Auld acquaintance

When my kids went from primary to secondary school, it was simply a matter of crossing the road from St Mary's to Queen Elizabeth School. And apart from a couple of misguided souls who might have headed for the grammar schools in Lancaster, all of their classmates went with them. That was quite a different experience from me, leaving my primary school in south London to go to Hong Kong and then, four years later, coming back for secondary school.

But despite that, I still think we have the same experience when we leave school or university or a job; of the friends we've made, some we keep in touch with and some we don't. When I was working freelance I'd work at the same place for anywhere between six months and two years, I would regularly find myself in that situation of 'moving on' and it wasn't always easy to predict who I would stay in touch with.

With the advent of social media, it became a lot easier to get back in touch with people and I did that with a handful of school friends, including my much-loved best friend from Hong Kong, David. There have been others - maybe popping up in my friend suggestions when I used to be on Facebook - but sometimes I just felt that much as I liked them at the time, there was no burning need to get in touch.

Conversely, there have been a couple of people that I've failed to track down, both from my first job after leaving university. One of them seems to have no presence at all on the web - unless that really is him in Stearns County Jail - and the other, the chap I would really love to see - has such a common name - Gareth Jones - that he is simply lost in the sea of people with same monicker.

Mind you, it's always occurred to me that they could find me if they wanted to so maybe best just to leave it after all.

Last week, out of the blue, another old school friend contacted me via the business nerds' Facebook, LinkedIn. As an aside, I must say that I feel obliged to be on LinkedIn yet also somewhat tainted by having anything to do with it. I don't recall ever seeing anything interesting on the site plus recruitment agencies seem to view it as a barrel full of fish to shoot at.

Anyway, this old friend of mine, Hamish, suggested we do a 'Google Meet', this week. I think if we were still living normal lives and he'd suggested meeting for a beer, I'd have been entirely up for it but the prospect of a virtual reunion filled me with dread for some reason and I really wasn't looking forward to it.

But, of course, it was fine. And, as I have found with a lot of my old friends, whilst we'd clearly changed and had decades of experiences since last meeting, there was still a connection there, the same indecipheral bond that had drawn us together as friends in the first place. Even so, I still wish it could have been face to face over a beer!

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-9.6 kgs
Reading: 'The Vanishing Half' by Brit Bennett