Planning a Reunion With Old Friends

Set a date before you settle anything else, keep the first one small, and choose something with a bit of structure rather than four hours sitting across a table. Reunions fail for one of two reasons: nobody ever named a day, or twenty people were invited and none of them could hear each other.

Two hours of doing something beats an evening of trying to catch up on eleven years. If the day has a shape to it, the conversation looks after itself.

Name a Date First

Pick one, put it out there, and let the plan form around it. A date with no plan attached gets filled in. A plan with no date gets talked about for two years and then mentioned at a funeral. Easiest of all is to borrow a date that already exists: a Dreamworx afternoon at Digital arrives with the day, the place and the music already settled, so all anybody has to do is say yes or no.

Give it six to eight weeks. Long enough for shifts, childcare and other people's weddings, short enough that it is still real by the time you mention it again.

What It Costs

The main cost of a reunion is usually travel, plus a night's sleep somewhere if people are coming any distance. Decide early whether you are asking for that or not, because it changes who can say yes.

• If everyone is local, keep it cheap and easy so nobody has to think about it twice.
• If some are travelling in, build the day and the timings around them. They are the ones who will drop out.
• If anyone is staying over, say so in the first message. A night away is a completely different decision from an afternoon out and it needs more notice.

Say the rough number out loud early. Money is the reason most quiet nos are quiet, and being upfront about it lets somebody say yes without having to ask you.

Keep the First One Small

Six is a conversation. Fifteen is an event, and an event needs organising in a way a first attempt should not.

Start with the ones you would actually ring up. If it goes well, the second one can be bigger, and it will be far easier to fill because there is something to point at.

Pick Something With a Shape

Something to look at, walk round or do gives everybody a way out of a lull. A walk, a match, a day somewhere, a Dreamworx afternoon, a few hours with music on. The activity is not the point of the day. It is the scaffolding that holds the day up.

Sitting still in a quiet room all evening is the hardest version of this, because every gap in the conversation is audible and the only way to fill it is to ask again what everyone does now.

Whatever you pick, give it a start time and an end time. An open-ended plan means somebody has to be the first to leave, and nobody wants that job.

The First Twenty Minutes

They are always a bit odd. Everyone looks different, everyone is slightly nervous, and the opening exchanges are all jobs and postcodes. That is normal and it passes.

You can speed it up. Arrive at the same time rather than trickling in, stand rather than sit for the first bit, and have something in your hand. Twenty minutes later it stops feeling like eleven years and you will have stopped noticing the grey.

Do Not Turn It Into a Job Interview

Ask about now, but not only about now. What somebody does for a living is the least interesting thing about them, and it is where every stalled reunion parks itself.

What gets people talking is specific and shared: where you all used to go, who you have seen since, what happened to the one nobody has heard from. Start there and the rest arrives on its own.

Go gently with anyone who has had a hard few years. Somebody in the group has. Ask how they are, and then talk about something else if that is clearly what they would prefer.

Who Organises and Who Pays

One organiser, not a committee. Take the decisions, tell everybody what they are, and accept that two of them would have preferred something different.

For the money, split it flat or run a kitty. Working out who had what at the end of a long day is the most reliable way to sour it, and nobody has ever enjoyed being the one holding the calculator.

Book the Next One Before You Leave

The most useful thing you can do all day is pick the next date while everyone is still stood there feeling good about it. Not a vague "we should do this more often". An actual month.

Do that and the second one takes about a tenth of the effort, because it has stopped being a reunion and started being a thing you do.