“Farewell to Didsbury Big Picnic.” tomorrow at 12.30, who could miss it?

Well we have almost arrived at the moment when it really is good bye to that college in Didsbury.

It has been a place to train teachers, men for the clergy and before that a family home but soon in perhaps just over a month the books, the students and the lecturers will have left.

I was there 42 years ago and over the years have worked with many others who went through its doors.

All of us will have a mix of memories, mine include the AV course without which you couldn’t qualify and consisted of being shown how to thread a film into a projector, the right way to put a master onto a banda machine and above all how to wire a plug.

All of which were perhaps the most important preparation for the classroom.

Of course the whiteboard linked to a computer, the availability of thousands of film clips on youtube and desk top publishing have changed all that.

So as the end of more than an era dawns I am happy to have been invited down to the college tomorrow for the “Farewell to Didsbury Big Picnic.”

There will be entertainment and opportunity to say goodbye to staff who are leaving and an invitation to record your memories as part of the “The Memory Project.”

And although I personally shy away from such things, “THE FINAL PHOTOCALL” at 1.45pm of staff students and friends.

I rather think it has the lot.

So the not to be missed Farewell to Didsbury Big Picnic, starts at 12.30, goes on till 2pm on the lawns near the front gate.

And as my old friend Pierre and I often mumble to each other “Goodbye and Thanks for the fish” the significance of which along with its origin can be obtained from either of us tomorrow.

Picture; of MMU Admin Building 2013 from the collection of Pierre Grace