Write about the last time you spoke to your best friend. What did you talk about?

Best friend? You mean I only get one?! Hmmm. Okay… well I’m lucky enough to have more than one ‘best friend.’ There is a small cluster of people that I would trust with anything and everything and they are my best friends (and yes this includes people like my mum and Dave). Though… I suppose… since there is one person that I see not quite so often as the others, I’ll talk the last time she and I met up.

Gemma. Lovely, lovely Gemma, who is, in truth, my oldest friend. We began as penpals at about 9 or 10 years old and have just stuck to each other since then. We also continue to write to each other by snail mail (because its fun to get stuff through the post that isn’t a bill!) and do most of our conversing that way.

However, once in a while we do get to meet up and now, more than ever, these meetings are important to me. Though this post will go live once my babies are breathing the free air, I can tell you that at the time of writing, it had been ages since I last saw her. Letters were still firing back and forth, of course (on a wide selection of very puuurdy writing paper), but seeing someone and getting a hug is so much more fulfilling than a letter, you know?

So we met and of course, there was talk of the bump. Unsurprising, since at that point it was stupidly large and managed to wedge itself into everything, even if I didn’t want it to (just turning around had to be carefully negotiated in certain shops in case I knocked something over). And catch up. Funny how much there is to say even with the frequency of the letters we send back and forth. Talk of siblings, close relatives, jobs, holidays past and to come, food, my ex… only because we saw him in town with his current girlfriend and I realised at that point that Gemma hadn’t meant him. Celine, who was also with us, has met him, but its startling to realise that the gaps between when Gemma and I meet means that though I would have talked about him, she would never have met him in person. Weird.

Anyway, it was a thoroughly pleasant day, made better by lunch at Nandos for the three of us, mooching through the World Market (woo ostrich burgers!) and eating copious amounts of chocolate and sugar covered churros. Lord… even thinking about it now makes me feel a tiny bit sick! o.O