NOW WHERE WERE WE?.....

.....before we were interrupted by almost fifty years of seperation?

Yesterday, I had the real pleasure of meeting an `old` friend. We had been at school together, played cricket together and always enjoyed each other`s company during our formative years. When he got married - well, for the first time anyway - I had the privilege of being best man at his wedding. We go back a long way, to another time and another place, but our paths went their own ways when I was called up for National Service and my friend followed a journey of his own and, as so often happens, we lost touch with each other.

It was, I have to admit, the perhaps unlikely route of the Friends Reunited site that brought us into contact again only very recently . After all this time, we discovered that we didn`t live all that far apart from each other and so it was that yesterday we met more or less half way in an excellent country pub in a Kentish village. We just about managed to recognise each other, despite the onset of avoirdupois and anno domini and we proceeded to spend the next four hours just scratching the surface of our memories.

I suppose one of the marks of true friendship is the ability still to recognise those qualities which gave rise to the friendship in the first place even after almost half a century. And they were still there - those inflections, those gestures, those shared bouts of spontaneous humour, those shared opinions and, of course, the real pleasure of being in each other`s company once again.

I think, now that the ice has been broken, that we will now resume our friendship on the same genuine, fun loving, non-competitive, non-combative, mutually supportive basis that it always used to be. And what a pleasure that will be for even after this length of time, I was tempted to begin our conversation by saying, "Now, what was it you said? I`m sorry, I got distracted for a while."