Carol Cuts the Cake...

... was the other contender. The cake was admirably ridiculous, but not a great shot of Carol.
This is because I was obliged to use flash until almost midnight. (I hate using the flash.)
This is because the room was not only furnished like a bordello, it was lit like one.
This is (presumably) because somebody assumed that 60-odd girls, who met each other 46 years ago and then for 6 years spent more time with each other than they did with their families, would give a rat's arse about seeing each others' wrinkles.

This was the last shot of the night, taken at six minutes to twelve, when they finally turned the lights on in an effort to get us to leave (it didn't really work, we just all started in again taking pictures - without flash).

Eva (holding a piece of the ridiculous cake wrapped in serviettes, so you still don't get to see it - sorry), Michelle, Robyn, Pamela, Rima and Deborah. I don't remember who the hands belong to.
These were some of the nice girls. Not everybody was nice back then. (Coincidentally, when admiring Eva's dimple just now, I realised they all have a dimple. Aren't they lucky?)

We meet every ten years and have apparently reached an age when some of us think we ought to meet more often. I think the plan is for unofficial lunches twice a year. We'll see if that takes off. It probably will in a small way.

Since last time, the first five of us have died (that we know of), including two cancers and one suicide. As seems so often the case, she was the girl who appeared to have everything a girl could possibly want.
Those are probably pretty low statistics for a cohort of 120.

The other interesting thing is that ten years ago we all recognised each other fairly easily, but this time there was a great deal of putting on reading glasses to check name tags. I found that once I saw the name, the face suddenly became familiar. It became a game. Girls would walk up to those they hadn't talked to yet, with their hands over their name tags, look each other in the eye and try to guess in advance who they were about to say "Oh, of course...!" to.

For some reason the School Song tends to get sung at these things, but not usually until everybody is as pissed as they're likely to get, which on this occasion was not very - at $10 a glass! It does however have some amusing words (at least in the old version, which we all naturally prefer to the politically correct new version) and the tune is "Men of Harlech", which is quite fun to sing, so it's not too much of a hardship.

Pamela is a very naughty girl. I hope she never grows up.