When Life was Simpler...

That's me on the left.  And that's my best friend holding the bananas. The hunky guy in the furry suit is the Cinema Manager - also my brother - on one of his good hair days. Taken at the opening of the new local Multiplex, I'd like to think that 'King Kong' might have been showing that evening, but I do have a vague recollection that my poor brother was given the only outfit large enough to take his stature - which I'm sure he'd have been delighted with because it maintains the air of mystery (or socio-phobic tendencies) which run in our family. We were all in our  twenties and, really, life couldn't have been simpler.   We shared the same house, shared responsibilities (i.e. I cooked, BF cleaned and sibling paid us both to do his share) and we all got on famously. There was a fourth lodger but we didn't really talk to  him much - he kept himself to himself, worked in something geeky like HR or IT, wore embarrassingly loud shirts and was forever jogging (in said shirts, oddly).  He also lived in the Harry Potter equivalent of a bedroom because we'd all bagged the best rooms by the time he'd got back from a run round the block the night we moved in. He merely served to make up the final quarter of the monthly rental.  Harsh but true.
And the only thing we all (apart from shirt-guy) had to worry about was whether there was stuff  we could make toasties with, if there was wine in the fridge and if, between us we had enough smokes to last until one of could be arsed to go to the corner shop and return with fresh supplies of all the above.
Work was an irritation which got in the way of being back home and having the best laughs I've ever had in my life.  Every weekend we had loud, drunken, hysterical dinner parties and our Sunday lunches became legendary.  Any day with a 'Y' in in it was a good enough reason to throw a party and before long we didn't even want to spend Christmasses away from each other.
And we knew those days were good, even at the time - we squeezed every last bit of fun out of them.
It's seeing a picture like this that makes me realise how easy everything was back then, no real responsibilities, no mortgages, no massive debts, the occasional blip with boyfriends/girlfriends but nothing that ever really got in the way of the life we all shared.  And of course I had no idea that one day, maybe 20 years hence, it would only take a phone call from the 'BF back then' to make me laugh during a time when laughs have been very thin on the ground. And after also not having seen each other for about 7 years, that's a pretty tall order. But then we've always been pretty tall girls.
And she said she'd missed seeing something funny come up on my blog recently, so I think this remedies that.