Friends for a Season

My Sanremo roommate had arrived in Baiardo with three other girls - girls she'd taught with. As we were the new arrivals it made sense that we shared one of the spare houses together in the village.

At this point I feel I should interject with an explanation. This owner of the company also (as far as I could understand) owned a lot of Baiardo - at least he helped build a lot of the village and came to own some of the houses there. Anyway as he had little use for all these houses, he gave them to the company to offer tired-out tutors a break here and there.

So on the Monday this is where I ended up. There were two types of houses - in town and overlooking the hills. The spare one was in town. We all went in together to have a look at this house and found it was inhabited - by Lydia, and Lydia's, ahem, man friend. It was a hot building anyway - sandwiched in the middle of other buildings in the town. I looked around. Found what would have been my bed. And to my great relief, Kitty said that she'd been keeping a bed spare in her house down by the edge of the village, overlooking the mountains.

Thank goodness.

You see I had been hit by a nasty feeling. I really got on with my Sanremo roommate, but she had since bonded with the tutors she worked with. It's like I said before, we were no longer part of the same experience.

I saw her that evening and we caught up on what had happened in the last two weeks. she had done two camps and they'd been completely different to mine. She'd been in a suburb in Milan and hadn't so much as smelt the country air that we'd been inhaling solidly over the past fortnight.

But the more people I spoke to, the more I realised that everyone's camp experience was different and that I'd been so fortunate. Despite all its foibles, my camp had been one of the better ones. I hadn't lived with nuns who gave me leftovers from lunch to eat, neither had I been abandoned by my family, or been left to explain why dancing like Lady Gaga wasn't appropriate for 10-year-old girls.

It was at that point I remembered the friendships I had made laughing over the tablemat debacle and oversized pasta. At that point two things were settled in my mind - that I would never risk the programme again (in view of the fact that striking it well seems so rare) and that friends for a season really do exist.