Concrete Pencil: Reunion

Not because I'm winning the hairline race or because other people have better jobs than I do but because I am not Martin Blank.

I didn't disappear to be a hitman. No one built a minimart on my family home. I don't get to blow it up to Live And Let Die by G'n'R. Minnie Driver isn't still pining for me. I don't get to shoot Dan Aykroyd.

It's the same for everyone.

Everyone has something. If it's not classic '90s cinema about a suburban Detroit DJ, there's something else. There's something intrinsic in reunions to bring out the worst in us.

So even before you and whoever you're meeting up with appear one by one at a mutually inconvenient gastropub to see how badly each other are ageing, you know your day is inescapably going to involve some interior unpleasantness.

My one was 10 years since journalism school.

Don't get me wrong, these people are great. I have time, respect and fondness for each of them and I'm still in touch with more than a few.

But as a group, as The People I Went To College With, they are a different thing. The people you did anything with - travelled, taught, trained or toiled - will be the same. They'll be a jury.

There's a good West Wing in which CJ goes back to Dayton for a reunion and meets Matthew Modine at the airport. He'd been to prison and is a watchmender in Paris. They both decide the whole reunion thing is a terrible drag. She goes in the end, but she has to cut short her speech due to some drama at the White House.

All these things are far cooler than anything I had to say, which was not much. (Not that I'm trying to say prison is cool, but in the context of that episode it was meant to be.) I'm pretty happy with stuff. I know I go on about work, but I like it pretty well.

It's challenging enough to be interesting but not so hard I look stupid all the time, and I don't think it's going to kill me.

And besides, I'm trying not to talk down what I do (in fact, I'm lining it up as a New Year's Resolution - I love New Year's Resolutions). And I'm the kind of English that doesn't like to boast.

But, like everyone else who was there, I'm a sharp-tongued ego-fiend (we are journalists). So that's too many conflicting forces, too many things to try to show at once. So you talk too quickly, drink too much and you go home feeling a bit odd.

Still, they may be excruciating and regrettable, but at least they don't happen every year.

Talking of which, how are the plans for the Christmas party?