The common element...

Off out tonight to meet up with friends present and past.
I don't call them colleagues because we have become more than that over the years.
We have all got our stories to tell, some have lived abroad since we last met, we've had children, got married, changed the direction of our lives but this emblem is a common element to us all, its where it all started.....

Borrowed from wikipedia......
Distinction: emblem and symbol
The words emblem and symbol often appear interchangeably in day-to-day conversation without causing undue confusion. Nevertheless, an emblem is a pattern that is used to represent an idea, or an individual. An emblem crystallizes in concrete, visual terms some abstraction: a deity, a tribe or nation, a virtue or a vice. An emblem is an object or a representation of an object.
Nuff said :)