I've known Jenni (as she was at school) since I was 5. We went to the same school together for 13 years and were friends at intervals for various parts of that time. We fell out now and again; at one point she felt I was copying her, which may well have been true. She was very quirky and happy to do her own thing, which is utterly cool when you're 12. We took up bell-ringing and both kept spiral bound notebooks full of dots for playing that game where you make boxes. There were school discos and shopping trips (which seemed a massive production at the time) and lots of visits to one another's houses, although once we managed to wrench open a door in her loft bedroom that had been painted shut and get into the attic crawl space, where we found a baby shoe and a whole lot of trouble when we showed her parents. She came to my 1994 NYE party and the boy I had a crush on picked her up and ran across the road with her at midnight.
I couldn't help feeling really proud of her in a very shy way when I saw her on the TV. Being proud of someone is a weird emotion, sometimes - I didn't contribute in any way to her success, after all, so I don't feel like I have any right to feel proud; but she was always massively into whales and ocean life and it was really exciting to see her on TV being everything she'd hoped to be. I sort of wish I could pop back in time to our 11 year old selves and show them this.
Pics or it didn't happen... here we are at my 10th birthday party, and again on our Y9 geography field trip to Winchester.
Observing my outfit, circa 1991, I think those are Mother Hand's Converse; I loved rolling my jeans up even though it was achingly unfashionable; everybody I knew seemed to have those primary coloured rugby tops. That fringe! It took me years to grow it out.
It's tempting to look back through my diaries for the entry about this trip but it is 23.41 on a weeknight and that's a rabbit hole best avoided.
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