His name was Hurricane and we had gone on one date, 29 years ago, when we were in junior college.

Two weeks ago, he re-entered my life.

Actually, his name isn't Hurricane. It is S. Hurricane was my nickname for him because I thought he looked like a character in a movie titled Hurricane.

That was a cheesy 1979 disaster-romance flick by Dino De Laurentiis starring Mia Farrow and an unknown Hawaiian actor named Dayton Ka'ne.

Farrow arrives on a Polynesian island ruled over by her naval officer father and starts an illicit romance with Ka'ne, a handsome islander. The weather turns nasty (hurricane, see?) and the two lovers go through hell and computer-generated high water to be together.

For some reason I found the movie incredibly touching and watched it twice at the now-defunct Premier cineplex in Orchard Road.

S. was a year ahead of me in school and I had a big crush on him. He played tennis and chess and his shirt was always sticking outside his pants when he walked into the Anglo-Chinese Junior College canteen.

He was tall, lean, very tanned, had short, wiry hair and piercing round eyes. I thought he looked like the actor in Hurricane.

He was also extremely shy and so was I. Somehow, though, we must have plucked up the courage to talk to each other and arrange a date.

I can't remember the details other than that we met at the then Capitol cinema (this was 1980) and he was wearing a small, tatty T-shirt (as if he didn't care about the date).

We must have watched a movie and I have a vague memory of us having a milkshake somewhere. We were both very self-conscious and had nothing to talk about. It didn't help that he mumbled. We both then went our separate ways - he cycled home and I took a bus back.

As dates go it was pretty disastrous and I must have given up on the relationship, not that it ever was one in the first place. In any case, I went on to have other JC crushes although Hurricane remained the only one I ever went out with.

And so the years went by. And decades. Whenever I looked back at my JC days, Hurricane would come to mind.

I Googled him once just for the fun of it and gathered that he had married a girl from Britain. Well, good for him, I thought. I didn't have feelings for him anymore. I wished him well.

Two weeks ago, I got a message from a colleague - S. called and just wanted to say hello to you. He came from Britain and is visiting Singapore. He will be calling again.

My first reaction was to laugh out loud. Wow, what a blast from the past. I did a count - it had been 29 years since we saw each other.

Did I want to talk to him and even catch up? If you'd asked me 10 years ago, maybe not. But when you hit a certain age, you tend to get nostalgic and sentimental about the past, especially when it was a period of your life when you were happy, and I had been very happy in JC. Hurricane had contributed to that happiness (dismal date notwithstanding). I didn't mind meeting him.

You also appreciate the value of friendship more as you age, and if there was someone out there who you used to like and who liked you, and who was now offering the hand of friendship, what do you lose by accepting it?

Then the doubts started to creep in. Twenty-nine years is a really long time. I wondered if I'd get a nasty shock at how he was now (bald, fat and obnoxious?). More importantly, what if his reaction upon seeing me was one of disappointment and even distaste because I had aged so much?

Yes, it is superficial to be hung up about looks, but it is also natural to be concerned. I certainly have long lost the bloom of a 16-year-old. Would he be disappointed? Could my ego take it?

In any case, we kept missing each other on the phone. But I finally managed to get him on the number he'd left behind.

It's strange how people's voices don't really change, not even after three decades.

We laughed a lot - a bit awkwardly - during that first conversation. He told me he is divorced and has a four-year-old daughter. He had become a British citizen in 1995 and was going home in a few days' time. He was also in a relationship, he said.

Let's meet for lunch, I said, and do bring your daughter. Okay, he replied. We were both thinking she'd act as a foil should we run out of things to say again.

And so, 29 years after we last saw each other, Hurricane and I met.

Like me, he's aged. He's bald (he looks like Andre Agassi) but trim and tanned. His eyes are still piercing. He still mumbles - charmingly so actually - and in ways like how he walks, he's the same 18-year-old. And he's not obnoxious but gentle and sweet and is also a wonderful father.

He told me I'd 'aged well' and 'don't look your age'. He could still see flashes of the old me. When I asked him how different I looked from the time I was 16 when we dated, he said 'your eyes are less pronounced - we used to call you 'goldfish'.'

Gee thanks, I said, throwing him a mock-dirty look.

But I was pleased. Not because I look less like a goldfish (okay, that too), but because it's nice that there's someone in this world with whom you've shared such a long history that he can give you such an honest and stupid answer and you're not offended.

What do people talk about after 30 years? Well, for starters, a good sign was that this time we could talk, even argue. We ran through the gamut of work, relationships and the meaning of life. He said he was still looking for it and I told him I've concluded there's no meaning.

He told me his greatest joy is his daughter. 'You don't know what love is until you have a child,' he said. I told him I'm happy for him but that I'll never have a child; it's too late.

A lot of things can happen to a person's life in 30 years. His has been eventful as has mine. We've both made choices, not all good, but we certainly can't complain about the lot that life has thrown us.

As an adult looking back, life at 16 and 17 seemed a lot simpler, more innocent and hopeful. I wonder if a reason he'd called me and a reason I'd agreed to meet was because a part of us had been so bruised by the years that we wanted to see if we could replicate the sort of innocent happiness we must have felt when we were young.

I'm not sure we did recapture it, though, which was why although it was very nice meeting up, it was also bittersweet.

You replay the years, you drench yourself in memories, you live in a suspended moment, and then you go back to present adult reality.

He's now home in Britain, leading the life he had before his holiday, and I'm here, leading my life. We live in different worlds and will continue to do so, happily I'm sure.

But if 29 years ago as teenagers we didn't quite manage to cement a friendship, we've now done so, and I can't ask for more. I'm happy.

This article was first published in The Sunday Times.