On Being a Becket Kid...

It's nearly 14 years since I left St Thomas Becket Primary School.

I was a geeky kid - the kind who spent their playtime reading in a corner of the playground as oppose4d to joining in with other games.  In fact, in some ways I cringe when I recall my naïve enthusiasm for any kind of learning; I hadn't yet learnt to act with nonchalance and I must have been infuriating to teach.

But I did love my school.  The Leavers' Disco with it's cheesy music and final shouts of 'Becket!  Becket!'  The boys in my class who changed the way I see Cher's 'Believe' forever.  And the innocent scandal when one boy kissed one of the girls.  In Year 5!  The horror!

Fast-forward to the present and I don't generally think about that time too much - for me, it was a time when I was at my most vulnerable, too soft and with skin barely thick at all.  But recently people keep on popping up on my newsfeed.  One girl getting married, another pregnant, people who have started their own businesses, are on holiday and the weird day-to-day stuff that we never really think about.

It's been so many years since I've seen most people, and yet I'm so glad that snippets of their life come my way.  It seems so strange to consider how grown up we are now, bizarrely as if those years had never happened.  I spent yesterday evening with one of my best friends from primary school and her boyfriend and it was as if we were 11 only yesterday.  The perfect evening.  An utterly lovely way to spend my time.

And I do hope that when we hit 20 years of having gone our separate ways, someone'll sort out a reunion.  Partly to see how everyone is.  Mainly for the gossip.