Forty fucking years later…
1. Been in the UK for a month…the longest I’ve spent here since I graduated from uni, which was apparently several decades ago despite the fact that I’m fairly certain the 1980s were about fifteen minutes ago.
2. Usually I come home on a fly-by visit…friends, family, lunches, dinners, trains, too much wine, must dash…Heathrow. This time I’ve had the luxury of actually being here. Walking. Sitting. Looking around. Remembering. It’s been extraordinarily good for the soul.
3. London will always be part of me...the buildings...the tube...the parks...the pubs...the banter...the aromatic smell of people piss wafting past a park bench...ahhh, home.
4. And then there are the tiny encounters that make somewhere feel familiar...the friendly chinwag with other sausage-dog owners...apparently we are a global sisterhood of women with abandonment issues, being ruled by an eight-inch-tall yapping narcissist.
5. Apropos of my time travel, I’ve just finished watching the final 7 Up episodes. There is something quite extraordinary about watching the same people at 7, 14, 21, 28 and every seven years since, right through to 70. Nothing like watching an entire lifetime unfold in seven-year increments to make you wonder where the bloody hell yours went.
6. Which is particularly timely because this trip was also a daunting 40-year school reunion…Forty Fucking Years…There’s something deeply strange about walking into a room full of women who knew you before almost everything in your life happened.
7. Before careers, marriages, children, divorces, mortgages, therapy, botox and everything in between. These women knew me before I had any idea who the hell I was. And looking around the room, it struck me how many different women we all become along the way. The good girl. The difficult one. The wife. The mother. The career woman. And, of course, several of them at once.
8. And within 20 minutes we were all sixteen again. The funny ones were still funny. The confident ones were still holding court. The kindred spirits found each other again before we’d finished our first drink. And apparently, even forty years later, old mean-girl memories are surprisingly hard to shake.
9. Maybe that’s what nostalgia really is...we think we’re going back for the places, the music, the people and the memories...but perhaps what we’re really looking for is a glimpse of the person we used to be.
10. Turns out she’s still there…just with better hair.
