What do you say to your childhood/early teenagehood friend when being re-acquainted with him 25-30 years later? I, for one, had no idea when this recently happened (though, admittedly, I often have no idea what to say to people, in general). An extra degree of difficulty was added by the looming possibility that my friend - now high achieving and highly respected in his field – would be dragged away by an over zealous colleague wanting to ‘have a word’. I had to think fast (not my greatest skill), and so I went with the (seemingly) easy and accepted topics: children, partners, career. There wasn’t space in which to find out who/where he is now; what had his first twenty-five years of adulthood given him?
I didn’t know how appropriate it would have been to recount with him tales of unhinged childhood, given the propriety of the venue and of the crowd, or if he even wanted to remember. But if it had been possible, some of my memories of us, which I would have recounted, are:
- watching The Goodies
- swimming in his neighbours’ pool (usually at my insistence)
- playing Charades in his backyard (usually at my insistence)
- his introducing me to the joy of eating Milo from the tin (which, quite frankly, I still do)
- playing Battleship (and my cheating, and his catching me)
- founding new territory in my backyard
- trying to come up with a title for his spy novel
- sailing with him and his father, on his father’s boat
- his drawing up and signing a Statutory Declaration (complete with “official” wax seal) indicating that he would come with me to my next school disco. (NB: As I have never ‘collected’ on this document, I assume the offer is still valid).
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