A new old friend

In the scrum of Freshers’ Week I made friends with a girl on my degree course. We got on really well and knowing there was a friendly face in my lectures was a huge relief for a shy undergrad. We settled into uni life, lectures and socialising, but as Christmas approached, she was off sick a fair bit. Although we exchanged emails in the holidays, I returned in January to find she had withdrawn from the course. In that long-lost time before mobile phones were ubiquitous, that was it – we had lost touch for ever.

Ten years later, I pulled into the car park of an Oxford college to visit a childhood friend who lived and worked there. As I watched my friend walk to the gate to let me in, I noticed she had company, and she vaguely introduced us, as her companion got in her car to leave. Parked up and sat on her sofa with a cuppa, I couldn’t get the friend out of my head. She looked so familiar.

Then it fell into place – it was my long-lost Freshers’ Week buddy. A minute later and I would never have seen her. The three of us have no other mutual friends, and a world away from that Freshers’ Week in London, we would never have worked out the link. It turned out she was just sitting undergrad finals as a mature student and had met my friend through her flatmate.

A few hours later, with much wine and a takeaway, the three of us had a wonderful evening, as if the illness that caused her to drop out of uni and the decade in between had never happened.

Submitted by Louise