Remember the Nights

I've just been for a yummy meal at Pizza Express (garlic dough balls anyone!!) with my friend P and an old friend from school. We worked out we haven't seen each other for about 7 years, so it was nice to catch up. Well, I say catch up - what we actually did was reminisce about our school days. We realised we're getting older now - eeeek! The things we used to get up to when we were 15 or so!! I would be horrified if I thought any teenage daughter of mine was doing the stuff we were, although times have changed even since then, I guess. We talked about all the fab house parties we went to, all the boys we snogged, how we blatantly lied to our parents about where we were going, who with and where we were stopping for the night... Once, after a particularly rowdy party, a group of us snuck off to the local tennis club, where one of the lads was a member and knew where the key was kept. We spent a very uncomfortable night sleeping on the hard wooden benches of the changing room and when I woke up in the morning, my contact lenses had dried up in my eyes and I couldn't open them... Of course, sneaking out was all the more difficult than getting in, given that it was now daylight...

I remember the highlight of my weekends was spending Friday and Saturday nights sitting on the benches at the Aston Triangle (on the Aston University campus), drinking from bottles of Thunderbird, 20/20 or really cheap cider that we had to ask our older male friends to buy as the shopkeeper knew we were all 15. When we plucked up the courage, we progressed to the nearby pub (The Pot of Beer!) and bricked it if ever there was a police raid - we frantically tried to work out what our birth dates would be if we were 18... Aah, those were the days....!