Old school

In 2005 my very best friends Reboot and Emily came out to the George to help celebrate my 21st birthday. It was a sultry November night and the annual fete at my old primary school was on. So we drank beers, and danced with my old teachers and the people I went to kindy with, before going home to eat the cake Reboot had painstakingly decorated.

It was the Women's Weekly Birthday Cakes cookbook's typewriter cake, with smartie keys and a musk stick return lever and mint-slice paper rollers. I think most of it ended up in our faces and hair when we had a food fight, but it's still the best cake I've ever had.

A lot's changed since 2005! Degrees done and dusted, towns and cities plundered, jobs and lovers earned, spurned and burned. Last weekend the three of us were together for the first time in many months, if not years.

Emily now lives in London with her new husband Ed. I'd been a little worried the UK's soggy climate and lack of career opportunities for agronomists might have been getting her down - but seeing her and Ed visibly radiating love and happiness I realised she's in great hands. Theirs is that ageless kind of love you occasionally see - on a dancefloor they're like infatuated teenagers at a school disco; in a quieter moment they could be a couple who've held hands in silent contentment on the same verandah for decades. And Reboot? Only the strongest, and funniest, girl I know. And, um, glamazon much?!

Emily told us that in their London flat, she only has one photo on her dresser. The one from the night of the typewriter cake, where we're all pissed on XXXX Gold and hideous but so, so happy.

Making new friends is great. But old friends never go out of fashion. Love you guys.