Long Time No See

Having joined Facebook recently and deciding that only people I really like will get added as friends rather than any Tom, Dick or Harriet, I found myself rather restricted.

Whilst lots of friends-of-friends are on Facebook, my immediate circle of friends only has a small number of people who are IT literate and have heard of Facebook.

So no friends-of-friends-of-friends etc.

But it was a small group. Too small...

I guess that some people feel pressured into oneupmanship. You see all those people with hundreds of "friends" and there's me thinking that I probably don't even know that many people! Besides, Facebook doesn't really work if your group of friends is too large. You just get bombarded. It's almost as if you need an inner and outer circle, something I'm surprised they haven't implemented yet as standard.

Nevertheless, I hunted around a bit more, typing in a few names into the search box to see who else I could find. As luck would have it some of my old school and university friends were on there (though not many, which was surprising) so I sent a few friend requests out and waited...

When I got a few replies, I started the obligatory "Hello. How are you?", "How are things?" going type messages with them and to cut a long story short, I ended up arranging a meet up with four of my old uni mates.

It'd been over ten years since last I'd last seen them. We all used to hang out together durng those formative years and even went on a fly-drive holiday around North-East America after we finished uni, from which I've had some great memories, but distance and laziness did me in.

They all lived in Surrey (we went to Kingston Uni) and I didn't. Without a car, and no direct form of transport, it'd take me almost two hours to do what should be a relatively straight-forward trip down to see them.

And...it just never happened. They kept in touch which each other whilst I grew further and further away.

Anyhow, it was great to see them all and the bizzare thing was that apart from a few more grey hairs or, in some case, slightly less hair, we were all basically the same!

One of my friends had got married (on the day that I went to Nepal so I never made it to the wedding) and had had two kids (one of whom was a junior monster) whilst another is getting married next year. Spookily one of my friends had not changed at all, in so far as I even thought that he was wearing the same clothes (or very close to the same clothes) that he used to wear 10 years ago!

Oh well. We all got on pretty well, though meeting on a Friday in busy, noisy pubs was probably not ideal for catching up type chat and I did have to rush off before everyone else as we'd met in Clapham Junction and their journeys home were more straightforward than mine.

Hopefully the beginning of some better friendships, I hope?

To be continued, I guess...