Brilliant Weekend!

I had a friend to stay for the weekend - I've not seen her for 14 years. We were best friends at my first secondary school, which I left aged 14, in really a very bad headspace (the school was rife with bullying, and I was not temperamentally suited to staying at a boarding school). By the time I felt able to think about my time there (without the attendant mental and physical pains - I would get really bad stomach cramp!), we had lost touch. An attempt to get back in contact through Friends Reunited didn't work.

Then, in January, she got back in touch through Facebook. We started emailing, then using MSN, and suddenly the years had disappeared, and it was as though we had never lost touch.

So she came up to visit us on Saturday and stayed overnight - poor John didn't get a word in edgeways as we chatted pretty much non-stop - ranging from general state of the world through to what my ex-classmates are now doing (I can't think of a more fitting punishment than "estate agent"!). It was incredibly cathartic - I was able to lay a lot of demons to rest, and it was actually genuinely interesting to find out what was happening (including the very real sadness at learning that one of the nicer people in my year had died a few years ago from a drugs overdose - not the end that I would have thought for him aged 14).

Whilst I know that my time at that school will always be with me - every so often I will get a flashback, usually from an unintentional comment (a recent one was our hockey coach saying that he'd forgotten about me whilst sorting out the training - that pushed me back to being the only one from my year in our boarding house not invited to a party - the group left from the bus stop opposite my bedroom window...), but I can now accept that what happened, though unpleasant, helped to shape me and is part of who I am.

In other news - my training for the Race for Life is going really well - I went out for a run last night (hooray for lighter evenings!), and went a little bit further than I'd intended. Mainly because I got lost... The outward journey was not too bad, but the last bit got a bit muddy and slightly overgrown, so, when I turned round and spotted a nice paved path heading back in roughly the same direction, I thought that would be ideal! Unfortunately, it very quickly curved away from the route that I had initially taken, and I ended up doing quite a big loop before it rejoined the main pathway (and as it scrambled down the hillside at the end to a three-way path split at the bottom, I was very lucky to get the right one heading back!). But I did just over 2 1/2 miles, and most of it was running, so I'm feeling very pleased with myself.