With the communication age that we live in, and the huge network of companies such as Friends Reunited, avoiding contact with someone from your past can be difficult.

Lets face it, if you really wanted to stay in touch with anyone from your school days you would of make the concerted effort to do so, you don’t need a website designed to ‘reunite’ you with your old classmates, good and bad. You loose touch for a reason.

Normally because you spent eleven years with them and that was more than enough and despite time being a great healer you don’t really want to be reminded in front of your current friends of the time you had to play rugby in your underpants in P.E class because you forgot your kit, or the time you threw up on the school bus and spent the rest of the term being called Pukey Paul or Sicky Sally.

But what if you had to face your past and were press-ganged into going to a school reunion twenty years later. You could of course not attend, but then you’ll be worried what is being said about you in your absence. Would your first love be there, and perhaps the class bully would also arrive and you hope beyond hope that he is now suffering what goes around comes around and is now feeling as downtrodden as you did back then. Perhaps his boss shouts and belittles him in front of his colleagues as he did you back in class. So you now must attend just to see if your dreams have come true and you can spend the rest of your life with the smug satisfaction of knowing that they are suffering and dreading the hours of nine till five as you did.

But let’s assume you’re a huge success in whatever you now do. What car should you take to the reunion? No matter how much you want to be seen landing in a private helicopter complete with Principality of Monaco markings in the school playing field, announcing the reason for your late arrival as being that your private jet suffered a technical hitch at Nice so you had to wait for Lear to send out a replacement, it may be a bit too much for your ‘friends’ to suffer and only perhaps the class geek will be impressed. The rest will assume you’re trying too hard and now know why Basher Biggins took great pleasure in flushing your head down the toilet, in fact a couple of them are considering to do the same.

So, no, you must arrive as the rest of them do, by car. So what gives the right impression without risking the chance of a flushing from a collective gang of green eyed thirty something’s? If we approach the matter assuming you have the following in your garage; a Ferrari, Porsche, Range Rover, BMW and a classic such as a Jaguar E-Type. Arriving in the Ferrari, although it may give the biggest success story factor, could also go the wrong way and make people think your trying too hard and have actually hired the car for the day just to mask any insecurities you may have. The Porsche, assuming it’s a 911, could pass as an acceptable steed but it could also give a whiff of trying that little too hard or perhaps could be read in reverse as ‘I wish I could afford a Ferrari, but instead I had to settle for this’. With a Range Rover, although it’s an excellent all round tool, whether it be yomping across country estates or being a motorway mile muncher, it could say that you work just below the law. Perhaps as a debt collector or selling non-prescription drugs to nightclub attendees, and it will be difficult to convince your ‘friends’ that you have actually bought the damned thing to tow your boat or that it is the perfect family car for your 2.4 children and Labrador. But then that leaves the BMW as the only modern car to arrive in. It would depend in what particular model you own, but for the purposes of this article and with the fact that I have the power of the pen, I declare that it is a middle of the range 3-series. Now how do you play your executive saloon card? There is bound to be someone else at this reunion with either a better-specified example or an even newer version. Despite wishing to seem humble, being seen as the most successful amongst your peers is important and arriving in the BMW could blow up in your face when someone points out that they were going have that model but decided that it wasn’t quite good enough and paid the extra and went for the 5-series, leaving you feeling dejected and perhaps suffering another 20 years until you can redeem yourself at the next reunion and going overboard and arriving in the helicopter. This leaves the E-Type, or in fact any classic from a Ford Model T through to a Ferrari 250LM. The problem with arriving in a classic is that it gives the impression that you have planned this event for weeks on end and have made a major effort spending hours tinkering in the garage or a small fortune with a specialist to ensure that the car runs perfectly before setting off. The car may be your pride and joy, but others would think you’ve been waiting for this day just to show up in the car.

So what is the right car to arrive in? Reading through my choices above, there isn’t really a right choice. Making the impression you want is very difficult and getting it wrong could be disastrous for any future credibility, this is assuming you care what a group of former school friends think of you. My personal choice would be go the whole hog and take the Ferrari. Give them something to remember you by, but make a real effort not to clean it for the weeks proceeding. Arrive in it filthy dirty with brake dust covering the alloys and let everyone think that you don’t care about it and it’s ‘just a car’ to you. That would leave an impression of someone who doesn’t give two hoots what everyone thinks and in fact you live your life only for your benefit, not anyone else’s.