MattsvGreggs Going away to university, how do you keep in contact with your friends? I asked myself this when I realised I wasn’t seeing these people every day, being in the same lessons and all doing the same things. I worked in Beijing while they studied in the UK; I found myself doing things I’d never done before, like sending postcards or writing letters at Christmas. In a few treasured (and expensive) phone calls, we would always come back to the same question: what would we do when back in the North East? By Matthew Bradbury (15-17).
Matthew Bradbury (15-17), Matthew Clark (08-17) and Matthew Hutton (09-17) at various stages of the run
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t RGS, most weeks we would go out running together, and during exam season this was the only time we ever got out of the School Library. During those phone calls we decided this would be a good tradition to continue whilst away. I’d missed stotties and the company of my best friends in equal measure, so we decided that running around all of the Greggs in Newcastle would be a laugh. By the time we realised that it was a marathon distance, we had already told too many people to back out. We also realised this was an opportunity to do some good and started raising money for the Greggs Foundation Hardship Fund. That was it really, that was how an offhand suggestion managed to get quite so out of hand. We got in contact with the local press to try and get more publicity (as a means of raising more donations for the charity) for the run and we found they were all very happy to talk to us. I was being made to consider my relationship with Greggs in a new way, each person wanting a weirder fact or some jokey titbit to fit into their article. Never before have I been made to consider my favourite Greggs (the one by Central Station, as it’s the surest reminder you’ve finally arrived home – beaten only by seeing the bridges from your train carriage window); or favourite Greggs food or any other Greggs related stories. It turns out one of us had even taken a girl on a first date to a Greggs!
