meeting up…

Life is full of coincidences. When I was volunteering with the Iona Community last summer, Becki Cox was the resident staff member “in charge” of all the volunteers (I think “staffing administrator” was her job title?). She’d noticed that I’d made reference to St Mary’s church, Thame in my application form. Her family had been church members there for a short time when she was “very young”(!) and so mentioned this in our first conversation on Iona. Well, of course, memories came rushing back… her parents, Sheila (singing group plus much, much more) and Stephen (star member of the church cricket team etc) and their twins, Andy and Chris (even smaller than Becki!).

At long last – and entirely due to Becki’s determination and organising capabilities - Moira+I met Sheila, Becki and Stephen for lunch at Bordeaux Quay, Bristol yesterday. We hadn’t seen Becki for 10 months, but it had been TWENTY years since we’d seen Sheila and Stephen!! And yet, strangely, thanks to the wonders of facebook (Stephen and Becki have been our FB friends since last summer – Sheila has decided to resist such social media temptations!), it didn’t seem like 20 years at all.
And the other (quite amazing) coincidence is that one of our old college friends, John Tremlett – he and I shared a house together for two years – is also a very good friend of the Cox family (he taught Becki to drive and his daughter and Becki were great school friends etc)… again, it was only through facebook that this fact “emerged”!
Anyway, Moira+I had an absolutely lovely time meeting up with them yesterday and, hopefully, it’ll be much less than twenty years before we get together again!
Photo: Sheila, Moira, Stephen, Becki and me in the Bristol sunshine (in front of Hannah’s harbourside banner).