Four friends

We met when we were 18, 19. Fresh-faced, naïve (some of us), lusting for life, ready for university. We were in res together in first year and quickly became friends. Our small town university was conducive to a social lifestyle, to the forging of intense, passionate, lively friendships. The kind that last. Four girls, all very different, but sharing a most incredible friendship.

We have shared triumphs and traumas, love’s beginnings and love’s heartbreaks, marriages, babies, moves to different continents. For a good wad of years I landed up being the only one living here on the tip of Africa, the others doing time up there, in the UK. On The Mud Island. Throughout it all there has been constant contact – mails, phone calls, visits. The type of visits that, while they may be a year apart, feel like they’re a minute apart. That’s how comfortable it is.

Now we find ourselves back in the same place (three of us) and the fourth visiting from Sydney, with my fabulous godchild. We sat at D’s table last night, eating delicious coconut milk fish curry under the stars, revelling in the coolth (well, relative coolth) of the evening air, with the husbands and partners and chatted and laughed and reminisced and I was so awfully proud of the choices they’ve made in husbands, they’re lovely. Our little foursome has grown, with some added adults and some kids in the mix too. And it makes a mighty fine little group, I must say.

This afternoon, however, the four of us will leave husbands, children, partners and pets behind and we’ll drive into the hills to spend a night together, just us. To eat, drink, reminisce and laugh… Not as fresh-faced, nearly twenty years on, with a fair amount of middle-aged spread (me, not them, they’re all ultra-slim, even the two who’ve had babies), scar tissue (both internal and external) and a few more wrinkles laugh lines, but just as fun.