FRIENDS REUNITED

During a mad moment a few years ago I signed up to Friends Reunited thinking it would be fun to get back in touch with people I was at school with.

Of course like everyone else I never did bother. If we’d been that good friends we’d have kept in touch anyway, and who wants to be reminded about their embarrassing teenage preferences in clothes, hairstyles and music by some git you never really liked in the first place.

So I never bothered to check it.

But part of the deal with them is you have to give your email address when you register and occasionally I get the odd email telling me that X number of people from my year at my school or college have joined.

Normally I ignore them but I got 1 yesterday and out of curiosity thought I’d have a look.

Now I have found a use for Friends Reunited.

People put in little bits of info about what they’re up to – job, career, wife/husband, kids etc.

You know how there are always a few kids who are the best at everything – top of the form, open the batting AND bowling in the summer and are either striker or flyhalf in the winter, and inevitably become head boy or prefect or milk monitor or whatever. And they are all matey with each other, hanging out in a little band of “cool kids”, and you, and they, just assume they are going to go on and rule the world, and you really envy them.

Well there’s nothing like checking into Friends Reunited and discovering that one of them is now working at a Carphone Warehouse in Croydon and another is an engineer in Solihull.

I realize I may not be exactly Ming the Merciless with a huge empire lording it over all and sundry, but then I never expected to, while these boys did.

There is nothing like the sight of others failing spectacularly to make your own smaller failures feel like a victory.