Friends Come & Go, Then Come Back

Having got married and had our children, we soon realised that we had lost touch with most of our London friends, this was really because before I had always been the one to make the effort to organise how and where we would meet up.  Sadly, once I had stopped doing this, no one made contact, I think this happens because once married and with children on the way, especially if not very near to each other, we all end up with so little free time. 

However, most of our friends have remained friends for many years.  Strange though how old friends, having had no contact for some 50 years, suddenly came back into our lives. 

For example, Ronnie Hendon heard my voice in a restaurant, in San Pedro near Marbella and came rushing over to greet me, like us he too had an apartment and so we kept in touch again from then on. 

Through Facebook my old school best friends Bob Herrick and David Fine suddenly got in touch, as did Martin Stern, this was more than welcome, and we hope to meet up again soon.  Meanwhile we have had some video calls together using WhatsApp, all free and rather amazing to us.

We were invited to join a superb new club in Birmingham 'The Albany Club' six months before it opened, this was a very up-market sports club that consisted of; 4 squash courts, a swimming pool, sauna, very smart changing areas, a restaurant, bar, and a dance floor.  We loved it and remained members for several years, going at least once a week till the late hours.  This was where we learned to play squash and we got to know a lot of the members.  

One incredibly special new friend, who became very close for so many years, was Parvis Moayedi (an Iranian, he later changed his name to Paris).  We first met him in this squash club.  More about him will follow. 

Another circle of friends came about from our love of dancing Salsa, we soon became members of 'Latin Motion' and had such a lot of fun times with them.


Keen Collectors

Trudy and I are both collectors (we hate throwing anything away) we started collecting Edwardian satinwood furniture and our large lounge in Hamilton Avenue, bit by bit, was completely furnished with fine satinwood pieces. 

Over time we have also had a collection of Jensen cars and various Asian antiques.


Classic Jensen Cars

We also got involved with Jensen classic cars, having bought a CV8 (the fastest four-seater car in the world at the time) to replace our MGB.  The CV8 was featured on TV as the car for 'The Baron' and Sean Connery (star of the first James Bond films) had bought a CV8 for himself. 

Eventually we had 8 Jensen 541S cars and two CV8's.  We joined the Jensen club and successfully entered their concours events.  We were so impressed with these fibre glass, hand-built cars which we believed were really undervalued. 

Particularly the 541S, had a poor reputation, as being rather slow, but this was due to all the reviews being based on the automatic version.  What was not well known is that twenty-two were made with a Moss manual gearbox and these were fast!