Following my posts last year about Nick Coker, the real-life model of the hero (or anti-hero) of the film The Souvenir, I was sent a photograph of a long forgotten event which took place on the lawns of King’s College, Cambridge in the summer of 1975, when Coker arranged what I remember as being a Festival of 1,000 Flutes, but in retrospect I realise could not have been that many (it was apparently 100, not 1000). I didn’t feel able to post the photograph without the permission of Matthew Creighton who took it and I have only just received his permission.

I am posting it for two reasons. The first is as a recollection of a different era, when Cambridge was not as manicured as it has since become. The second is that it shows Coker in his undergraduate phase, standing at the top of the bank wearing a white suit and wearing – I think very uncharacteristically – a boater, when he was still an infinitely glamorous figure, much more so than he is depicted in the film:-