Forty-One Flashcards for One School Reunion

Andy went straight to the bar for what he called “a much needed pint of courage”. I had no accent to lose. I had a stack of cards and a seven-year-old examiner, who tested me over breakfast all week. By Wednesday I was on thirty-eight out of forty-one, and two of the misses were twins.

The other man who went first was more alarming. In January 2010 four former pupils of Dalziel High School in Motherwell, class of 1974–1980, met in the Electric Bar and set a date for a big one. Between them they could remember 86 names. Friends Reunited then sent invitations to 247 people, most of whom, noted the organiser, who blogs as Layclerk, were from the years above and below. I had forty-one flashcards. He would have needed a filing cabinet.

On the night, by his reckoning, 22 came. The lounge bar had already been booked that evening for a 21st birthday party: “not us then, perhaps our children!” He described his year as having walked out of the school gates and “transformed into alleged grown-ups”. Alleged is doing a lot of work there. On Friday it would be doing it for me.

My husband, who has never been to a reunion and regards Facebook as a kind of weather, offered me a mock. He would stand in the hall as a stranger and I would come in and name him. I came in and named him. He said, “Wrong. I’m the vet.” We did not speak again until Thursday.

On Friday I walked into the function room and they were all there, older, wider and exactly themselves, and I got all forty-one. The vet is a dentist. The twins were easy in person, because one has a beard. Like Andy, I wanted to talk to everyone, and I did, by name, first time. Then the woman I had sat beside in chemistry for two years looked at me for a long, kind moment and said, “Sorry, were you in our year?”

Nobody, it emerged, had made a card for me.