It was the final morning of our holiday on the Isle of Lewis. On the advice of TPR I asked for sausages and eggs for breakfast. Bored with waiting for my meal to arrive, I stepped down from the table and set off for the beach. There was still some snow on the ground and the views were well worth photographing, even though I only had my Blackberry camera on me. I struggled over the wet grass in my stocking feet. The grey-spotted socks were soon soaked through. I hoped that their real owner (possibly RG?) wouldn’t mind. Where the river normally hugs the edge of Uig sands I discovered three otters playing in an enormous open water tank. One swam all the way up to me, popped his little paws over the side of the tank, and we rubbed noses. He disappeared back into the water, then reemerged as a small brown dog, completed with a collar that told me that he belonged to a croft called Luach. I didn’t manage to take any photos. I hoped that everyone would believe me when I returned to BnC to enthuse about the friendly otter.

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It was already September (presumably 1985) and HW (now HJ) and I still hadn’t organised our accommodation for our final year at the University of Birmingham. We knew that we had the option of living with TPR in his little house in Northfield, but hesitated over the “authenticity” of such an arrangement. Shouldn’t we be with a bunch of other single girls sharing a flat? Whether or not we solved that problem before we went back up to Birmingham in the autumn, I do not know, but it was a lovely feeling to be crowding with everyone else at the railway station – just like boarding the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter novels, excited at the prospect of the start of the new academic year.