Fostered friends we never see

One of the many advantages of new technology is that you can stay in touch with people who have moved to the other side of the world just as easily as if they were living in the next town. Email addresses travel with you so it no longer matters if your physical address changes quite often.

Ella and I have an old-fashioned address book, so old in fact that it is made from paper rather than just being electronic. Some of our longest running friends have multiple addresses - up to 20 in some cases - but their email addresses remain unchanged. That makes things so much simpler!

There are lots of people I feel I know quite well despite having either not seen them for years or in some cases never having met them face-to-face.

BT Overdrive went to the same school as Ella and I. She was fostered but as she wasn’t in the same year group as us we never got to know her during our school days. We met her for the first time at a school reunion some years after we had both left and the similarities in our upbringing came up in conversation over tea and cake. She is currently working in South Africa as a nanny. Her best friend,  fellow subscriber and very gifted author Joined Up Writing was fostered in Port Elizabeth and is also working a nanny. South Africa is somewhere that is high on our list of places we would like to visit so it would be nice to think we will see BT Overdrive again one day.  

Emma R was a key-note speaker at a conference that Ella and I both attended. Although we have only met her this one time we exchange experiences via email every few months and she is very much on our "active friends" list. She is currently working in Halifax (Nova Scotia, Canada) for a tour company. 

Pixie and Dixie are two friends of mine from university. They have seen more and done more than any couple of their age I have ever met or heard about. From the first time we met they seem to have done almost everything together. Currently they are working in Malta, despite the financial problems there. They hope to get married in 2016 and promised me that it would happen in the UK so we could all attend without bankrupting ourselves. 

Last, but not least, of my long-distance friends there is Stars and Stripes who lives in the USA with her foster Dad. She is another old-girl of my former school. Her foster parents divorced just as she was timing out with them but despite this she moved with him (ex US military) to live in Denver and then onto Phoenix (Scottsdale) with him and his new wife. Stars and Stripes is attending a community college as a mature student with a view to going to university.

Of course there are some former friends who have died (Boy who shall not be named) or have fallen out of touch with us (Jam Tart, Kitty B and Reigning Monarch), usually when events in their own lives conspired to rather overwhelm them, but they are never far from our thoughts.