I have been blasted from the past a lot lately! I had been visited (and sort of visited) by friends I knew from my time in Plymouth and Amsterdam, and I had caught up a bit (via email) with my old Norwegian landlady, and with Neil (also from my Plymouth time). But now a blast came from even further back.
I suddenly got a friend request on Facebook from a bloke I had been friends with in secondary school, in the early 90s. That is a while ago by now! So I accepted it. And I was of a mind to send him a message saying something along the lines of "crikey, it has been a while" but he beat me to it. And he suggested catching up, be it by written word, phone call or video call. That sounded good. I voted video call.
On a Sunday morning we had the call. I had already seen on his profile page that he hadn't changed much, of course. People rarely do! We both seem to remember we had only seen each other once after I got my A-levels, but we couldn’t agree on at what occasion, so our memories might not be overly reliable when it comes to that. Nonetheless, we pretty much picked up where we left off.
Bringing people up to date after more than 30 years is a bit of a job, so we figured after an hour or so we were not done yet. And we will call again. And I might even pop in and drop by for a cup of coffee next time I am in the country. He still lives in the same town, and that's where my mother lives, so that's my base then anyway.
This came falling out of the sky, but I'm glad it happened! My head is sucked into a wormhole taking me back to my teens. Which might not necessarily be an unmitigated joy, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to reflect on that with someone who was there. And it's very interesting as well (for both of us) to, after all this time, get to see what was behind all that teenage posturing that was going on… who wouldn't want that?
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