How sad and unsurprising it is to note the lack of a sense of drama in the various (though pitifully few) letters to this web page. How people look back! Are their lives so dull now that they have to find colour, excitement and the headiness of  comradeship, in the golden haze of a past long gone? Come, friends, and no longer tell me of the great drinking bouts and sexual conquests of the past! Surely we have matured into men of even more vigour, desirous of ever deeper draughts of life's elexir! If women were ever admitted to the club how bored they would be at the beery reminiscences of middle aged men who seek to be warmed by the embers of a fire a long time cold! Here the dead are indeed dancing with the dead, the dust is indeed whirling with the dust!

Instead can we not envisage a club that's actually living? That's actually based on comradeship and community now? I have suggested becoming a club that looks out primarily for the interests of its members but Mick Manson has said in response "However, putting it on a formal basis is not really viable. We are not Freemasons, we do not have their membership base or their resources. Often we are strapped for cash just to help out the Club or college in a small way". What terrible words! Does he mean to say that we should not help out a fellow member because our resources have to go to some college refurbishment?  Does he not understand that helping out fellow members is EXACTLY what a club should be about? In the last century when a member of the Savage Club was temporarily financially embarassed fellow members put him up in a hansom cab outside the club until he found his feet again. It is this sort of club ethic we should be thinking of rather that whether an old beam needs replacing in the cloisters or the club name should go up on a plaque. Incidentally the member in question was a particularly irascible curmudgeon but that didn't stop his fellow members helping him out at some cost to themselves!  

We should take a lesson from last years London dinner. By all accounts it was a great success. Was this because it was away from Lampeter and thus had at its heart something other than the past?  

The trouble is, I fear, that some people have never really left Lampeter and see the club as a means of continuing that connection. What is equally obvious and sad is that very few returners actually return. Although hardly any are drawn back to renew their links with the college, my belief is that many more would be interested in returning to a club that has its roots in the college but has its life and being in the needs and interests of its present members.  

This being said the lack of contributors to this web site leads me to the depressing conclusion that  the apathy has gone too far. Somewhere along the way the members have lost the sense of true drama,  the mystique and the living fellowship that a club such as ours could and should, have formented.  

I do realise that the charge can be brought against me that I, myself, have very seldom attended club dinners. In response I can only say that I was probably too busy getting thrown out of the Groucho Club or taking the 6th form of Benenden  Girls School on camping expeditions. 

love 
Brendan 

Mail Brendan Somers.