Friends Reunited

What have the internet and insomnia got in common? Well one of the answers is Friends Reunited, and another is blogging. I started blogging in October 2004, a bit late some might say, but still in the days when the wave was small. In fact, my fetish at the time was meta-blogging, or blogging about blogging, but that is a story that belongs elsewhere (see my personal blog).
Having been rather critical of the OR pages on the Chatham House website, I went to Friends Reunited and set up a group called "Old Ruymians" so that there would be an easy place for ORs to share communications. I checked the number of people (claiming) to have attended Chatham House on Friends Reunited and it came to an impressive 2282, then I did a dodgy search on the Chatham House web site to discover that there were 899 ORs registered there (I was expecting about 5 given the quality of information that was provided about ORs there). Now unfortunately to invite people to join the aforementioned and erstwhile group the "Old Ruymians" the invitees had to be not only friends, but friends in the "Friends Reunited sense". So I duly took on the task of inviting lots of people that I knew from school to be my "Friends Reunited" friends: I do hope they don't think of me too sadly when they get the inevitable pleading email. Tonight would have been totally bereft of sleep if I had not managed to break the "Friends Reunited" invite-a-friend function by making far too many invitations. No doubt there is some buffering and processing problem. Well, in any case, I will continue my modest democratic, if not democratically elected, efforts to further conversation between Old Ruymians.
Before I close, I must note that one Judith Ruback professed herself to have attended Chatham House Grammar School. I happen to know, as do most of my contemporaries that this was not in fact the case. Judith was, and indeed I hope still is, a rather attractive lady and well acquainted with us Chatham House lads. Sadly, being a year older than myself she was beyond the cast of my feeble net, but I am sure that better men than I were more successful