Memory cheesecake

I’d wondered if I’d recognise Sarah.

The last time we’d seen each other was July 1987. I was all back-combed bleached hair pale-faced multi-earring-ed top-to-toe black-wearing Goth. Funky Town, Who’s That Girl, and Sinitta’s one-hit-wonder Toy Boy were riding high in the charts. The Pet Shop Boys were on the way back down from the top with It’s a Sin; we were just about to hear Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up for the very first time.

I’ve been on several blind dates* over the last few months and have certainly had a few butterflies on each occasion; that I was nervous going to meet an old school friend caught me by surprise. What would she look like? Would she be taller, shorter, fatter, thinner, speak differently from how I remembered? In the same way that rarely-visited relations seem genuinely taken aback that you’ve grown, I even couldn’t help but wonder if Sarah would still have her curly perm.

She didn’t, of course, and I recognised her at once as I walked into the pub. We embraced, ordered drinks, stared at each other, laughed at our ages, talked of partners, children, additions to and departures from our families, ordered food, shared tales of the tribulations of our own parents’ aging processes, of house moves, health, careers, current news, and reminisced about old friends seen or heard of or otherwise.

Memory’s a funny old thing – a sort of black box recorder where things are encoded and filed away according to, among other criteria, the significance to you of an event or a time or a place or a person. Sarah had the most astonishing recall of our school days. Details that I had completely forgotten – of friends, classmates, teachers, the old nuns who were still teaching at our school back then, of sports days and hockey teams, the playing field, the trees, the autumn conkers, the smell of polish, the pews in the chapel, and even where people sat in the 5th form. When she told me that she could name fifty individuals that had been in or left our form during the time we were at the Convent, I quite believed her.

Two forty year old women with twenty two years of life having passed by since they last met were always going to have lots to talk about. We ended our lunch with New York cheesecake and cream, more embraces and a date to meet up again in a couple of weeks.

Let those memories flow on and around the women we have become and help us create a new friendship in the here and now.



* But that’s a story for another day