To yet another crematorium, this time to Barham near Canterbury for yet another funeral which seems to be an all too frequent occurrence these days.   This one was for an old friend of mine, who had passed away after a difficult year.  We had known each other since our time at school together and throughout the years of our youth, playing cricket in the same village team and sharing many `youthful interests.` 

Some minor medical problem meant that he missed National Service, but I was conscripted into the university of military intelligence and so we lost contact, went our separate ways and didn`t meet up again until about 50 years later - some ten years ago now.   After all that time, we merely looked at each other and carried on as if the intervening years had not happened.  Such is true friendship.

He was a cricket buff - like me a devotee of the beautiful game.  We both relived the memories of our partnerships at the crease and he enjoyed the last 20 years of being President of Sturry Cricket Club, close to Canterbury.   And so it seemed entirely right that today, before a full house with a packed gallery and standing room only,  his wish, to leave us by being dressed for the occasion wearing his cricket whites, was fulfilled. 

Howzat?

HARD AS NAILS.....

To begin on a sad note.   It`s about a year ago when a good friend of mine from our National Service days passed away rather suddenly.  But, instead of dwelling on his untimely loss too deeply, I find myself remembering the good times we had together and our long lasting friendship which was forged in the two years of our compulsory military service, largely in the comparative backwater of Germany`s BFPO 16.

Now I have the utmost respect - admiration even - for those who make the armed forces their career of choice and so nothing I say here will in any way be critical of them.  But the fact remains that, in those days of the call-up, conscripts like me and my departed friend were very different in out attitudes to life and to the concept of good order and military discipline.  

But we learned early on that to survive in that environment, one had to become `hard.` Not just as a result of the training we endured, but also in the persona we tried to convey to our fellow inmates and especially towards those regular soldiers who we assumed were `hard` anyway.   Somehow we had to compete.   And there were ways of going about that. 

One ploy I particularly recall was the ritual of the NAAFI break - a mid morning sojourn to the NAAFI canteen for a mid-morning snack.   We thought this gave an opportunity for us to demonstrate our `hardness` and so, eschewing the more favoured cup of tea and sticky bun, we both plumped for a pint of Paderborner Export and a pork pie.   This brought admiring glances in our direction along with the assumption that, therefore, we ourselves must be `hard.`

But there were other means of achieving that status, one of which, curiously, was through music.   I suspect it`s still the case that the `harder` the music you go for, the `harder` you are perceived.   It`s all nonsense, of course, but what other reason can there be for inflicting the likes of AC/DC, or The Running Sores on an unsuspecting world than to demonstrate `hardness` in the ear of the beholder? Anyway, back in the day, we trawled the airwaves for `hard` music and we went for songs that told `hard` stories like the `hard` western saga `El Paso` by Marty Robbins, which we played loud and long for all to hear and admire our `hardness.`.   Here it is:-

It doesn`t sound very `hard` any more, but it did in those days, and like the friend I lost a year ago, it`s still fixed in my memory.   

WE MEET AGAIN...

It`s a delight when after many, many years, old friends and acquaintances meet up again. And it is especially so now that those old friends and acquaintances are, like myself, well into their 70s.   It started just two or three years ago when, thanks to the internet and some judicious searching, I met up with an old school friend who I had not seen since we played cricket together on a Kentish hillside in the late 1950s.   Fortuitously, his niece had a village pub where we arranged to meet and I think our first words to each other after over 50 years may well have been, "Now, what were we saying?"   A much treasured  and continuing friendship revived.

A month or so ago, our local Parish Council had, as they are required by law to do, given notice of the Annual Parish Meeting, which is traditionally poorly attended.   This year, however, they had gone to the admirable trouble of producing a seductively glossy brochure, delivered to every door in the parish, containing the annual report and announcing that a talk would be given by a well respected Kentish historian, whose name I recognised, about the development of the county over the years. 

Now I`m not a great fan of Parish Council meetings but even I could not resist meeting this much heralded historian.   You see, the last time he and I met was again all of 50 years ago on the same cricket field on that same Kentish hillside when he captained a team from Sevenoaks and I had the honour of captaining the village team.   We didn`t speak much about the history of Kent but we did speak a lot about the glory days of village cricket.   More treasured memories revived.

And last evening I ventured to the last resort that is Folkestone - all heaving bingo, fairground noise and what passes these days for entertainment - to meet up with an old friend and his wife who were staying overnight en route to France from their Yorkshire home.   He and I had met fleetingly well over 30 years ago now and before that we had spent most of our National Service together in Germany, by day in our armoured cavalry regiment and at night working as projectionists in the AKC Cinema.

The coincidence being, of course, that we should happen to meet up again on the 70th anniversary of D-Day, when the casualties and veterans of the real war were recognised once more for a sacrifice and a triumph that enabled people like me to survive long enough to enjoy the company of good friends remembering good times.   

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME?

Yesterday, I had the very real pleasure of a most convivial lunch with two good friends. For years, the three of us worked together in varying capacities, throughout which time we developed a friendship as well as a working relationship. We`re all retired now from the slings and arrows of that former life and we have each found our own way of coming to terms with a different sort of life, away from the career-driven compulsion of permanent employment.

By and large, we are pretty fit and we keep in touch and every three or four months we meet up for lunch and compare notes. It`s a pleasant thing to do and although we are the same people, our respective roles in life these days are very different to what they were when we worked together. Yesterday, however, perhaps for the first time, there were just hints of fleeting moments when it seemed that we might be beginning to settle in to the kind of people we might become as the years continue to pass.

I found it difficult to escape the notion that the three of us might, after all, be slipping unknowingly but inevitably into our own Last of the Summer Whine. The stage is set, the conditions are right, the cast in in place. All we have to do now is decide which of us is Clegg, which is Compo and which is Foggy.

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."