order of the brass mass

Every now and then my phone emits a notification alerting me to the fact that it's had one of its periodic sweeps through the various things it can log into and has matched some contacts between them, despite this behaviour having been requested to be switched off when I discovered the feature when setting up the phone for the first time.

Left to its own devices it would probably have eventually worked out all by itself to whom the hitherto-unknown number from which I received a text early this afternoon belonged, assuming that the number is listed somewhere in the Facebook profile of the person of whom it is attributed. Saving the phone the trouble, the sender identified himself in the message as Wayne, a name instantly recogniseable as the gentleman next to whom I sat in GCSE German classes, whose loans of cassettes introduced me to Jethro Tull and with whom I shared a table in the A-level Physics lab, resulting in frequent completion of practicals well before Mr Saxton returned from his lengthy trips to find fresh mugs of Brownian motion, leaving plenty of time for experimental variations and chat. He'd been in town for a conference a couple of minutes away from my office but as I had a day off today I was able to scootle out to the airport to meet him before his flight back to the extreme south. My imperfect pre-Blip biological memory reckons it was probably sometime around 1996 that we last met, most probably in Old Nick's Tavern in Horncastle, most probably in September. He looks much the same as back then so it was left to the speech patterns and accent to take a few minutes to fully bed in as they've not been incrementally updated by the occasional recent sighting on the internet. I'm most pleased that he took the opportunity to flag his proximity.

I really am quite shite at keeping in touch with people, even with the internet there to help, even when they're one of the few schoolpeople I found it easy to talk to back then, but I shall try to improve.