One For Dave

My registration at Friends Reunited finally paid off last night - I got an e-mail telling me that I had a message from an ex-schoolmate at Greenfields High who I more or less liked. He was part of the same hopeless-at-footy-and-cricket, Doctor-Who-and-Goon-Show-fan, totally-fringe-weirdo crowd that I was in for my last three years of high school.

I'm not sure I should have written that last sentence - by way of an answer to his question about what I've been up to in the last thirty-three years I sent him the address of this blog and that other one, where some, but not all, of the grubby details of my life since school are laid bare for all the world to see. With the emphasis on grubby, since that's the font et origo of most of the stuff I pass off as humour.

It's about time that registration at Friends Reunited paid off. OK, so the past four years I've been getting what I paid for - a list of footy-and-cricket-adept boofheads with whom I had little in common then, even less now, and one or two people who might be worth contacting. And some interesting where are they now stuff which generally shows that the kids who got streamed out of school in Form 4, or earlier, and went off to seek opportunities elsewhere, often did a lot better in life than us mugs who stuck out the full sentence in the hope of achieving academic excellence. My favourite example of that is the totally dysfunctional kid who joined the army as an apprentice, worked his way up to Major, and went overseas a couple of times on peacekeeping operations.

That's enough of that for now - I've got to see if I can track down a hand cranked laundry mangle on E-Bay. I'm going to need one if I adopt one suggestion I got in response to this post at Larvatus Prodeo that I cut down my laudromat costs by hand-washing everything - including towels and bed linen. If I can't find one, I'll probably have to go all third world and find a stretch of the Moonee Ponds Creek where I can bang the sheets on the bikepath or the concrete embankment.