A story that I cannot resist telling...

...had an important chapter in Cheltenham on Friday.

It begins 49 years ago.

As a Girl Guide, I wrote a feature for The Guide magazine, describing how, as a Patrol Leader (8th Carshalton Guides)  I had taken my Patrol camping  in the grounds of my school during the Easter holidays.  I had just acquired my Patrol Camp Permit (entitling me to wear a  green lanyard, which felt very important)  - and the school grounds were approved as being safe, with access to clean water etc. It seemed very exciting, and rather weird, to be , busy with making fires and cooking sausages and so on, in a place that we normally knew only in its formal setting with lessons and teachers and school uniform. Indeed, the very place where we were camping - up in The Meadow, beyond the lake - would normaly have been Out of Bounds.

The magazine published my feature, complete with photographs, and a short while later I received a letter from a Guide in Gloucester, suggesting that it might be fun to be pen-friends.

So began a correspondence which has lasted for nearly half a century. Ann proved to be a wonderful correspondent. Our early letters were all about Guiding  - camping and hiking and gaining badges, leading Patrol projects, being members of the Court of Honour... We both in due course  became Queen's Guides. We both took seriously the message about service and responsibility - all rooted in the immense fun of Guiding, the sense that this was all connected with learning that life should be  - as the message from HM the Queen put it on our certificates - "a joyful adventure"...

And the years whooshed on through "A" levels and the starting of careers - Ann as a pharmacist, me as a journalist - and then marriage...

We met briefly, once, in 1980, when Ann was in London...time was limited, we got on well, but there wasn't even the opportunity to have a proper long talk together...

And the years whooshed on again...and we were now writing mostly just at Christmas, and then it was emails...

Somehow we never telephoned, and even the arrival of Skype didn't change things...but the writing continued.

And then, a couple of months ago, Ann saw my name on the programme for the Cheltenham Christian Arts Festival (see Blog entry below). We fixed a date for lunch.

We later each admitted to a certain nervousness. Perhaps we just wouldn't get on, wouldn't have anything much to say to one another...

At the station, there was a momentary hesitation as these two ladies in late middle-age looked at one another and then:"Ann?" "Joanna?" and we shook hands. Then:"Let's do this properly!"  and we gave the Guide salute, and offered our left hands (is that still the tradition? it was so in our day...) and laughed...

And then we had the most wonderful, talkative, unforgettable lunch and the years peeled away and we reminisced about childhood,schooldays, Guiding of course, and so much more...

Forty nine years.

We found that we still had so much in common, a strong sense of shared values, the same sense of life as an adventure...

It is impossible to convey just what this day meant.

And if you have read this far and think it all just sounds a trivial story and isn't worth blogging about - well...you have simply missed out on the joy of life's adventure and the things that really matter.

Ann and I will keep on writing (we've already exchanged post-lunch emails with great joy). And it won't be another 49 years before we meet up again.

Thank God for Guiding and Scouting and all that it has given to the world.

Thank God for a happy day and a reminder that life should be lived as a joyous adventure...