Nostalgia

Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing... it can generate sentences like "those were the days" or skewer your memories into a warped, and usually more positive, version of events. It can make you long for a previously destructive relationship, or create an illusion of friendship in people that never really existed. This is all perfectly understandable; as we get older we realise more and more that the world is not black and white and is, in fact, infinitely more complex, chaotic and illogical than we are ever truly capable of understanding. With this knowledge we retreat within ourselves and hark back to a time when we weren't so aware of all the middle ground that life offers up. This time is usually childhood, or the latter parts of childhood and the beginning of conscious memory.

This is why Friends Reunited is doing such a roaring trade. Millions and millions of people, despondant at the notion of their futures, have turned to the past the hope it will remind them of a time when self-importance and self-indulgance were required character traits. It reconnects you with people with whom you have a built in bond, and thus the complexities of real interpersonal relationships can be glossed over momentarily.

That's me in the centre, second row from top.

I rejoined the site a couple of days ago during the dying flushes of being ill ('Winter Vomiting Disease' is what the Guardian called it) and have since enjoyed my time skirting through the lives of my former classmates and secretly measuring their success against mine. I'm not sure who is winning...

• about half are married
• just under half still live in Nottingham
• 70% of males work in IT
• 30% of females have children
  
• 8 people have emigrated
• 2 people have dropped out and are proud
• 7 people have an unusual or cool job

Obviously we all have our own barometers of success, but I can't help that feel that the class of 1994 has somewhat let the side down in the 'drastic departure from what is expected' field. Caroline Hustings aside (Radio DJ in Bangkok - yes, go Caroline - second from left, third row from top), most people have posted something akin to what Tim Taylor (to my left, top row) wrote:

"After graduating from Uni, headed home to Nottingham. Where I worked in the textile industry working as an Account Manager. Have now left the tax office, and am back studying for a professional qualification whilst working for a firm of accountants in Nottm. Been in my house for 18 months now , and finally got round to do doing the garden!!"

Now Tim was a lovely guy, and I sincerely expect him to still be so, but that description has hardly left me salivating with a desperate urge to get back in touch with him. In fact, it has illustrated for me that Friends Reunited has inadvertedly worked against the forces of nostalgia by allowing us to forever wipe out those rose-tinted memories and replace them with the harsh fact that we're all grown up and, look, this is what we're doing now.

There is another option; lie. My friend Lord Bunn claims on his Friends Reunited page to be about to publish his third novel. If you're gonna do it, do it in style.

Mr Micklewhite, Science.

You realize that life goes fast
It's hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun doesn't go down
It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round
- the Flaming Lips