COMRADES REUNITED

Well, I remember Derek Dreaper chasing Simon up the Euston Road :)

He got married at the weekend - I don't remember that though. My missus chucked him down some stairs once however!

Strange. I read about this site on Harry's Place. I click the link. I see "I Remember When" and decide to reminisce about Derek Draper. Only to discover that there are two previous entries, both of which are devoted to him.

Even so, can I just state for the record that I also smacked him? And that a good friend of mine once dangled him out of a window?

Didn't a woman from the Militant pull Draper's trosers and pants down at an NUS disco in Blackpool?

And there was the time when Draper caused a furore at a Nols conference in London when he told someone that he wouldn't shag their gilfriend if she had a paper bag over her head.

didnt Jannine Booth take down his trousers and pour a pint over him?

As I remember, we used to be on top of this. Didnt we stop talking about DD becasue everytime we did so, he won?

Mixed feelings on this one, as I wish Derek well on his personal journey. People should be able to put rather embarrassing episodes firmly in the past. We all make mistakes, except most of them aren't in public.

In any case, I'm partly to blame, as I first met young Draper at an NUS training weekend for FE Student Union Officers in Scarborough, and thought that he looked like a likely recruit for the forces of truth and light. Needless to say, I sought to explain the evil nature of various political projects to him. At that stage he was a earnest, clean-cut working class lad from Runshaw College.

The rest is history.

Funny how things change - my eternal memory of Phil Frampton used to be of a fist fight he had with John Mann in the course of a football match at LPYS Summer Camp 1983. Years later I read his articles in various places about being a Barnardo's boy, and an awful childhood in care, and I realised how the ideological posturing that all of us engaged in then blinded us to the human things that formed our beliefs.

Recently, I've run into a number of ex Big M people in the course of my work, including some I sharpened steel for in the 1980's. Bygones seem very much bygones, especially when one is in a meeting with a bunch of political and economic illiterates barely aware of the history of the people and communities with which we deal. (I manage economic development and training programmes in a former coalfield area).

NUS Conf a 4 sided football match with no ball.

RO Gill Stuart waiving her tambourine announcing the purity partol of FE delegeates bedrooms; Michele Carlise proposing to delete all the NOLS motion and insert our identical one - and getting away with it; Marcus Sheff and Paul Kossof and Dave Herman snatching that fascist outside the Winter Gardens; bulletins about Phil Woolas's head being too big to get through the door; SWP always getting it wrong; very great deal of booze; very nasty Jew Haters; Militant occupying the stage becasue their student organisers never knew how to make a proper fuss and resorted to a certain muscularity; Sunderland Poly; Paul McGary mistakenly winning a place on NUS Accounts Committee or whatever it was called; Feminsim or Femocracy - surely the most correct and most badly timed artcle coming form our stable; SSiN positon on Israel defeated as Zionist then UJS positon passed.