How to get through a school reunion

T here’s no need for a mirror at school reunions. Just look all around you to see the cruel effects of anno domini on your old contemporaries – and don’t fool yourself that you alone have miraculously dodged the hair-thinning, waist-expanding horrors of middle age.

Is that really the semi-divine girl who scored a modelling contract in her first term in the sixth form and was in a Nivea advert in Elle? Can that be the Brad Pitt of the Remove – the one who had sex before first lesson every morning? Where has the plumpness in her dewy lips fled to? How far back along his scalp have the golden ropes of hair retreated?

I’m certainly not one to speak. When I went back to the 20th-anniversary reunion of my year at Westminster School, an old acquaintance said to a friend of mine: ‘Is Harry OK?’

‘Yes – he’s fine. Why do you ask?’ my friend said.