Foreign Perspectives

Over the years I’ve been making efforts now and again to track down various friends from places I’ve been ranging from primary school through to university.

Thanks to the likes of FriendsReunited, FaceBook and LinkedIn it’s gradually become an easier task as the years went by. However, there’s a surprisingly high percentage of people who don’t use any of those services and particularly surprising in my case as I did computer science at university so I’d have expected the percentage of those from the course using these services to be higher than average. I even had the idea some years back that presumably there’d be quite a high percentage of the computer science people who would have their own domain name by now but, so far, I’ve only tracked down one person that way. Still, now and again there’s little flurry of activity on one or other of those sites and suddenly you find people you’d been looking for over a number of years.

One of those little flurries happened over the past couple of months and I’ve added more contacts from the past than I’d done in the previous several decade from primary school right through to university.

Obviously the people I’ve not seen from primary school have put on “a few years” with their appearance. However, what’s really striking is how differently people have aged from university. Probably a silly assumption to make but I figured that we’d all look like we were 22+X years but in fact the range of appearances is something like 22+X-10 through to 22+X+10 ie some look around 20 years older than others even though we’re all just about the same age.

Now, I can understand the shows like 10 years younger have 40 year olds who look like they’re 50 to begin with and who look 35 after their transformation because they’re picking people from a whole host of different backgrounds and lifestyles. It seems strange that you can get a similar range from people with quite similar backgrounds and, by and large, fairly similar life histories since the last time I saw them at university too.

What I must do next is to compare what people said they were going to do with what they actually did… I’m sure between this post and that one I’ll end up having nobody speaking to me 🙂