Last year, whilst on the home leg of my trip (I think it was in Albania), I was watching the film Grosse Point Blank. In a nutshell it's about a contract killer returning to his home town for his 10-year high school reunion. This got me thinking about my own high school days and how next year (i.e. this year) it would be 10 years since I had left school.
The seed had been sown and soon after returning I decided to set about trying to organise my own class reunion (an entire high school reunion would have been crazy as each year group had over 500 pupils and I didn't know many of them). There were two immediate problems to the exercise: I was now living in London and yet I went to school in the south west of France, so finding and contacting my old classmates would be more difficult, and secondly the whole concept of school reunions isn't very common in France. Nevertheless I started by contacting my high school friends that I'm still in touch with to get their opinions on the idea. Initial feedback was positive and so I went ahead with the task of finding the rest of my classmates, mainly by trawling through the internet. Once I had found a few people it snowballed from there and in the end I managed to find 35 of the 38 former pupils.
Despite my happy memories of Pau it seems that people were itching to leave, with only 5 still living in the area, and some having moved as far afield as Ireland and Norway to get away; but now, this weekend, we are returning again to our old stomping grounds, some of us for the first time in several years. Personally I am curious to see how much we have changed and what we have become in the intervening 10 years (although I don't expect any of my former classmates to be assassins I'm sure there will be plenty of interesting stories). And with that I'll leave you with our class photo from 1997 (see if you can spot me).
The seed had been sown and soon after returning I decided to set about trying to organise my own class reunion (an entire high school reunion would have been crazy as each year group had over 500 pupils and I didn't know many of them). There were two immediate problems to the exercise: I was now living in London and yet I went to school in the south west of France, so finding and contacting my old classmates would be more difficult, and secondly the whole concept of school reunions isn't very common in France. Nevertheless I started by contacting my high school friends that I'm still in touch with to get their opinions on the idea. Initial feedback was positive and so I went ahead with the task of finding the rest of my classmates, mainly by trawling through the internet. Once I had found a few people it snowballed from there and in the end I managed to find 35 of the 38 former pupils.
Despite my happy memories of Pau it seems that people were itching to leave, with only 5 still living in the area, and some having moved as far afield as Ireland and Norway to get away; but now, this weekend, we are returning again to our old stomping grounds, some of us for the first time in several years. Personally I am curious to see how much we have changed and what we have become in the intervening 10 years (although I don't expect any of my former classmates to be assassins I'm sure there will be plenty of interesting stories). And with that I'll leave you with our class photo from 1997 (see if you can spot me).
2 comments:
Ummmm.... looking.... nope, can't spot you.
But then, I was looking for a chap with a fat lip.
To put you all out of your misery I'm the rather suave looking chap, bottom row, second from the right.
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