Kenny Campbell Dot Com

Blairs College, Aberdeen

The college is on the outskirts of Aberdeen, and used to function as Scotland's national junior seminary, where boys between the ages of 11 and 18 would come for a life of study and prayer. Not surprisingly, in the years before going to Blairs, I was a devoted alter boy, and a regular attendee at charismatic prayer meetings where there was much singing in tongues and banging of tambourines. My guide and mentor through some of this time was the late Father Thomas Mannion, a great man, and a wonderful priest, who touched many lives with a beautiful, everyday way of caring that didn't seem to have much to do with the trappings of the religious context in which it appeared.

I was a student at Blairs from September 1981 to June 1985. After four years there, the college was closed by the Bishops of Scotland. It was considered too expensive to continue running, and wasn't resulting in a high enough yield of young men who went on to become priests.

Sadly, I missed a reunion which took place 10 years after Blairs closed, and since I now live in New Zealand, attending a reunion at any point in the future is an unlikely prospect at best. I'm not entirely sure what sort of reception I would have had if I had been able to make it. We're all adults now, of course, and very different people to who we were then. I'm guessing that my sexuality might pose a bit of a barrier to some, despite the fact that I didn't get up to much at all when I was a student in the place, so I wouldn't provoke much in the way of guilty memories. I learned later that I was missing out big time on what was going on, because I have bumped into one or two former students over the years, and the tales they have told have sometimes been quite surprising.

More recently, I have been in touch with a few guys from my year, many of whom are now on the Internet. There is a forum for former students, if you'll pardon the excessive alliteration, and through it I have managed to contact a few old chums. Reading some of the comments that appear within the forum, it seems that myself and my contemporaries were there for a somewhat golden era of the college's life. Students from generations before us had experienced brutality and abuse (physical and sexual) in their time there. In my day, such things didn't happen. There was a degree of bullying, as there is in every school; but in contrast to years gone by, corporal punishment was illegal, and there was enough awareness about sex and sexuality to make that type of abuse less likely. Rather we enjoyed great liturgy, great teachers - particularly Father (now Canon) Bill Anderson, who taught me English in my fourth year - and fabulous productions of Gilbert & Sullivan, thanks largely to my form master, Father Steven Robson.

If I were to enumerate the things that I took from my time at Blairs that are obviously still with me, even though so much of that whole experience has been formative, it would probably boil down to this list:

• writing software
• awareness of sexuality
• conjuring
• musical tastes (part I)
• musical ability
• Latin which helps with English