IT MIGHT not seem like this to you now, as you bid a fond farewell to another squirming viper’s nest of children who all, at some point, have seemed intent on killing each other in various combinations of random tribal loyalty - but, sometime in the next ten years, they’re going to go to friendsreunited.co.uk, the school reunion website, and exclaim “Richard Boden! Boders! God! I wonder how he’s doing now!”, forgetting that, however he is doing now, it’s with one leg, the other one having been ripped off in a fight about who was the most gay in 1992.

Myself, I thought I’d never want a school reunion. Our school wasn’t really the kind of school that has reunions - often, it wasn’t the kind of school that had glass in the windows - and the teachers had enough trouble attracting the children in then, when there were free Sandoz markers to inhale, let alone later, when they’d have to apply for bail. But, with the birth of my daughter in February, I started to think differently towards my contemporaries. I have just endured a three-day posterior labour, I thought.

I checked out my previous schools on friendsreunited.co.uk. My secondary school was a big blank, but Wendy Miller, from my junior school, had registered - but Wendy would. She took it on herself to chart Mrs Hollicks’s menstrual pattern, in order to give her a big hug on the days she came on.

However, once my disappointment in not being able to track down Ian Maulin in order to ring him and say “Yes, I have actually got pubic hair now. Turns out 13 is a pretty respectable age for all that to start,” had waned, the poignancy of friendsreunited.co.uk started to wash over me.

Scrolling through the lists of people who’ve registered, in the hope of getting in contact with their old comrades, it became apparent that they were the people who would have had the most wretched times at school.

Why are they trying to meet up with their former tormentors? One can only presume it’s because they are now fabulously rich, and own a tank.