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Friday Thoughts 15 - Friends!

Updated: Feb 5, 2022

It’s the end of another week and it has just been wonderful to welcome so many people back, both staff and students. We have now officially welcomed back Jack, Rosie, Sau Wan, Francesca, Suzy, Yasmin, Sarah, Adam and Kirstie and we expect to welcome James and Michael next week.

Watching the children this week re-connect is magical. The purity and innocence of their friendships is just heart-warming. Just this morning I saw two EYFS children arrive and completely unprompted I heard ‘Oliver!’, ‘Olivia!’ and the biggest of grins on two little faces. Oliver wouldn’t come into school until Olivia was ready. He was waiting for his friend! On the flip side, I had a usually cheerful and happy chap wracked with tears because he couldn’t sit next to his friend on the carpet ‘for ever’ (and we all know how long for ever is when you are 4). These very different, effusive, shows of emotion, combined with the two girls’ silent joy in finding eachother again (the slow smiles and arms reaching out to hold hands round the pillar in the STEAM room) showed that quiet emotion is just as powerful.

This made me really think about our friendships and connections. I didn’t grow up as part of the Facebook generation, and was a fully-fledged teacher when someone introduced me to it. So the idea of ‘collecting’ friends in a race to see who could have more was a little alien to me, especially when a ‘friend’ might be someone you have met just once! Anyone I have on my friends list is someone I genuinely want to keep in contact with and, honestly, I only use it as a way of knowing I can get hold of someone easily who is still important to me but our lives have diverged.

I’ve changed my Spotify playlist this week and it has transported me back 20+ years to my late teens/early twenties. Some of the songs trigger such powerful episodic memories it is quite extraordinary. Songs I had completely forgotten about, album covers of CDs which are sitting in a box in an English garage (I have never been one to buy much music, so the CDs I do own are generally pretty important to me). My journey into and through Britpop began with my friends from BHS, my very first ‘proper job’ at the age of 16 taken so that I could learn to drive. They introduced me to a whole new world of nightclubs where the music had words not just techno beats and places we would head to continue our nights out. Zoe was a particular fan of Jarvis Cocker and Sally much more in to Blur (I was much more an Oasis girl myself). Our lives went in very different direction after those days, although all of us ended up teaching. Listening to to ‘The Riverboat Song’ took me back to a train journey with friends from school on our way to a Keele University open day, my friend Tony re-writing the lyrics. I literally haven’t seen him since I bumped in to him on the university campus when I was doing my PGCE. Hearing someone say ‘Sit down!’ makes me smile and think of lectures with Rachel when we would respond with ‘Sit down next to me!’. Rachel and I are very much still in touch by the way, 23 years and counting and I am loving my reminiscence, recreating my lost youth!

To finish, I would just like to say that the year 2000 was a long way in the future and yes, it would be strange when we were all (almost) fully grown, for anyone who remembers the old Birmingham New Street station taxi rank, I never could stand there without hearing ‘You’re my Wonderwall!’ and thanks to Google I now know what a Brimful of Asha is!

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