I'm going to talk about a completely chance meeting I had last autumn with an old secondary school classmate named Liam. We hadn't crossed paths in well over six years, ever since we finished our final GCSE exams. I was actually on holiday in Edinburgh, waiting for a delayed train at the main railway station, so I decided to kill some time in a busy little coffee shop on the concourse.
As I was standing in the queue to order a flat white, I heard a voice behind me that sounded vaguely familiar. When I turned round, there was Liam, holding an oversized rucksack and looking just as startled as I was. It took both of us a split second to register who the other person was, especially because we were hundreds of miles from our hometown. We ended up grabbing a corner table together while we waited for our respective departures.
We spent the next forty minutes catching up on each other's lives. It turns out he had moved to Scotland for university and was now working as a landscape architect, which didn't surprise me at all because he was always sketching in our art lessons. We reminisced about our eccentric chemistry teacher and shared updates about mutual friends who had drifted away over the years.
To be honest, I felt an absolute sense of delight mixed with sheer nostalgia. Life gets so hectic that you often lose touch with people without even meaning to, so having that spontaneous catch-up felt like a breath of fresh air. It really brightened up a rather dull, rainy afternoon.