Friends reunited

I was on my way out on Tuesday night when the phone rang. It was an old friend from school, C, who was in town and wanted to know if I fancied a drink.

That night was out of the question but we met up tonight. C and I were at school from 16-18 and were goodish friends; both class jokers in our way, taking the same A levels and writing for the school magazine. He wrote an excellent piece about elves in the North Pole labouring in inhuman conditions under the evil Santa ‘Claus’ Barbie while I concentrated on cynically humorous advice columns.

Anyway, in the early 2000s Friends Reunited came along and we got back in touch. He was in the technology field like me and we met up for a drink that ended up morphing into dinner, more heavy drinking, an unsuccessful attempt to chat up two air hostesses and me pouring him into a taxi at 3am, only to hear the next day that his wife had locked him out of the house.

We sent each other the occasional email but when Facebook came along we got back in contact and exchanged numbers, thus the call.

It was good to catch up and as the drinks flowed we found out a lot about what else had happened to the class of ’87. An astonishing number of classmates had left Derbyshire for a while and then come back to live. One is a landlord of one of our old drinking haunts, another teaches at a nearby college (and married one of his students!) while yet another was the town librarian until it was shut down.

However, a few of us have flown the coop. One old chum in currently in Spitsbergen, high up in the Arctic Circle, studying polar bears. C himself ran a telecommunications company in Outer Mongolia for a while. Another copped a packet in the first Gulf War. It’s amazing how people get around.

All in all a very good night, only slightly soured by finding out that C got off with a girl I had lusted after two years at the leaving disco. No matter, it was over 20 years ago and we’ve all passed a lot of water since then and it was a damn good night, so we’re meeting again tomorrow.