Sonia Knight

Denise Richards and myself Sonia Hamilton (as our contemporaries would have known us), were at school between September 1959 and July 1966.
 
In the Sixth Form we went on the very first school journey ventured upon by BHS at Christmas 1965 - a converted troop ship headed for Malta, Beirut, Haifa and Piraeus, although Malta had to be omitted due to heavy seas delaying us in the Bay of Biscay. The header image is a photo of us at the Parthenon, with Miss Howard (Maths) on the right.
 
Denise and I went in different directions to university, she to Edinburgh to study Maths, and I to Exeter to study languages. She stayed on in Edinburgh, taught, married, and raised four children there, and I returned to the Enfield/Hertfordshire border for my first teaching job, married, and raised two boys. We kept in touch periodically, and we met with Gillian Clifton, Diana Rees and Marion at the school’s 125th anniversary OGA lunch in Sept 2005.
 
My elder son also studied languages and spent a year in France. During a subsequent stint as a courier with Canvas Holidays, he worked with a student from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen and they now have two daughters who attend the primary school in Milltimber, in the Dee Valley outside Aberdeen.  Last June I went there by train and, on my way back, took the opportunity to visit Denise at her home in Edinburgh for the first time. We had plenty of time to talk!  Imagine our surprise when we discovered that Denise’s second daughter lives in Milltimber, about a 5-minute walk from my son, and that her grandchildren go to the same school as my grandchildren and know of each other, although they are not in the same year groups.
 
At the beginning of March this year, my husband and I flew to Aberdeen to visit our son and his family and I happened to text Denise to say we were there.  Amazingly, I had a reply almost immediately to say that she was also spending the weekend at her daughter’s 5 minutes away so, of course, we met again. With this weird sequence of coincidences, we seem destined to keep in closer touch from now on.