Martin has very kindly saved me the effort of chronicling the ten-year reunion of the four most interesting, most attractive and all-round best (yes, I am being entirely objective) ex-Birkdale High School students by writing his own account, here.

It would have been laughably easy to leave this entry at that one short paragraph, but I’ve been neglecting this website enough as it is recently, bar a few frustrated ramblings about computer hardware (most of which have been largely resolved, much to my relief).

It’s quite surprising that of the 150-odd boys who were my peers for five years at Birkdale, I’m in contact with so few of them. Even considering that my form only consisted of 30, we were streamed by ability (or rather, perceived ability (and in some cases sheer malevolence)) for most core subjects, so I met most of the intelligentsia of my year frequently enough (and it’s probably impenetrably long run-on sentences like this one that got me a grade C in English Language, in which I was firmly placed into Set Two…).

So out of 150 pupils in my year (and four times that amount in the school’s other years at any given point during my stay), there are only three people I’m even in anything like regular contact with.

Dan and I are still great friends, having lived together for a while in Derby, and even now that we live several rail-networks apart we manage to get together for beers frequently enough (possibly too frequently, given the amount of money I seem to effortlesly haemmorrhage every time we do so).

Martin is a more interesting case – having been close friends at school, we started to lose touch once I dropped out of college, and lost touch even further during the period when he was at University, to the point where I called his parents house out of the blue to catch up, only to be told he was living in New York, and could I call back in three months’ time.

After he graduated, we caught up a few times in Southport, but in October 2001 he emigrated to Thailand, where he’s remained for most of the past four years. Oddly enough, we’re probably closer now that we have been since high school – we talk frequently online, I’ve been out to visit him in Bangkok twice, and I’m about to book my third trip (all being well, Dan will be accompanying me).

The only other ex-Birkdale alumni with whom I have anything like regular contact is Mike. Born in an industrial accident involving a time machine and a thesaurus, Mike has the rare misfortune of having been an impressively eloquent forty year-old lawyer since birth^[1] Now a high-powered thrusting solicitor in the City of London, he can at last use words like “cornucopia” and “lavatory” in the pub without being mocked any more than is absolutely necessary.

Mike sailed through sixth-form college whilst I noisily and noticably crashed and burned into the academic (and general) oblivion I was to inhabit for the following few years, and by the time he was graduating from Bristol I had barely made it into regular employment. I’ve managed to make up a surprising amount of ground though for an uneducated geek, and can just about keep pace with him in conversation, on the all-too-rare occasion that we actually manage to meet up. We regularly email, but I’ve seen even less of the man who lives just 50 miles away than the man who resides about 6,000 miles further east.

So whilst it was terrific to catch up (and get roaringly drunk) with the two percent of my year with whom I’ve made the effort to keep in touch, I was left in the days afterwards wondering what happened to the other 146, and how I could so effectively lose touch with 99% of my peer group within such a short space of time – not the ten years that have now passed, but the much shorter amount of time it actually took to do so – I’d hazard a guess at two years…

But with ten years gone (and where did it go?) and only four of us in touch, it doesn’t bode enormously well for the twenty-year reunion, when we’ll all be 36 years old. And I thought my fast-approaching 27th birthday was scary…