Old school fun

The whole idea of school reunions has always filled me with a special kind of horror. Why would anyone want to subject themselves to the inevitably unfavourable scrutiny of people they were fond of many years ago but with whom they long-since lost any meaningful connection? I assumed the bulk of any reunion would consist of career, waistline and hairline comparisons - none of which I'd emerge from with much credit. And why revisit a school where I spent a good part of my time feeling inadequate, insecure and in constant conflict with various teachers - the less said about some of whom the better?

How wrong I was. Last weekend was spent with a group of people I haven't seen in 30 years in most cases. I wasn't even all that friendly with some of them three decades ago. And yet we spent nearly three days together, meeting up in London on Friday for drinks and an evening meal, then again on Saturday at the school in Dover for lunch in our old refectory - surrounded by today's pupils no less - followed by a tour of much of the school. Then there were more drinks, another blow-out meal, more drinks, and some low-key alcohol-fuelled dramas (without which it would have been a pretty poor reunion, let's face it). On Sunday morning the brave-hearted met for breakfast at the school (I was blissfully asleep at the time - I managed a lie-in til 11.00!) a trip to the hills outside Dover where we used to meet to drink cheap wine and engage in immature pursuits, followed by yet another meal and then, finally, home.

People flew in from Australia, the US, Canada, various parts of Europe and travelled from all over the UK. There were even people at the London event who had crossed the river for the occasion!

I wouldn't swap a minute of the whole weekend. It was a fantastic celebration of timeless friendship, shared experience and joyful reminiscence. One of the most remarkable of many remarkable things about it was how effortless it was to pick up the old friendships where they'd left off. We're all older and different in many ways but the fundamentals haven't really changed. The sleazebags are still sleazebags, the diamonds still diamonds, and the feelings are just as strong as they ever were (once suitably nurtured in a hothouse of constant exposure and alcoholic lubrication). And now we've all grown up a bit we're capable of speaking to the people we never went near at school because we weren't cool enough - or because they weren't - which resulted in a whole series of new friendships. We were able to say what we meant this time - rather than muttering vague adolescent indications of how we felt about each other. The upshot of this was that I left feeling genuinely loved by these people about whom I'd stopped thinking for years until a few weeks ago, when the invitation arrived.

It was a heart-warming, life-affirming experience and I'm so glad I parked my scepticism and my nervousness and my silly misgivings. To have given in to them would have deprived me of a genuinely significant event in my life.

I took lots of photos, obviously, but I couldn't possibly pick one that did any kind of justice to the occasion so I've gone for a silly one: the really rather delicious apple crumble they served us in the refectory on Saturday lunchtime. You may feel I've tweaked the colour saturation to emphasise the yellow of that custard. You'd be wrong.