Happy Monday: Here's to old friends

In praise of friendship after a wonderful life-affirming weekend

Happy Monday!

How was your weekend?

I had a really enjoyable one. I caught up with old schoolmates at a cricket match on Saturday.

It was a brilliant, life-affirming day packed with beers and bonhomie, laughter, smiles and sausages, fizz and friendship. And that was just breakfast.

Bangers and fizz for breakfast at my best mate’s house on Saturday morning.

Normally, free-time to spend with friends is virtually non-existent for me, because - like all of us - time truly is a precious commodity for so many reasons, on so many levels.

Life comes at your fast, and for me, as a football journalist, weekends for ten months of the football season are taken up with, well, covering football.

A sign pointing to the cricket green on Saturday.

However, every summer there is a rare window - which is right now - where I can actually find time to spend with my friends on a leisurely Saturday.

Old friends. Really old friends.

……….

Old Friends

You know, the type that you might not have seen for months on end, but it’s like you only saw them yesterday.

The type of old friend that can say the name of a teacher, and you and they will either burst out laughing at a joyous recollection from 40 years ago, or curse their memory at such a draconian punishment once meted in the mid 1980s. And you’ll be laughing along with them - never at them - because their history is your history.

The type of old friends that will not only discuss the fake Fila jacket you bought from a dodgy bloke in the high street as a daft teenager, but also recall your fashion faux pas’ as a fourteen-year-old (dungarees and Chelsea boots) not to mention anything from dodgy haircuts to psycho kids in your year, to mishaps on school trips and foul lunches, and as the beers flowed, even to reminisces on those we’ve lost.

And it’ll be done in an unspokenly caring and relaxed manner, full of laughter and full of trust, honed by the myriad of shared experiences big and small that you’ve gone through together throughout the years - safe in the knowledge that the people you are talking to will have your back, and have had your back for more than four decades.

For those old mates will have watched you grow up and make mistakes - big ones sometimes - but will have never judged you, because they’ve been on your side while you try to struggle and cope with the vicissitudes of life. And because you’ve been there while they’ve grown up too.

While you’ve experienced big life changes, taken part in big life decisions and matured (mostly), not to mention getting older and greyer, (and in my case, wider) they’ll have invariably been doing the same thing in a parallel existence that used to always intersect with yours - and even if recently you haven’t had the time, then you’ve always still cared about them. About their families. And about their news, good and bad.

All the while, they’ve been quietly getting on with their lives, meeting those twin imposters of triumph and disaster as stoically as anyone can - sometimes far more than you think possible.

Your achievements and failures have been the soundtrack to their lives, just as much as you take pleasure from their successes, and feel for them when things go wrong.

The view from the clubhouse on Saturday.

I won’t say who the old schoolfriends were that I had a drink with on Saturday. It doesn’t really matter - for we all have old pals - or we should have. And we can all feel what I, they and we felt on Saturday.

Fun and frivolity, loyalty and camaraderie, recollections and reminisces, news and nostalgia, and joy and pain - amid the beers and bonhomie watching a local cricket match together as old pals, in the rare summer sun on Saturday.

Because as we sat there with drink taken in a glorious setting, between us, between old friends, the thought struck us that we had also lost good people in our lives.

I won’t go into the details, suffice to say, so many of us - you too perhaps dear reader - have been affected by loss, by the freight train of grief, that knocks you so badly that you think you’ll never get up again.

But you do. Because of the love of friends and family. Partners and parents if you are lucky enough to still have them. People who care. People who are on your side. Including old friends. Especially old friends. And Saturday was one of those times.

Because, before you know it, you’ve got a lifetime of accrued memories together. Special shared memories from human beings you value. That you respect. And yes, you love.

As mates, as pals. As old friends.

And that really is a beautiful thing.