Back in 1990, my sister and I pretended we were looking at universities when we were, in fact, roaming around shopping malls. This astounded my teens
When you book your kid on a university open day, places tend to have a pretty strict specification: no more than one guest. Me and the middle teen kicked this around a bit, planning her trip to Bristol. Her friends could book their own place; it definitely wasn’t a cocktail party; so what kind of guest, exactly, did they have in mind? “They mean a parent. Didn’t you go with your parents?” Oh boy, no, we did not.
My sister and I used to tell our mum that one of us had to go to, say, Newcastle, and the other one should go too, in case she got lost. Then we’d trouser the train fare – even in 1990, it was a lot – and spend the day in the Arndale centre in Wandsworth. Sometimes we went to the cinema. We never did anything lavish, like go out for lunch. We spent an awesome amount of time and a not negligible amount of money in the Body Shop.
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