Reunion meal
Yesterday I travelled into central London for lunch with a pal and some of his mates, all of them alumni of the same school. There was a certain novelty to the expedition because I’m now about a decade past the time I last commuted into the metropolis and it was fascinating – if you see what I mean – to check how much had changed and how little had changed. The answer was ‘plenty of both’.
My mode of transport was overland railway. I suppose I could then have taken the Tube when I reached the London terminus but I wasn’t clear as to whether yesterday was going to be a Tube strike day or not so I had allowed enough time to walk if I had to. Or wanted to.
The gathering was entertaining. In advance I wasn’t sure how many of the dozen attendees I would know well, or indeed at all, but as it turned out there were enough of them (three) that, on the rare occasions I was left chatting to someone I’d never met before in my life, even my miniscule capacity for small talk was happily able to cope. I dare say the alcohol helped.
The group dynamic was interesting because, as far as I could tell, only two of them were currently in regular social contact. Most were in their early sixties so had last been living together in the same institution about four and a half decades ago.
As a result – not unexpectedly – the atmosphere was underpinned by a semi-contradictory juxtaposition. They had sufficient in common that a certain camaraderie and ‘shorthand’ in both shared memories and school slang was ‘in the bank’ … and yet, because afterwards they had all set off along different career paths in different parts of the world and different personal circumstances, they also each possessed forty years’ worth of having practically nothing in common at all and were therefore also ‘feeling their way’ towards learning about the course of each other’s lives, possibly again for the second or third time (if that was how little they’d seen each other since leaving school).
As you do when you’re as old as I am, it was not long before I began secretly assessing who of those present had been treated most unkindly by the passing years.
No such table etiquette was required, of course, by the bulk of the party as was epitomised by the last-but-one arrival who, having hailed everyone he knew, pointed straight at one bald and silver-bearded individual and said “Christ, you’ve aged the worst of all of us!” before even taking his seat.
Eventually we spilled out into the encroaching darkness emboldened by a spirit of bonhomie and some of us then retired to a nearby bar for a ‘livener’ before making the journey home. It didn’t surprise me in the slightest that, upon reaching sanctuary, I lasted not much more than an hour before surrendering to an overwhelming urge for bed.
