In the blink of an eye
Yesterday I took a train into the West End of London in order to attend an occasional but serial lunch organised by a pal – serial in the respect that they occur two or three times per year and none of the guests ever know in advance who is going to be there, other than everyone will be known to the host.
I was therefore pleasantly surprised to discover that one of those present turned out to be an old acquaintance of mine alongside whom I had once played in the centre for our school 1st XV. I don’t suppose I am justified in calling him more than an acquaintance because, although ‘back in the day’ we were close (as contemporaries and sports team-mates), I must confess the bald truth here that we had not set eyes upon each other since he left the school – which he did before me as he was my senior by the best part of a year – until yesterday at approximately 1.00pm.
A gap of some forty-eight years.
As you might expect the experience prompted a range of reactions and thoughts.
The first was over our appearances.
I recognised him instantly but – I’m not sure this is quite the appropriate analogy but hopefully you’ll ‘get’ where I’m coming from – it was akin to sitting in a cinemas struggling to understand a surreal movie in which a flashback sequence was now unfolding. The man before me was definitely him, but in the context that somehow in an instant he’d morphed from being eighteen years old to sixty-six, with no attendant explanation as to why or indeed as to what the hell he’d been doing in the intervening period.
To be blunt – but I don’t think unfair – this character looked about the age of sixty-six, which de facto he was. Not much older than that, certainly, but equally not much less either.
(Without a shadow of doubt, I’m sure he felt exactly the same of me).
And yet, writing as someone who regards himself as being permanently eighteen years of age, when meeting people from my past I immediately begin wondering whether they’re going to be the same person I once knew.
Because so often people’s attitudes change over time. On top of which humans tend to get either fat, grey or bald (or even a combination of these). Nothing too terrifying in that, it happens to us all and is inevitable – but the really concerning thing from my point of view is whether, weighed down by the necessity to take life seriously … get a job, take on responsibilities, maybe acquire a life partner, a house, a car, pets and children, basically live life … they have ‘grown up’.
Which is where my insecurities and worries kick in.
Because I haven’t.
There is nothing more dispiriting than – as occasionally happens – meeting up with someone you knew say ten or more years ago and finding that they’ve since become a pillar of (high or otherwise) society in their local or regional community – almost turned into their own parent or parents perhaps, which they said they’d never do – when in contrast you haven’t changed a jot.
Instead you still regard yourself as being a bit of a rebel, a maverick, a drifter – an outsider if you will – who is still taking a ‘live fast, die young’ attitude to human existence because (you do not yet sense) the time to cast aside youthful foolish things … and take on responsibilities, just basically ‘grow up’ … has not yet quite arrived.
When you see yourself as a free, wild spirit and you come across someone who was once (in your days of yore) entirely similar but has now become Mr Sensible, it’s a downer.
Partly this is because you register than what the two of you once had in common has gone; but mostly because of an insistent nagging feeling that Mr Sensible has actually done no more than what human existence demands of us over the course of time and mortality.
And you haven’t. Which probably makes you a prat, or an overgrown schoolboy, or an eccentric, or possibly just a rather sad individual who needs to make up and smell the coffee. And get a life …
Anyway, those were the thoughts that were coursing through my veins yesterday at this lunch. Perhaps similar were coursing through the veins of my erstwhile comrade on the rugger field. As it happened neither of us had the time or opportunity to find out the truth because we were sitting too far apart to have a proper conversation. Which may (or may not) have been just as well!
