all in the interpretation

Hmmm.
After Cpt. Blogs mentioned Facebook a couple of weeks ago I popped in to see if I could remember the password to the account I registered in April with which I had since done nothing except upload a picture. I had initially registered under a false name (not knowing one was not supposed to) for the same reason I registered under a false name on Fiends Reuntied, viz, anonymous covert observation. I temporarily re-registered under a different email address and added my other self as a friend to check that the false name was the name which appeared to other people (which it was). It took a bit of poking around to find the option to change the name to my real name and then took a few days for the request to be applied as it evidently required approval from the PTB. A couple of days later, a few unipeople with whom I am still vaguely but shamefully irregularly in touch spotted me followed shortly afterwards by a couple of former flatmates with whom I had completely lost touch. Today, an old friend from my school spotted me...

They did message to check that it was me behind the beard and hair on my profile pic, though. Shame on them. The hair at least had been growing for a year or so by the time we finished school.

It would have been sometime around the late nineties that I last had any contact with my peer group from school. I had kept in touch during uni holidays for the first few years but after a particularly troublesome year didn't go back for a bit and then didn't get in contact with anyone when I did. When I did eventually pop back into the usual places in the town I went to school in one year no-one was around. It would have been quite easy to ring their parents' home numbers (still in the phone book and I can still remember one or two of them even now) but only for someone for whom speaking to people is easy in the first place. I've occasionally googled people or searched various internetty things for familiar names but have either never found anyone or got the usual umm-but-ahh-but contact-initiation nervousnesses...

I'm not nervous about it for any memories it would bring back as it was uni rather than school where everything went nasty and I can remember everything anyway; it's just that when I was sorting myself out I was doing it up here and did slightly try to deliberately distance myself from anything which was causing me problems which was to a certain extent the being I had been at school. It brings everything to the forefront of the mind when you reach into the back of the cupboard like this.

Still. It's done now. I also had a wee surf through my new contact's friends list and found (via a friend of a friend of this friend) a couple of other people from a slightly different sphere who have also always been on the would-like-to-speak-to-again list. Poked them. The internet is about communication after all...