Another Christmas 'get together'...

Today DH and I went to the early church service so that he could go to golf mid morning and I could meet my friends for lunch at a Yum Cha Restaurant. (I wished I had my camera or phone with me as the church looked beautiful with all the purple Advent banners)

These ladies have been my friends for many years; 2 of them started school with me in 1957, one other lady came to my primary school in about Grade 5 and the others started high school with myself and my other friends in 1964. For many years we have been out of touch but in the last few years we've drifted back in touch...Facebook has been very helpful in this contact. My friend Jane organised today and she invited quite a few people who live locally. Unfortunately it's a busy time for most people so we ended up just a group of 7. But we had a great time recalling stories from our school days...including a scandal when we were in Grade 8, involving the Deputy principal...tsk tsk!  His replacement as DP was a teacher called Ray Massie...we recalled how Mr Massie had a 'chook farm' (poultry farm) and each year he would bring in bins of chook manure and they would spread this over the school oval to fertilise the grass. It would stink a bit but the thing that we remembered was that there would be little white featehers in the manure. When the wind would blow, these feathers would 'dance' around the surface of the oval....aah memories! With OH and S today this wouldn't happen!
One of our number has just separated from her husband and she told us of the dramas of starting life anew and her plans so she doesn't have to work until she is 70 :-(. The majority of us around that table have personal experience of such a situation so we were certainly a sympathetic audience.

When we have get togethers like this it's really weird that all those years just seem to melt away....it's just like our school days were just 'yesterday', not nearly 50 years ago. I was the odd one out today...all the other 'girls' today were in the class 10C1 (we called it a commercial class...today it might be called business studies), I was in the class 10A2D which was a combination of Academic and Domestic Science stream. We (the academic)  didn't do typing and bookkeeping, instead we did an extra science subject and maths subject. Memories...