Who'd've thunk it?

An old friend from high school just emailed me out of the blue. We haven't really been in touch since 1998, and last time we spoke, I probably was planning to do an undergraduate degree in English literature or French or German, or in any case, something totally different from what I went on and did.

She opened her email with, "I really hope this is you. I found this email address by googling your name, and it came up with some conference abstracts that sounded like the sort of thing you'd write."

Admittedly, we were pretty close at high school, and she probably did have a good sense of the sorts of things that would interest me, and what my writing style was like (although the last piece of writing we did together would have been our guidebook for an imaginery holiday destination, Gobblegobble Land, in 4th form social studies). But I'm still astonished—and a little concerned—that the high school me is recognisable in my recent academic abstracts.