SCHOOL REUNION

Some friends of mine are trying to organise a school reunion. I skimmed through the email.

Yada, yada, yada, great to meet up, find out what everyone's been up to, bla, bla, bla, bla,  partners welcome (of course), invite teachers, twenty years since GCSEs, et cetera, et cetera...

WOAH! Hold the phone! Twenty actual years?! Two Zero... Two. Whole. Decades? That can't be right... can it?

Man alive.

There were a lot of replies. Fab idea! yay! count me in! Defo! Great idea! Some, intriguingly, from people I've never heard of, but all wanting to get together to find out how life has treated the other eleven-year-olds who started at Meadway School in the sunny September of 1989.

I'll be honest: I'm not quite so enthusiastic about the idea. I predict it will be an awkward evening of tricky memories, interspersed with a few poignant reminders of how twenty years' worth of time can change people you once knew as children.

I imagine old jealousies and embarrassing anecdotes tumbling from a locker-room you've tried to forget, while terrible characters who tormented you in the playground are suddenly unfeasibly grown-up and polite about it, or worse, horribly dismissive. Friends you wished you'd stayed in touch with because you really adored them, might not remember you at all, and most frighteningly of all, everyone with great jobs, fancy homes and beautiful children will be quietly desperate to show off about their greatest achievements. Shudder.

Yep. And I can imagine me, top of the class in every subject: the front-row, chess-clubbing, Scrabble-outside-the-staffroom-playing, goody-two-shoes, hardworking, all-round boffin-of-boffins... trying to tell people that I live with my parents, never found someone to get married to and struggled through life like an unambitious, deluded, career-hopping dreamer.

Yeah, I don't think it'll be for me, this one.