a separate waiting area with about 4 guys behind the counter and another four with electric buggies to run passengers to the trains. And given all that I still got told to make my own way down to the train, but it was the closest platform to the office and there was someone there to run me up the ramp.
And off I went, facing backwards, on a Virgin trains Pendolino - i.e. the tilting train. Turns out going backwards on a tilting train with no side support makes me travel sick. I spent most of the last hour with my eyes closed! I knew Lancaster University had grown since I was there, but it didn't stop an involuntary 'Bloody hell!' when we finally passed it and I realised campus was now almost down to the rail lines.
I was met at Lancaster by Sam, one of my online friends (also a Lancaster grad, though about 15 years behind me), and we went for a quick beer in the nearest pub - the Merchant's, which I think had just opened when I left. That was my first experience of having my chair grabbed from behind by a 'helpful' drunk. I'd actually stopped because I needed to reverse out, not because I needed help going forwards. Grr! This is why I normally have my handles folded! It was the first day this year that was fine enough to sit out in the sun, which was very pleasant. Then it was time to head up to the university - if I could find a taxi. None to be had back at the station, so I ended up waddling the chair down to the bus station (the slope is pretty extreme), where I got a taxi straight away. I was particularly impressed that every taxi in Lancaster is wheelchair accessible - Wheelchair Accessible Vehicles with a ramp into the rear rather than the London black cab fashion, though I actually travelled in the front seat rather than the chair.
First priority at the uni was to pick my key up, and the start wasn't too auspicious when I got jammed in the door of the building where I was supposed to pick that up, fortunately the receptionist rescued me. I was booked into one of the university's B&B rooms, in a block of County College I'm pretty sure wasn't there when I was. The narrow corridor to my room, barely wide enough for the chair, brought back memories. I'd mentioned the chair and requested a ground floor room when I booked, but the one I ended up with technically wasn't wheelchair accessible. I could have gotten the chair through the door, if I didn't mind a 27-point turn, but it was simpler to climb out and drag it in - that did mean I left the keys in the outside of the door pretty much every time I used it. Inside I could get the chair to the bed, but not past it (pretty typical of hotel rooms in my experience), and it wouldn't go through the door into the tiny en-suite. Fortunately I can manage around that. The bed itself was a double, and my first thought was 'that's better than mine at home' (and I wasn't wrong). I'd guess the room as twice the size of mine when I was a student.
An hour or so's rest, a quick wash and brush up and it was time to head down to Grizedale, which meant negotiating the Spine. Lancaster is a campus university on a hill, it's aligned roughly North-South along the crest, and the main route around campus is a long pedestrian footpath, the Spine, with most of the colleges and departments fronting onto it. Because the ground falls away to the south, there are regular flights of stairs. Wheelchair accessibility wasn't great while I was there (I remember one girl had a mobility scooter, and there were a handful of others with ambulatory mobility impairments, but I don't remember any wheelchair users at all). Fortunately things had improved.
There were ramps around pretty much every stretch of steps, the one exception was a spot I'd expected to be a problem, and that had a wheelchair lift, which did the job, but didn't impress me. It was basically a boxed in platform lift, but rather than press a button to call it, it was press-and-hold a button, and the same to work it once you were in. Not ideal if you have limited hand strength as many chair users do - I was just able to do it with my bendy fingers. It was even worse headed up as the angle on the door made it much easier to get in so you would roll out backwards, which would have been fine but for the plate glass window you rolled into!
Grizedale had been completely demolished and rebuilt since I was there (the original principal admitted they might have skimped a bit on the cement in the mortar for the original building during a speech later), which got me a bit turned about as I didn't realise it was on the original site, I thought it had moved down to the new development. But I bumped into my taxi driver from earlier who set me right. My next problem was trying to figure how to get in the 'automatic' doors. At which point I heard a familiar voice say 'You still causing trouble, Dave?' - Tony, who I'd not seen in at least 15 years, and still looking much the same as ever. We were quickly joined by Andy and Linda, who I see regularly as they live not to far from me (frighteningly their daughter graduated Lancaster last year), and later by Gregg, another who I'd not seen in about 15 years. He and everyone else insisted it was 13, that I'd been at his wedding, but I didn't think so.
The event was the college's 40th anniversary, rather than a specific year group's, so there were lots of small cliques like ours rather than general mixing. There were a handful of other people from our year, but the only one we knew wasn't about on the Friday. The evening was okay rather than great, it was based in college reception and the bar, which weren't ideal mixing areas. There was a hog roast laid on, so we were fed, and the bar was doing a brisk trade. We stayed in reception until about ten, then headed up to Fylde bar to see if we could find some better beer, which we did. Turns out all those ramps are less helpful if you're going uphill, I consented to being pushed. Fylde looked a lot more like we remembered. It had been refurbished, but they had kept the look of the place. But it called last orders at 11ish, so we headed back down to Grizedale and the bar.
Grizedale's new bar is on a mezzanine floor and exposed me to an even more ludicruous wheelchair lift. This one had a sign on it saying "get porter to turn key". The porter was easy enough to find, he was directly opposite, but we ran through every key on his two foot long key chain without any of them fitting - not helped by the light in the lift turning off every 20 seconds. Eventually he went off to find the college administrator, who told him that he needed to go up to the bar and press the call button. So that makes it a lift that's actually impossible to use independently - I was less than impressed.The bar horrified us. Not only was it all shiny and modern, not the dark, wood-panelled 'World's End'* of our day, but there no bitter on tap, in fact no bitter to be had. OTOH there was an energy drink on tap and cocktails available to order. Our old barman would have been spinning in his grave!
We broke up about half one and headed back to our rooms, Gregg and Tony pushed and I navigated, which seemed a perfectly fair division of labours!
* Grizedale used to be the southernmost building on campus, so logically our bar was 'The World's End.' Having a bar in the same building you live in was remarkably convenient!
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