There is blossom everywhere

This is L's garden, up in Dundee.

Was up there overnight for my school reunion last night. This is the first class reunion we've had - marking our collective 50th birthdays. The two organisers, K and P, had done a great job of contacting people and there were over 70 people there out of our year of 240 - I think a pretty good turnout. I've seen a handful of people in the years since I left school but otherwise it was more than thirty years since I'd seen most people there. Some people seemed to look more or less the same and I recognised them as soon as they walked into the room while others had changed so dramatically or my memory so comprehensively failed me that even their name label didn't help. It was strange though, re-telling events since school, right back to going to Uni and then getting my first job, all seemed like continuing a conversation with people I last saw only a few weeks ago. Such an easy reconnection. And people seemed to remember odd little details - like the woman who remembered when we were in the same maths class together and just one time she got a better mark than me and was sure there had been a mistake. Or someone else who was surprised I hadn't studied English at Uni as she still remembered an English class when the teacher read out a story of mine - something about a journey - that back then she had thought, 'wow, that's good!' Interesting to hear the different potted life stories - the people who had moved around, the ones who had stayed in one place. Several people really enthused about their work - twenty-five years as a nurse in Ninewells Hospital for example or someone who had just started teaching art having 'escaped' from science. I took a few photographs - sort of semi-official photographer - but as I'd already blipped I didn't change the image for the day. In fact I could also have blipped the joint portrait I took of my parents in the afternoon, so it was one of those days with a real surfeit of potential blips.