Foyle 400, part two

I should say the reason I’m covering the event in such detail is for my mother’s benefit. She wanted to see lots of pictures.
Here’s me with Stuart Eakin, IT manager at a bank in Leeds and apparently a very good golfer. He missed receiving the league award tonight to join the dinner.

Here’s me with Caroline Brown and Ruth Eakin, Stuart’s sister. Also at my table were Caroline’s parents (I stay with Caroline’s sister Julie when I’m in town), Ruth and Stuart’s brother, Howard, and their father, Dr. Marshall Eakin.

We each received a small complimentary bottle of some kind of Irish creme liquor, which we were in the process of downing when this photo was taken.
Here are the Eakins:

Howard is an engineer with an oil company in Scotland. He and his wife Carmeen, whom he met in primary school, are both keen golfers and must be pretty good to play in Scotland. Ruth, I’m told, is the top pulmonary oncologist on the island. If you ask her what she does, she’d say “I work at the Royal,” shorthand for the Royal Victoria Hospital. She’s very modest and is good craic, as we say here. She talked me into getting up this morning (day after the dinner) and doing the 5K park run. It was a beautiful morning and a great way to start the day.
The rest of the day involved visiting Mrs. Walker, who is recovering from a fall after her valley was flooded three weeks ago, and visiting the Siege Museum, which catalogs the Siege of Derry, more on that later.
If I were to sum up the dinner, I’d say it was a love-in for the school. We received a top notch education from selfless teachers who gave tirelessly of their time. The dinner was a chance to express our loyalty to a school that launched so many of us into the world equipped with the discipline to learn what we had not yet mastered.
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