On Zaki’s whim, I arranged for a bunch of people to meet up at Tresor Café for lunch, then wander over to the house tree in Croham Wood, and then finally head back into Croydon for the usual Thursday night curry. As I expected, most people didn’t actually reply, though unlike Zaki I didn’t take it personally and instead put it down to the fact they’re ex-Whitgiftians. It’s what they’re always like.

For those who could make it (Ben first, then Zaki and Georgie from his uni, then Andie and T a little late, and finally Guy and Chyde much later), it was actually rather (slightly subdued) fun. We picked up food at Tresor and took it to the graveyard which had been our school lunchtime haunt (no pun intended. really.) during the previous two years. It had probably been over a year since I’d last been there, but it was cosily familiar. We were in such a good mood we (well, Zaki) even gave an extra beer to a builder and probably made his day.

Andie and T had to leave at this point, while the rest of us headed up to the woods to visit the old House Tree. In the email I sent out, the included glossary perfectly described a House Tree as:

a tree that has grown/fallen so that it forms a sheltered “house”, originating from the term “treehouse” but different in that it encompasses the entirity (or majority) of the tree, rather than being built halfway up.

So naturally everyone thought it was a pub. Apparently yes, my sense of humour is that quirky. Zaki had wanted to visit it since we had both been there at its creation, hammering a few branches into a makeshift roof and so forth. Naturally the visit would conjure up memories for us. However, given that I was pretty sure (and inevitably right) that it would have collapsed into a particularly dillapidated dead tree with a few rusty nails, I wasn’t sure quite what the others were supposed to get out of it (unfortunately Katie, who had arranged the original House Tree expedition, never replied to this invitation).

So after spending a while in the sun at the top of the hill, we wandered back to my house and watched inordinate amounts of Family Guy before the much-awaited Curry Night (it’s really quite bad that it’s the height of our collective social calendars, so much so that it gets capitalised). On the way home I bumped into Martin and hung out with him for a couple of hours, but since I couldn’t contact my parents to let them know, it led to a bit of a confrontation. I think we were equally pissed off with each other. The less said about that the better.