Last night, while catching up with school friends over a bottle of wine, conversation turned, as it inevitably does whenever we get together, to One Direction. It was a decade ago, we realised, that we had woken up at 5am, got the bus to Wembley and skipped school to be first in the queue for their Where We Are tour. All of us now 25 — with grown-up jobs and complex lives — reminisced about the simplicity of those early teen years when we followed the band and how far-removed from that we feel now. How silly we once were, we said.
A few minutes after we parted ways, one of the group messaged our chat. “Have you seen this? People are saying that Liam Payne is dead.” And suddenly, we didn’t feel far-removed from those teenage years at all.
