Blast from the Past

I’m looking forward to next week now. An old friend from school is going to be dropping by on his way to a wedding. His wife is due to give birth in five weeks, so there will be lots to share and talk about. It’s weird, we see each other once or twice a year, and it’s so easy and comfortable, even though it’s almost 20 years ago that we left school. We keep in touch with about 10 people we went to school with, and enjoy meeting up occasionally. Whether our partners enjoy us reminiscing is debatable, but then again we are building new shared memories all the time. It hit me yesterday how much time has gone by. Manchester has an awful lot of University students, and they have descended in full force for Freshers’ Week. For me the term Fresher now means more than new, it means they all seem fresh faced and young. Perhaps the legacy of playing football last night is distorting my vision, I feel old today, bits of me are aching that I didn’t know existed. The sight of all these students has obviously awoken something in my colleagues as well. We were discussing yesterday how great it was to be students – the sense of possibility, opportunity and freedom. We all agreed that it was probably the best time of our lives. Other moments surpass others, marriage, children etc. but for the actual consistently best times, without real worries, college wins hands down. If only there was a way to recreate that feeling of going off to college for the first time, the trepidation and excitement all rolled together. There again parenthood was like that, but with more than a three year course stretching ahead.