"It's the most wonderful time of the year" lalala...yes it's true I'm still in a sickly joyous mood at the moment...well it's November 5th what do you expect!
It's been a busy old week to be fair, old friends reuniting after 25 years, jobs ending, jobs beginning, A&E, plastic surgery Halloween, A limestone Soldier, Bonfire Night & Birthdays galore...not quite the usual (unless you live in Weatherfield).
I'll concentrate on the reunion as this will take a while, you'll have to wait for my next installment to find out about the rest! :D...I know I'm cruel like that.
As usual it all started with me geeking around on the "tinterweb" in a bleak attempt to add a bit of excitement into my otherwise very mundane afternoon. I had decided to update my Friends Reunited profile?!...think I was spurred on by a report on the news that they were trying to save my Old School building from being demolished after a fire as Stan Laurel used to board there as a lad & rightly so! I have allot of fond memories of that part of school...mainly of the boys in class lighting the gas taps :s....I'm going off on a tangent.
As I was saying after updating my ...very...very boring profile I had a scan around...after exhausting the search functions trying to locate my Friends from yest er year I decided to have a look on behalf of my mum. At this point you need a little background information on my mum, aged 16 my mum decided to move to South Africa with a friend (yes you know where I get it from now) anyway very long story short...they had a fallout & my mum ended up moving from Sassleburg(Transvaal) in the Orange Free State to North Cliff just outside Jo Burg. Here she lived in an apartment with about six other people (mainly students)...when I was younger she would always tell me about how wonderful her friends were & how she wished she'd kept in touch with them.
Me being me, I decided to do a search on a few of the main names I could remember from her tales...& lo & behold I found one of them!...without giving it a thought I sent a message which read something along the lines of "Hi, you wont know me but I believe you may know my mum..." I obviously added a few facts & dates to jog his memory...otherwise it would have been quite a random email indeed.
Later that day when my mum arrived home I told her all about the old friend I may have found & she couldn't believe it...but ever the pessimist she didn't want to get too excited saying "oh it wont be the right person" & "I doubt they would want to talk to me after all this time".
The very next day I received an email saying that "J" (mum's old friend) had replied to my message...my mum was panicking so much as I logged into the site to see what his reply was. I wish you could have seen her face as she read the email confirming that it was indeed the friend she had been looking for all those years, he seemed just as shocked & excited as my mum as he explained a little about himself & what he was up to now...we were shocked to find that he was now living in the UK with his wife & children & was extremely eager to find out what my mum had been doing all these years.
After many lengthy emails to & fro trying their hardest to summarise the last twenty five years of their lives (wow I've not even been alive that long!) marriage, children etc..they exchanged numbers and tonight "J"called!...my dad & I sat listened intently as my mum & "J" talked about the "good old days" in Jo Burg...why he & his family had to flee South Africa..where all the other house mates were now, you could make a movie out of it no lie!
Just before "J" went he asked if he could speak to me...with a puzzled expression I took the receiver from my mum, on saying "hello?!" I was greeted with a soft Afrikaans voice full of praise & thanks for making it all happen...I didn't know what to say...I didn't feel like I had done that much...I'd merely clicked a few buttons & got the ball rolling that's all...but the gratitude continued...I never realised what a difference I was going to make, I'm so pleased I was able to do this for them...it's true when people say you feel so much better when you do something for others.
All of our family's are now hoping to have a gathering sometime in the near future which will be great...I'll be sure to let you know how it all goes & hopefully post some pictures up here for you all to see :).
Anyway...I should go to bed now as it's after midnight...again! :p
Ciao!!
The perfect words never crossed my mind because there was nothing in there but
you...
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