School.

It's funny how we never really appreciate school for what it is: an absolute doss.

We've all been told that school is the best time of our lives...and that it only goes downhill when you enter 'the big bad world and get a proper job.' But did we ever really listen...? I certainly didn't.

At the time, secondary school seemed ever so important to me. Not necessarily the GCSEs and exams, but the friendships and connections I'd made over the four/five years I was there.

They seemed like relationships that would outlast the dying of the Sun. We all planned our lives in conjunction with each other: it was implausible and impossible to imagine a future without my gang of friends.

How poignant it is now then, that I speak to but one of those friends on anything resembling a regular basis, but even then, nothing like enough for us to be considered good friends based on anything other than our former closeness. Today I reacquainted myself with one of my oldest friends...over a drink in Edwards Bar in Wimbledon, while I took a break away from my other friends. He's one of my oldest friends, but now we're so very distant and different that what seemed like a friendship cast in stone, now seems like a distant, faded memory. Like a quote from a book I'd read during my studies that no longer mattered now it was of no immediate concern.

I raise this as when I was on the bus this morning on the way to work, I saw the current student body of my old secondary school. And I saw on their faces, and in their mannerisms, the same juvenile outlook as I possessed at their age: this is all that matters...I have my friends and the relationships we build and break now will last forever. God, how naive I was back then.

I assume we all felt the same to some lesser or greater extent, or at least I hope we did. It was odd running into that old friend. He had no worries or cares beside his basic desire to satisfy himself. While I constantly have to concern myself with the need for a good degree, and what I plan on doing after graduation: a postgraduate study perhaps, or should I search for a graduate internship somewhere?

Such questions were well beyond my means of worry back at school, and I sometimes wonder if I were wiser then for not caring, or now for caring as much as I do. Perhaps it was not naiveté back then, but a more innocent, less corrupt, more honest view of the world in which we live. Perhaps it was all meaningless.

All I really know is that without the profoundly superficial views of life I harboured back then, I wouldn't hold the superficially profound views I now do. And I probably wouldn't be as drunk. But hey ho, here's to schooling! Enjoy it while you can kids: it's probably going to be the best time of your life. Shit..........