Mutatis mutandis

I left school, ahem, a number of years ago, well OK, almost thirty years ago, and apart from one memorable occasion a few years ago when I went to a surprise 40th birthday party for a former schoolmate, I have seen pretty well no one from those days.

The advent of Friends Reunited, and more recently Facebook has meant that I have in fact kept in email contact with a small handful of people, but never face to face.

So anyway, in January I was contacted by someone I haven't seen since about 1979, and he's arranged a bit of a get together next Friday which has rather grown in scale as the net widens and more people are contacted and invited.

It's only a few beers in the Electric Bar in Motherwell, which always has been more or less an unofficial Dalziel High School Former Pupils Club, but I'm actually really looking forward to it. Particularly now that sense appears to have prevailed and the event has been opened up to persons of the feminine gender too!

I say sense has prevailed only because when it was first mooted to include ladies there were a few low level grumblings about it being a lads evening and if women were there we wouldn't be able to swear and fart. Well personally I rarely fart, not when there's anyone at all around anyway, but as regular readers will realise, I do swear a lot. I don't go out of my way to offend, and I will in fact take steps to try not to offend, but swearing is an intrinsic part of my vocabulary, and if I can swear when in conversation with clergy and family members, then I can do so in front of adult females with whom I went to school!

So anyway, the latest email has just arrived and to my surprise, frankly, it seems that there are a number of the girls intent on turning up. It'll be good to catch up with people, male and female alike, albeit I'm well aware that none of us will be the same people we were in 1980.

I know I'm certainly not.

Thankfully.

The photos, from around 1964 and 1977, and my current profile image respectively, are evidence of physical changes, but underneath the exterior, there are inevitably psychological ones too, which are much more important. Maybe in a future post I'll try to outline those changes.

Or maybe not.

Anyway, the profile photo is not actually of me, as if you needed to be told that, but in some ways it does bear a passing resemblance. It is my beard, and those are a former pair of glasses of mine, for instance. And sometimes it's how I see myself.

But in any case, changes or not, Davy, Dougie, Dougie, Dougie, Euan, Gordon, Ian, Paul, Scott, Tom, Hazel, Karen, Elaine, Mags, Margaret, Carol and June - it's going to be a good one!