I'VE been thinking about the Jesuits this week. It's not something I do often, which I will acknowledge says more about me than about the Jesuits.
I was thinking particularly about the most famous adage ascribed to the order: "Give me a child until the age of seven, and I will show you the man."
Like most of the world's most used quotations its provenance is iffy. It has variously been said to have originated with founder St Ignatius of Loyola or his able assistant and missionary St Francis Xavier.
Other theories have that it is merely a truism that has attached itself to the Society of Jesus because of their formidable reputation over the centuries as educators.
I had always interpreted it as the slightly sinister warning of a system of childcare and education carrying various overtones of "spare the rod, spoil the child", drill and rote learning.
However, after a reunion this week with a childhood best friend I last saw when we were both 10, I've come to appreciate the maxim from a very different perspective.
Amber and I last saw each other *cough* years ago and after she moved to the other side of the world from me we kind of expected 'Goodbye' was 'Goodbye'.
We wrote to each other for a year or so, which eased the worst of the pre-teen heartbreak at a separation imposed by unfeeling adults who selfishly had to relocate for work to provide food, clothing and shelter for us.
I faithfully parcelled up copies of comics (Whizzer and Chips and the Beano - Hey, it was *cough* years ago...) and posted them off to Pakistan - an act I later cringed at as unthinkingly patronising before recently realising it was a devious device by my mother to decluttering our house.
Then one day we weren't writing to each other any more. New friendships had been made that had a proximity that displaced the former ties of a bosom buddy. Also, we were 12 - nothing much was actually happening to us that merited being committed to an Airmail letter (finally discontinued by Royal Mail three years ago).
Then one day, earlier this year and *cough* years later, an email pinged into my work inbox from Amber.
She had moved from Lahore to Islamabad where she is working as a reporter for BBC Urdu and had come across my contact details quite by chance after mentioning my name to the only Irish person she had met, a journalist from Dublin who, it turned out did the same journalism course as me.
Kismet? I think so. So when she said she was coming over to London for a month-long training course the first thing I thought was I must FOI how many of those there are and what they cost. The second was we must meet up.
And meet up we did, on Monday.
It was the strangest thing... She was just the same.
Well, I mean she didn't smoke when we were 10 and she is definitely far more glamorous now, but as we sat in a Caffè Nero outside St Paul's tube station it was clear to me that, if we had stayed on the same continent, we would still be friends.
We hadn't even needed to be on the same continent to follow the same career path - although I know if we had been I would have got her to show me how to do my eyeliner like that.
Amber and I barely talked about the long distant primary school days that should have been our only link. We marvelled at how many parallels there are between Northern Ireland and Pakistan. We talked about our children (I tried to get my head round the fact her eldest daughter is 11). We covered the relative richness of the languages English and Urdu. Game of Thrones was mentioned...
The girl I had parted from aged 10 was the *cough*-year-old woman in front of me now. What was freakier was that I am also the 10-year-old girl from yesteryear and it turns out I didn't know that chick quite so well.
"I always remember that you gave up chocolate biscuits for Lent," she said at one point.
It's so strange, because I've been convinced all my life that I never ate chocolate or biscuits as a child.
