Holding back the years? writes Andy Mitchell

I went to a reunion this week. On this occasion, this wasn’t a school one, though those always prompt interesting if stilted conversations with people you half knew, half a lifetime ago when you passed them in a long demolished corridor. “and what are you doing now?” is the opening gambit, and when they’ve told you, then you’re usually fumbling around for the next question.

Devotees of Joyce Grenfell (pictured) will recall her wonderfully revealing monologue ‘Old girls school reunion’ in which the sad Miss Clinch tours the room repeating her short 30-year-old biog over and over again to an ever exasperated audience, resorting at one stage to doing it in French, because she finds herself chatting to her old French teacher “Oh isn’t she lovely,” she comments as she moves on... “I wonder why we hated her?”

Saturday night found me in Carlisle.

A lifetime ago, I used to mither the good people of Cumbria every lunchtime on the BBC with a strange mix of Midday Mart calls which involved buying and selling old tat to the value of £100 on Carlisle 38484, deftly mixed with Kylie Minogue records.

I’m not sure Cumbria remembers, but my former workmates certainly did, and it was lovely to meet up again with some old faces.

I mention faces because, of course, in some cases it does actually take a few moments to work out who some people are, even though you knew them instantly by sight in 1989, now having aged 30 years.

Some looked no different at all... I wonder how they did it. But then of course some careful preparation is needed personally before I embarked on an adventure like this.

Refurbishment takes planning and time at my age but I think I managed to pull of a convincing look of vibrant youthfulness. Or maybe I didn’t.

Maybe they went home thinking “Mitchell’s looking old isn’t h , and MY how he’s piled the weight on etc”

It was a terrific evening, and unlike some clunky school reunions, many of us have been in touch regularly on social media and have grown older together.

We are already planning the next BBC reunion. By then I might even be more of a slave to the ‘Just for Men’ hair dye than I am now.