Wooden pants... and a tale of two dinners

It was a brainwave for David and Stephen to come up with the idea of a 'secret Santa' - also, come to think of it, a gold-star-worthy leap of lateral thinking to come up with concept of alternative Christmas. So combining the two in one delightful evening of food, drink and presents was always going to be a medal-winning performance.

And so the four of us - Liz, David, Stephen and me - gathered once again at their house to raise a toast and fill our boots at our alternative Christmas dinner. One month on from the C event proper meant that enough time and tide had passed under the bridge of any hastily-made virtuous new year resolutions to allow us a guilt-free evening of indulgence.

One of the 'rules' of the evening is that we each contribute one course to the meal. So we enjoyed a starter of chicken breast stuffed with Stilton and bacon; a main of delightful roast beef (with all the trimmings, naturally); and finished off with a choice of chocolate torte or blueberry cheesecake (or both) for pudding - accompanied by crackers and party hats and all washed down with champagne and lashings of thick double cream.

Stephen was my allocated person for secret Santa - anonymous gift to be to a value of a maximum of £5. So of course I made him a pair of wooden pants out of a piece of fire wood. I'm pretty sure that wasn't something that he already possessed...

***

A couple of weeks ago, I met up with my old school friend Sarah for the first time after twenty two years. Today, she had kindly invited me to her home for Sunday lunch, so I also met her husband (Simon) and son (Issac) for the first time. As well as their four cats, three chickens, two love birds, and, well not a partridge in a pear tree exactly, but two tanks full of fish.

Sarah had excavated some old school photos - those long, whole school affairs that took about half a day to take as I recall and mostly involved the younger ones getting told off repeatedly for fidgeting as the camera rotated slowly from one end to t'other. One of the photos was from 1985, just on the cusp of when Sarah and I were about to sit our O Levels and then to go on and leave the Convent for a 6th form elsewhere. Coming face-to-face with my 16 year old self was not something I'd anticipated today...

Another delicious roast (lamb today), followed by date and fig steamed pudding with custard and lots of fantastic cheese and biscuits. Wonderful. Although I remain puzzled how one can eat two such enormous (and delightful) meals barely more than 18 hours apart and still have room, let alone stand up afterwards. Good food, like sleep I've often thought, is something that can be enjoyed afresh on a daily basis with no hangover relating to what has gone before. Fantastic.

Now, where's my supper...?

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