THERE is something about the very thought of a school reunion which has always made me shudder.

While I’m still in touch, and occasionally meet up with, a handful of old school friends when I’m back home in Ireland, the idea of our whole year group getting together again after all these years is almost frightening.

Would it be full of former classmates desperate to show us how successful and happy they are? Would someone arrive in a helicopter?

And would each of us be eyeing the others up, deciding who has aged the best or who has packed on the pounds?

Despite all my misgivings, I did attend a school reunion last weekend, although not mine, and only as a bystander. So I felt relatively comfortable. In fact, as an observer it was fascinating.

I was helping to show a group of past pupils, who left in 1968, around our local secondary school, where a few volunteers had set up tea, coffee and cake, along with a selection of old photographs, in the library.

The former students, including professional, even world-renowned, musicians, scientists, teachers and entrepreneurs, picked themselves out in the old black and white school photos, when they looked so young, fresh-faced and innocent, unaware of what the future would hold.

This was the first time in 48 years they had returned to revisit their old classrooms, the stage where they had put on their school productions, even the dreaded examination hall.

Before long, some were in full song, remembering, word for word, their particular roles in the Pirates of Penzance. At the cricket pavilion, more memories came flooding back, with one former sporting star re-enacting the time he took ten wickets for 21 against an opposing team.

Now in their mid-sixties, within a matter of minutes, eyes twinkling, joshing and larking about, they appeared rejuvenated, like teenagers again. They had been transported back to the 1960s.

Living in far-flung places, working in a variety of careers throughout the UK and abroad, and not having grown up in the age of social media, it has been harder for them to keep in touch over the years.

But they have a shared history and sense of place that will never leave them.

What made it so poignant for me is that this is the same school where my sons are spending their formative years. They, too, are forging bonds and forming friendships with those with whom their lives will be forever intertwined.

It’s a strange thing to be flung together with a group of people, all born in the same year as you, when you’re 11 years old and forced, for the next seven years, to do everything together.

You study, play sport, perform, party, go through puberty and adolescence. First loves come together, hearts get broken, friendships are made and occasionally ended. Dreams are pursued. There is success and disappointment. The whole gamut of human emotions is there.

And then, having been through this intense, life-changing journey as one, suddenly, at the age of 18, everyone is waved off in different directions, never to come together again as they were over all those years.

I won’t be around should my sons decide to return to these same school buildings to meet up with their old friends nearly 50 years on. Who knows what they will all be doing and where they will be living then?

But last weekend, as I stood on the side lines, watching old memories being stirred and old friendships rekindled, I came round to thinking that perhaps school reunions are not such a bad idea after all.

ONE dad, Mark, was telling me recently how he came across a Bible reading which particularly resonated with him, so much so that he decided to read it out to his young son, Robert. “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens,” he read. “A time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh…” Robert interrupted him: “When is it time for me to get a mountain bike, Dad?”

GRANNY is proud of how she has got to grips with ‘silver surfing’ since we got her an iPad for Christmas. But occasionally, she rings up to speak to our teenagers when she has a problem. She was on the phone the other day complaining that her Blue Band was down. We had to point out that is the name of a brand of margarine. But she’s getting there.