Friends reunited
In the UK they’ve gone mad for the shared memories a website can bring
I HAVEN’T seen my old friend Nina Pozzi since the day we stood together anxiously scanning the school notice board for our A level results. That was a while ago… back in the twentieth century. She was very funny and a bit crazy and I always regretted losing touch with her. But who could have predicted the school reunion epidemic that has swept the land courtesy of www.friends-reunited.co.uk ? It may be pretty unnecessary in Cyprus where all you need to do is wander down to the coffee shop and ask what happened to old Patroclus… but effects have been pretty far reaching in the UK. Mean old skinflint that I am, I have refused to pay up to join the thing, but it doesn’t stop people finding me… “Hi Nina” I replied, attaching a photo of smiling self standing next to trio of good looking Cypriot men. “Do you recognise me?” “Surprising how the beard suits you!” she replied. Lost none of her wit, that one.
And I hope to see her in person come the summer, because all the gels who went along with me to the seven year-long party that we had at Stratford on Avon Grammar School for Girls have decided it is now or never. We are going to go down to the river again just like the old days – not to canoodle with our boyfriends this time, but to introduce our husbands, unless of course, as in some cases, the one eventually became the other. So we will meet by the Avon, barbecue, drink Bulgarian cabernet sauvignon, or maybe Bulls Blood or Hirondelle or whatever retro tipple we can source for the event, and reminisce. Maybe we will listen to T Rex and Grateful Dead. Maybe we will eat school canteen food and enforce the school rules for old time’s sake… Girls are not to walk down the street more than two abreast. Hats must be worn at all times. Skirts must be no shorter than twenty centimeters above the knee when kneeling… I swear that the staff used to go around with tape measures in order to enforce that one…
Friends Reunited is working overtime. And some clever person has set up a special website upon which gels are posting the most embarrassing photos. There is a hilarious one of me with practically floor-length hair. Some of our ex-boyfriends are e-mailing us to say they just can’t burleeeve how short our skirts were… Of course, when we weren’t in that excruciating purple, blue and yellow uniform we were all wearing exactly the jeans that girls are wearing now, with low waistbands, bare stomachs, chain belts and wide flares that were no good unless they were long enough to fray around the hems and soak up muddy puddles by capillary action. My daughter has several pairs and I keep wanting to say “what do you think you look like!” but I hesitate in case she uncovers any photographic evidence that I once went around looking exactly like her…
Memory plays really clever tricks. Girls who were part of my everyday life for seven solid years stare out at me from fading colour photographs challenging me to remember who they were. They thrashed me at tennis, queued with me for inedible school meals, dissected worms with me, tested me on French irregular verbs, passed notes to my boyfriends on the school bus, helped devise endless, no doubt tedious and repetitive, tricks to play on the teachers… Some of them seem complete strangers, many others are familiar faces whose names escape me, while a few, like Nina, are never to be forgotten.
Unbidden and unexpected, along with the jogged memories of friends, happenings and the minutiae of every day life, come the opportunities to share other peoples’ reminiscences of things which I couldn’t forget because I was not actually there at the time. I had an email last night from an old contemporary who asked fondly after my “little” brother Simon: “does he still go into Woolworths and set all the alarm clocks to go off at the same time?” Well, I never knew he did it then, but no, I wouldn’t put it past him if he still does it now. Seems he got away with it. I wonder what he will pay me not to tell our mum…Roll on next June!
