One word? When seven would do…

A long, long time ago (which I can never type or say without wanting to carry on with ‘I can still remember how that music used to make me smile….’) when I first worked at B&Q as a 16 year old there was a 17 year old girl who also worked there part time. Our shifts rarely clashed but I recognised her sufficiently to shyly talk to her when I went to a sixth form open day before I started there and she showed me round with lofty, soon to be Upper Sixth superiority. During the summer she dropped out of sixth form to go to art college instead but as I was taking two of the same courses as her she gave me all her old course notes and we bonded a friendship. We had similarly giddy mothers (who also got on very well) and lived in similarly large houses and had similar aged brothers and that was sort of enough to base a friendship on back then.

For a while we were very close, we once went out to Brighton with a group of her friends on the Thursday night before Good Friday with a plan to pub and club til closing time, stay in an all night cafe until morning and then get the first train back home. I was working at 11am the next morning but I was 17 and didn’t really need sleep back then 😆 Unfortunately after a great night pubbing and clubbing (in this fab nightclub which had pinprick holes in the dance floor which had different colour spotlights underneath which showed through making sparkly twinkly rainbows of light through the dry ice) we failed totally to find one of the all night cafes we’d heard about, and when the last kebab shop shut at 3am we worked our way to the station to find the first train home was on Sunday timetables being a bank holiday Good Friday and we had about 6 hours to wait. We all tried to sleep on one of the docked trains but got kicked off, then we tried to sleep in the hard plastic chairs on the platform but the pidgeons kept crapping on us and then they shut the station so in the end Dina and I got a taxi home and split the £16 fare back to Worthing. We shared confidences of all sorts back then and she supported me through a particular period of teenage angst and in true Malory Towers fashion gave me a tiny silver locket which was one of her own belongings as an 18th birthday present cos she was too broke to afford a new gift but wanted me to have something. It’s still in my very meagre box of treasures upstairs actually, I’ve told Scarlett the story behind it and that she can have it one day when she’s old enough to treasure it properly.

Our friendship drifted a bit when she started seeing one of our friends who had recently split up with his fiance. Him and said fiance got back together, by which point Dina and I had moved into different social circles – as you do when you are that age. It was truly moved on when he split up with the fiance again a while later and hooked up with me. That would be Ady! All very symmetrical as one of my exes was a very close friend of Ady’s. Infact I think the two of them should have hooked up to really make it tidy 😆 Strangely out of the whole incestuous group of friends who all had various one degree of seperation relationships with each other over the course of a couple of years there is only Ady and I who went the distance and ended up married with children.

Anyway, I still bump into her Mum from time to time and I know my Mum still bumps into her Mum too and they exchange stories about ‘Nicola’ and ‘Dina’ and respective grandchildren so I knew she was married and living in Bristol with a son about Scarlett’s age. We were very different people and I don’t think it was one of those enduring ‘for life’ sisterhood type friendships but for a period in time we were very close, and of course she snogged my husband before I did so there will always be a bond :lol:.

Today we all went to do our mammoth months worth of food shopping and towards the end I had veered ahead with Scarlett to get toilet rolls with one trolley while Ady and Davies were tailing behind with the second trolley choosing which coloured bottle of bleach to get. Scarlett was prancing about nearly colliding with everyone’s trolleys and I said to her ‘Quick look behind you!’ grinning at a big, friendly looking man she was about to back into while pulling faces at me and he did a really good Sully style ‘Rah!’ at her sending her running back to me giggling while his wife behind him looked at me and shrieked ‘Nic!!!!’. And there was Dina :). Introduced her to Davies and Scarlett and sent the children back to fetch Ady too. We had a brief catch up and went off on our respective ways again but I’ve spent the day recalling the times when Dina was the first person I’d ring to report something exciting happening and some of the laughs we shared. I hope she’s done the same too :).

Anyway, food shop done and brought home and packed away – which takes bloody forever, we had lunch and headed over to Chris and Julie’s a mere hour later than planned. 😉 We had a nice few hours over there including chatting, a wander down to some nearby fields where plums were ripe for picking and generally catching up with each other. It all ended rather annoyingly when their old and quite blind dog who is prone to crotch sniffing and obviously as I hate dogs makes me his prime target came and tried to sit on me – he is a lurcher and HUGE and knocked my boiling hot cup of tea all over me, my camera and the picture of a tardis Davies and I were sitting on the floor drawing 🙄 Bloody animal! Having said we’d go when I’d finished my tea and knowing our dinner would be ready for us as we’d bunged it in the oven before leaving the house we set off for home.

Lovely dinner followed by a laze around while the children played with Doctor Who characters and Where’s Wally books and then they went to bed. I had this crazed idea that if I sat and read Davies a bedtime story and then sat with him reading my book he’d go to sleep quicker as he is twitching a lot and has been quite weepy today through sheer tiredness. It didn’t work and at 930 with my alcohol consumption hours severly eaten into I gave up and came downstairs for a bath :roll:.

Tomorrow we’re off to the Science Centre in Hertsmonceux which I’ve wanted to go to for about 2 years since Steve and Sarah were down here before, to meet up with the Clarkes and Ros and remaining child, which I’m really looking forward to :).