I’m writing this from a train, on my way to visiting an old friend who I grew up with in Newcastle (in fact she lived in the genteel market town of Hexham but we got together on Saturdays in the city centre to attend an AmDram club and retire afterwards to the Tyneside Coffee Rooms for shared chocolate biscuit cake and teenage angst). Now my friend lives in York and I live in London. With three children and hundreds of miles between us our meet-ups are rare but it’s one of those great friendships where everything slots back into place as soon as we are together again.

I’ve memories of us, around exam time, heading off to the Central Library in Newcastle – a great brutalist building pivotal to T. Dan Smith’s uncompleted master plan and sadly demolished a few years ago to make way for some contemporary glass meh – for light revision and heavy flirting with Chipie clad young men from the local grammar school. The ‘study’ must have done us some good because we both ended up at university where (how quaint this now seems) we wrote each other letters using actual pen and paper in which we described the thrills and spills of our college lives. We then plunged into the world of work and big city living and lost contact for a while. I tracked her down a few years later to invite her to my wedding and, happily, we picked up the friendship from there. She reciprocated and, in quick succession, I attended her wedding and then the christening of her son (both, impressively, in York Minster). She’s since had a daughter and I’ve had my son and we’ve only managed to meet up a handful of times in the intervening years.

Today’s reunion took weeks to organise as we ummed and ahhed over whether or not to bring our kids along (not, we eventually decided) and then hopped around various dates that we might be able to take off from work. I’m sure our teenage selves would never have envisaged the life that lay ahead of them. Brought up as equals to our Chipie flaunting male peers, the importance of good exam results and sound careers impressed upon us at school and at home, we looked forward to a life of independent, professionally-focused living. Perhaps we imagined being hotly pursued by dashing men but children – and their implications for us as women – were just not on our radar. So, in recent years, it’s been quite a shock to see our male contemporaries stride out of the Central Library, into university, work, relationships and children without a missed step, while we have found ourselves dealing with family life as well as trying to cling on to our other important commitments and interests.

Would we turn the clock back? Certainly not: we love our children. But I imagine that they will be just one item on the agenda as we rattle through discussion of jobs, husbands, cinema and theatre trips and our imminent 40th birthdays before our biennial three hours are up and we both head for home: in time to collect the kids.

Rebecca Asher has worked in television news and current affairs and as the Deputy Editor of Woman’s Hour and an Executive Producer at BBC Radio 4. She lives in London with her husband and son. Shattered is her first book.