My dear wife is not one of the world's great conversationalists. After a few minutes nattering with her, you'd soon realise that you had found out a good deal about her primary school years, but not necessarily a lot else. Even though we grew up more than 200 miles apart, I feel as though I know personally some of her classmates and she often wonders what they are doing now. It is sometimes as though the last 50 years were just a bad dream*.
Imagine her delight last night, on spodding her way through hitherto unexplored swamps and forests of Facebook when she came across a group called "I grew up in Stalybridge". She joined it and started to sift through all the photographs of whit walks, band contests, black pudding and tripe competitions and that sort of thing until eventually she happened upon a couple of school photographs from her primary school years. And there they all were! James Delaney, the boy who could not consistently solve the riddle that meant that seven eights always make 56. And there, indeed, was Yvonne Barker (or whatever her married name is), Jan's Very Best Friend from primary school. Gleefully she sent out a friend request to Yvonne and then started to look at what information there was about her.
It was at that point that she spotted the fateful words "Likes Boris Johnson" and "Likes Brexit Party".
*many of them were