complaint to Tony Blair about the missing bin from outside the newsagent at the top of the road?’
‘None of those things are even on the List, babe, let alone ear-marked for my next big tick-off.’
‘So what is your next big “tick-off”?’ said Claire, clearly amused by my growing List-inspired vocabulary.
‘Something I’ve had on my mind for quite a while now.’ I stifled a huge yawn of my own, ‘Items 42 to 50: “Catch up with lost friends because you know what? They used to be great friends”.’
Chapter 10: ‘Catch up with lost friends because you know what? They used to be great friends.’
My list of lost friends was long. Very long. It included every kind of lost friend imaginable: Ian and Scott (rubbish summer job lost friends); Monica and Paige (over-worked and under-paid bar working lost friends); Jane, Mia and Simon (camping holiday in Anglesey lost friends); Sarah, Alex and Maria (working on teen magazine lost friends); Sam, Richard and Tall Mike (lost friends inherited from other lost friends); Emma, Jo, Anthony and Alison (university lost friends); Cath, Susie and Sarah (sixth-form lost friends); Mick, Mark and Simon (secondary-school lost friends) and Lisa, Steve and Jen (early days in London lost friends).
I decided to start with the easy ones: those with email addresses. This still left an awful lot of work to do, as the last time I saw some of these people, email had yet to be invented. I began to try to type a suitable message but found myself stuck. What exactly was I supposed to say to people that I hadn’t spoken to in years? And what reason was I going to give for contacting them now? Would they be pleased that they were on my 1,277-item-long To-Do List, or would they be vaguely insulted? I decided to put the question to Claire, who was usually pretty good at working out whether or not I was insulting people.
‘Just tell them that you were thinking about them and want to say hello and hope that they’re well.’ I stood slack jawed in awe at how easy women find anything to do with relationships.
‘You’re right,’ I replied. ‘That’s exactly the thing to do.’
Inspired, I wrote the following email and sent it to everyone that I had addresses for:
Dear [insert name of missing person here], It’s me, Mike Gayle, I was thinking about you recently and how ace you are and so I thought I’d just drop you a line to say, ‘Hello!’ Hope you’re well and would love to hear your news.
All the best,
Mike x
I sent this to five out of the twenty-six lost friends and for a moment or two felt really good about myself. Then four of the five messages were immediately bounced straight back. It was disheartening to say the least. To put it bluntly I was stuffed and I was about to embrace failure when an idea hit me. This was the age of social networking and what better way to catch up with old friends than to join every single social networking website on the internet? So that was what I did. I joined Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friends Reunited, Blogger, WAYN and even ancestry.co.uk and hoped against hope that at least a few of them would be on there. Sure enough I got lucky. Within an hour of joining MySpace I found four different old friends, and a few hours after joining Facebook I found another six, which given that neither website had even existed when I first became friends with these people made me feel really old. Gathering my wits about me, I copied and pasted my original email into messages to all those whose profiles I’d managed to locate, pressed send, then crossed my fingers and waited. Ten minutes later I got my first reply.
I first met Sam in the autumn of 1992. Having just graduated that summer and moved back home to Birmingham I’d been feeling a bit lost without the security of university life with its easygoing daily structure of lectures and nightly array of
‘None of those things are even on the List, babe, let alone ear-marked for my next big tick-off.’
‘So what is your next big “tick-off”?’ said Claire, clearly amused by my growing List-inspired vocabulary.
‘Something I’ve had on my mind for quite a while now.’ I stifled a huge yawn of my own, ‘Items 42 to 50: “Catch up with lost friends because you know what? They used to be great friends”.’
Chapter 10: ‘Catch up with lost friends because you know what? They used to be great friends.’
My list of lost friends was long. Very long. It included every kind of lost friend imaginable: Ian and Scott (rubbish summer job lost friends); Monica and Paige (over-worked and under-paid bar working lost friends); Jane, Mia and Simon (camping holiday in Anglesey lost friends); Sarah, Alex and Maria (working on teen magazine lost friends); Sam, Richard and Tall Mike (lost friends inherited from other lost friends); Emma, Jo, Anthony and Alison (university lost friends); Cath, Susie and Sarah (sixth-form lost friends); Mick, Mark and Simon (secondary-school lost friends) and Lisa, Steve and Jen (early days in London lost friends).
I decided to start with the easy ones: those with email addresses. This still left an awful lot of work to do, as the last time I saw some of these people, email had yet to be invented. I began to try to type a suitable message but found myself stuck. What exactly was I supposed to say to people that I hadn’t spoken to in years? And what reason was I going to give for contacting them now? Would they be pleased that they were on my 1,277-item-long To-Do List, or would they be vaguely insulted? I decided to put the question to Claire, who was usually pretty good at working out whether or not I was insulting people.
‘Just tell them that you were thinking about them and want to say hello and hope that they’re well.’ I stood slack jawed in awe at how easy women find anything to do with relationships.
‘You’re right,’ I replied. ‘That’s exactly the thing to do.’
Inspired, I wrote the following email and sent it to everyone that I had addresses for:
Dear [insert name of missing person here], It’s me, Mike Gayle, I was thinking about you recently and how ace you are and so I thought I’d just drop you a line to say, ‘Hello!’ Hope you’re well and would love to hear your news.
All the best,
Mike x
I sent this to five out of the twenty-six lost friends and for a moment or two felt really good about myself. Then four of the five messages were immediately bounced straight back. It was disheartening to say the least. To put it bluntly I was stuffed and I was about to embrace failure when an idea hit me. This was the age of social networking and what better way to catch up with old friends than to join every single social networking website on the internet? So that was what I did. I joined Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friends Reunited, Blogger, WAYN and even ancestry.co.uk and hoped against hope that at least a few of them would be on there. Sure enough I got lucky. Within an hour of joining MySpace I found four different old friends, and a few hours after joining Facebook I found another six, which given that neither website had even existed when I first became friends with these people made me feel really old. Gathering my wits about me, I copied and pasted my original email into messages to all those whose profiles I’d managed to locate, pressed send, then crossed my fingers and waited. Ten minutes later I got my first reply.
I first met Sam in the autumn of 1992. Having just graduated that summer and moved back home to Birmingham I’d been feeling a bit lost without the security of university life with its easygoing daily structure of lectures and nightly array of
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