#lastdinner

NOSTALGIA UK

The last dinner (1994)

After much deliberation, I finally made up my mind: Surrey would be the next stop in my academic journey. It felt like the right choice, though part of me couldn’t help but wonder how different life might be if I stay put. Alongside me, Fudin set his sights on Nottingham, Ela headed to Warwick, and Shah chose UMIST in Manchester. Meanwhile, the rest of the group—Amir, Azizi, Nazrul, and Nasrul—opted to stay in Glasgow, all enrolling at the University of Strathclyde. Interestingly, none of us chose the University of Glasgow.

The details of those final days are hazy now. I can’t quite recall when we officially moved out of our shared flat or whether we all left at the same time. Still, a vivid fragment lingers in my mind: I spent my last couple of days at the Malaysian Students Centre, near Pollokshields. Maybe Shaikh or Fudin would remember it differently, but that’s how I recall it.

One thing I do remember clearly is wanting to mark the occasion—a little farewell dinner to close this memorable chapter of our lives. I visited a nearby Pakistani shop, picking up meat, curry powder, onions, and all the essentials to make one last curry in Glasgow. It was a bittersweet moment, cooking that meal, knowing it would be our final one together as a group.

Matt and I were very lucky that we were able to find a tenant that wanted to buy everything inside the house. The apartment was rented unfurnished and we bought everything inside the house. Thanks, to our friend Jen she referred her friends to us. Being able to sell everything to her friends have saved us a lot of time and stress. Especially during the pandemic not many people were willing to move and pick up items. After living this apartment for 2 years it only took us 2 days to clean and pack up. 

After cleaning the place and showing the new tenants the apartment we took our bags and made our way to Katie and Rav’s place. Katie and Rav offered their place for us to stay for the night before we flew out the next day. We didn’t want to be in the apartment after we cleaned it. We wanted it to be clean for the new tenants. We ordered Dishoom take away for dinner. This was our offical last dinner in London and it was so wonderful that we got to have it with our favourite London couple. 

In the morning we said our good byes and called an uber to take us to Heathrow airport. Our luggage was 10kg over weight so we had to leave one suit case behind for it to be posted away. Besides that our luggage weighted fine we had no issues. We did have issues find the VAT refund box after walking around the terminal for some time we finally found the box. Due to the lock down most stores were closed except for Boots and W.H Smith. We had a meal deal for lunch. Our flight was on time and we boarded on the plane. It was quite a full flight to Doha. Doha was a stop to many other flights. From Doha we transferred to another flight to Melbourne. On this flight we upgraded to business class.