Schemes and dreams

Hard as it may be to believe, I went to University and survived to get a (poor) degree. This is all ancient history (1996) and is filed on my flickr as "I had a life too once".

I forgot about it, until last week. Found one of the blokes on facebook. Oh, you're successful and have wife, child, house on the hill. I'm not... That was fun. Then another ex Beng bloke contacts me.. wife, 2 x child, house on hill, more success.

(I should perhaps at this point make clear I wish no ill, and am not bothered by their success... I assume they've earned it and thus deserve it. I haven't, and don't.)

At points in the past various peeps have said "we should have a reunion", but nothing has come of it. However, this time I think it could work, and nobody will have to get nailed to anything in pursuit of it. After all, everybody is starting to put their lives on t'interweb.

Without doing much searching emails are exchanged between six of us. Discounting foreign students, those known to have left the country since, those who didn't socialise during the course (I'm thinking of you Gailasuarus), this gives seven more potentially to find. One more can probably be discounted ('cos she's a lady and we're smelly blokes), and a further one (black ball from everyone so far). So that's five to find.

So on Saturday I set off to meet a small group of localish plotters. One wasn't coming out to play, so it was Zulf and Dara and moi. Despite my natural apprehension, we had a really nice time and came up with some perhaps viable strategies for finding the missing people. I'd like to say we haven't changed in what? 14 years, but it would be a lie. I've got fat and mental. Zulf's stopped drinking and Dara appears to be a straight and honest geezer. God have we gone downhill.

There is one slight snag, should we pull it off. What do you do to celebrate this reunion?

Now you could say go to the pub.. but people are older, with house on the hill etc, and it's not much of a draw to get people to come many miles.

Possible thoughts so far include:

Meal out somewhere.... followed by pub.
Blokey things... paintball, go karts etc. followed by pub.
Fly to somewhere cheap and cultural. Ignore the culture and go to the pub.

Any ideas from the blogosphere are most welcome?

Plz to note that we be blokes. Smelly older blokes. You don't get many lady engineers, so it has to be something where when we get there they don't think we're a stag party and throw us out. Attempting to appear sophisticated is also out (we're engineers).