LETTER TO SYLVIA

March 2003
(Just found this mad letter I sent to my old school friend)

Hello hen

Seeing as you’ve lost my address and fone number I thought I may as well send it to you along wi a letter full of tripe! ….first break…just going for my bath….back soon.

I’m back. Gave the dead-ends a walloping as well. Maybe I should take a wee course in shoemaking, it’s the only thing I don’t do.

I joined that ‘FRIENDS REUNITED’ on the net. If you want any contact you have to pay £5 for the year. I paid because I saw the first boy I ever kissed was there. You lot made me kiss him through the railings between the boy and girls playgrounds. I think I was about 13! So I emailed him, telling him what I remembered and he emailed back! He said he remembered a lot worse events from his school days and that a kiss should be one of the nicer memories. He’s in New Zealand, got his own business, a wife and 2 daughters. He also told me that he’d bumped into an old schoolmate a few years ago who told him that 4 people from his class were dead!

I’ve had loads of work this week, so next month’s wage should get me out of debt - well the debt I pay…I mean there’s debt you forget about and debt you run away from. Mind you, I think most of mine’s fell so far behind me I completely forget about it. Well, time for another break, I’ve got to go and tape something for Amazon…I’m always late taping things for her and she goes mad. Time also for a cappichino with scoooshy cream.

I’m watching Kevin Costner and nipping in here to write this. Adverts are over, I’ll be back. That film, ‘A Perfect World’ it’s really scary…the thought of that kid with a man who doesn’t know if he’s bad or not. The whole way through it you like him and accept his faults, like murder, but then it hits you. Makes you think about how much you let people away with, how much you forget. I was watching Law and Order last night and a woman mentioned date-rape and how she’d always thought it was her own fault. I remember that happened to me, but I wasn’t traumatised, I just shrugged it off and learned a lesson. And Roseanne used to berate me for laughing at her cause it happened to her in my house. We were young then, and thought that a woman changing her mind half-way through had to just get on with it. Well, I think I must’ve thought that. I don’t know. How’d this get so serious? And now I come to think about it, when it happened to me it was in Carrie’s house and she laughed at me when I told her about it, she said I imagined it, or that I was drunk and it hadn’t happened like that. I remember I couldn’t look at the guy again. We used to see him in our local pub. She’d talk to him, but I wouldn’t even look at him or acknowledge him.

It’s late now. I’ve been watching the last ever episode of the X-files…the last words ‘Maybe there’s hope’. Not a chance in hell is what I say…we’re all doomed!!!

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NOW, 2008 You'll never believe this: I edited this find earlier today, planning to post it tomorrow (today now) this old letter I wrote to Sylvia (remember only the dead have their real names). Well, when I returned from work I found a message waiting for me on yes, wait for it - FRIENDS REUNITED! from Sylvia. We haven't been in touch for a few years - probably since I sent her this mad missive. W~ow. I just love stuff like this.