By Neil Coupe
I recently read an article referencing the fact that as we age there are things we may never do again.
This may be people that we may never get round to seeing again, or places that we never return to.
We should try to enjoy the times that we have, acknowledging that they may not be repeated.
I try to bear this in mind when attending events or going somewhere unusual.
However, this thought never crossed my mind in late January as I returned from spending a few days with a lifelong friend of mine.
Six days later he died.
This is the first time that an immediate and close member of my peer group has passed. It has been a difficult few weeks and I have been very struck about how emotional it has been for myself and several other people I have been in touch with who are not known for sharing our feelings.
He was a very well-liked figure who had impacted on many people’s lives and was given an excellent and well-deserved send-off.
We all had our recollections and absurd stories of our absent friend, touching on his prominent role in our teenage misadventures. There was always a story with him.
One of the favourite ones was when he hitchhiked to Ireland to see a U2 concert. On the way back he was picked up by a guy en route to see his girlfriend. “Nice car,” said my friend, admiring the expensive BMW he was travelling in.
“Cheers,” said the driver. “I couldn’t afford the train fare, so I nicked it.”
At the Wake, a group of friends from my teenage years started reflecting upon our friendships that had endured over four decades. Life has taken us in various directions, and our encounters are less frequent. It was however clear how crucial those early relationships were in almost every facet of our lives.
One of the brighter moments of the event was meeting a friend, who, thrillingly, was able to share photographs from years gone by, that had never been seen before. It was like opening a spectacular archive of our youth.
This was an era of big hair, ties being worn on special occasions, Vauxhall Chevettes, and ghetto blasters. There is always something magical about exhuming such photos, remembering where we were, what happened next, and then trying to work out who on earth the two people in the corner were. Whose boyfriend was that, what became of him?
On the other hand, it was a slightly bitter-sweet experience, to see our younger, carefree selves, not knowing what life would have in store for us.
My main learning was that pulling a funny face to crave some attention on a photo full of trim, smiling teenagers is not likely to age well. It will be the inscrutable Queen Victoria look for me from now on.
We joked about the fact that at the time, we used to roll our eyes when her camera came out. Now we wished that her camera had been out every time anything happened, as it is in the present era. The reality was of course that at the time a roll of camera films could only contain either 24 or 36 photos, and you used to have to send them away for processing before you could actually see the output, several weeks later. You tell the young people of today about that, and they just do not believe you.
