On 4th September 2015 Reading University’s Alumni Office was kind enough to organise a guided tour for the 6 of us celebrating, with our partners, the 50th anniversary of our freshman year.
We started our visit in the Library which was just a year old and state of the art when we joined in 1965. No computers for general use in those days, though, no eatery, and no information board offering help with our literacy or numeracy!
Our tour on campus continued with a visit to the Students’ Union – a vastly extended enterprise compared with the Buttery and Bookshop we remembered. The SU was on the London Road site in those days, part of St David’s Hall.
We then moved on to the Language Department of HUMSS where five of us had enrolled for French or French combined with Italian and one for Classics. The foyer of the building seemed little changed and served to jog a memory of being press-ganged into doing Linguistics as our third subject, totally unappreciative of how privileged we were to be some of the first of David Crystal’s students! Here we met up with Dr Veronica heath who had herself been a student in the 80s, taught by many of the profs and lectures who variously inspired, amused and scared us witless. Much nostalgia was evoked by names from the past, including Prof Lehmann, Michael Holland, Dr Dale, Dr Redfem, Geoffrey Strickland, Prof Meneghello, Dr Lepsky and John Scott to name but a few. All of us spent out third year in 
Lyon, those there for the whole year witnessing Les Événements of May 1968 at the first hand. It was here that our long-lasting friendship was cemented.
We are delighted to welcome our new Teaching Fellow in French Language, Miss Marine Orain, in September 2016. Marine joins us from Birkbeck College and she will be teaching Language modules. Marine holds an MA in Teaching French as a Foreign Language from the University of Cumbria and she is completing her PhD thesis on French intellectuals.