Life's funny (but I'm not laughing)... Chapter 24

I met an old friend on the street the other day, and we shook hands and began our conversation with pleasantries – how are you, how have you been etc – and I gave him the five second run-down: still plugging away, nice gigs coming up, no retirement to the beach house yet, etc, and when it came his time to give a rundown, he started saying things like ‘well, we’re just getting on with it, you know... it’s hard on the kids, but we’re just keeping our heads down..’

And the smile slowly melted off my face, as I realised with a chill that something AWFUL had happened to my old friend, and I had NO IDEA what it was.

Our circles - that used to overlap so closely - had floated apart. We had no-one left in common that could have told me what had happened. It had somehow passed me by. And yet we had known each other for so long that I was embarrassed not to know, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask – what happened to you?

And so I breathed in sharply and I nodded with a stern look and murmured some platitudes: it’s hard... god, yeah, I can imagine... And we patted each other on the shoulders and off we went, with me none the wiser.

I climbed back into my car with a mixture of regret, shame and embarrassment and wondered: what else could I have done?