Old friends

The end of the lockdown is in the air, but it's still months away in reality. The first, very modest, reduction in social restrictions begins in a week's time, on 8th March, with the chance to meet up with one other person outdoors in a socially-distanced way, although still in one's local area. Then, on the 29th March, one can travel any distance for the day (Durham, perhaps, with a break at Barnard Castle?) and enjoy a private meal al fresco with up to six others. But shopping, pub garden meals and overnight stays - all still with social distancing - must wait until 12th April. And not until 17th May will most remaining restrictions be lifted. Only on 21st June will a kind of normality return, and even then it seems certain that some Covid-19 precautions will remain in force. And all this depends on keeping to schedule as regards controlling the virus in its various strains. 

So there's plenty of time at home left to kill. At least for retired people like me. It's just as well that I've still got so much photo scanning left to do before all the prints worth digitising are dealt with. I've been steadily getting through them, but I think I may have - potentially - five or six thousand still to scan. That's too much, even if I decide to leave half of it for next winter. I'll have to be selective. But that'll be quite difficult. Most of the remaining shots are of people - friends and family I knew during the 1990s. I had a lot of friends then, because I was very active socially. And all my close family were still alive. Will I be able to bin pictures of fun times and significant family events? Just to make the scanning go faster? Knowing that all these shots are unrepeatable? I don't think I will have the necessary resolution.  

I haven't looked to see what's actually there. If I did, I would hopelessly divert myself from the task. Most of these pictures have been boxed up for donkey's years, and it would very much be a voyage of rediscovery. I know what I ought to find, but there will be many fascinating pictures of scenes and people I've long forgotten about, or can only vaguely remember. Good shots too, because I would have been using excellent equipment. No duff, out-of-focus pictures to discard; they're all keepers. 

Studying these old prints - all of them taken at least twenty-one years ago, with the earliest of them thirty-two years ago - is bound to call forth mixed feelings. I know I will ponder what we really meant to each other, whether we really were having such a good time. What we could have done, but never did. I will think, with hindsight, things like 'Did Mum and Dad guess, in that merry shot, that they'd never see their son (my brother Wayne) alive again?' or 'We could have been special friends - why didn't we give it chance?' 

I will be keenly aware that everyone in those pictures must have aged as I have aged, and that an entire swathe of older persons will, by now, either be in some home, or will have died without my hearing about it. Really, with very few exceptions, all the people in the prints I'll be looking at are lost to me. We parted company long ago, for whatever cause, and they are now just part of my personal history. And, of course, I am the same thing to them - assuming they remain alive and kicking and able to remember me at all.

Should they remain lost? Should we try to get together again? In most cases, it wouldn't be hard to trace and contact them. 

I've thought about this before. It's an issue that doesn't go away. In fact it gets more and more acute as the years go by, and time starts to run out. There's still sufficient time to revive an old friendship, but that won't always be the case. For some, it may already be too late.

You can't ignore or discount the likely effects of getting older. Ravaged looks are the least of it: those are expected and can be accepted. But the changes may still be shocking. Personality traits will certainly have become accentuated, maybe to the point where they twist a person's demeanour. Tragedies may have scarred and subdued a former ebullient nature or sunny outlook. I'd say that the lives of many older people tend to become narrower, more and more clouded with personal worries and family concerns, real or imagined. They feel weaker, much more vulnerable than before, and take refuge in an inflexible daily or weekly routine. And then, often after some sudden shock or health crisis, spiral into a sharp decline in physical and mental powers. I once had a neighbour who went like that. He lived, mentally and physically, in a time well past. Then one day he died, and that was that, apart from attending his funeral. He had no family, and only one old friend turned up. We learned, too late, about my neighbour's passionate but very private interests, and his former life. It was so sad. 

When scanning my slides from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s before last Christmas, I came across several people who by now must be very elderly and not at all as I fondly remember them. To a lesser extent, that must be true also of the older people I knew in the 1990s. I still live life with zest. I am still in the fast lane - when driving anyway! How would I react, meeting up with someone from years ago - someone of my own age - to find that they hadn't thrived at all? That they had instead been physically and mentally crushed by the passage of time? I think I would be deeply disturbed. Appalled and sorry for them; embarrassed that I had escaped that fate; and concerned that it could still happen to me. I'd also feel guilty for making silent, private comparisons, if it were obvious that I'd aged better and was clearly more alert and receptive to the new and the different.     

And there are other aspects too. Out of curiosity, I did a Google search on two friends from the 1990s whom I will most certainly see in the print-scanning to come. 

As expected, they were both to be found. Both were on LinkedIn, being professionals. One, a former journalist, was a brilliant technical translator in four languages, with a long-established commercial practice and a local presence as a parish councillor. The other, formerly a highly-qualified company treasurer, had moved on into top-level charity work, and from there into important community projects, for which she had earned an award for outstanding service. 

We had gradually parted company as M--- became dominant in my personal life. But with M--- long gone, there was in theory no reason why I shouldn't renew our acquaintance. And yet... 

Well, two things. First, they had both been hugely motivated people, achieving much, with a host of influential contacts. I hadn't been able to compete with that in the 1990s, and would not be able to now. Second, I'd changed too much. They wouldn't feel I was in any way the person they'd known. I doubt whether they would actually like the kind of woman I'd become. I'd seem less impressionable, much more my own person, more assured and assertive, distinctly more independent, and not nearly so amenable. I really think my self-growth, my late blossoming, would make me seem less attractive.

In any case, can one bridge a too-long gap? If one part of me wants to reach out and reclaim past friends, and never mind a possible rebuff, another part tells me that if lives diverge for too long it will be like two strangers meeting. And just as awkward, if there isn't an immediate bond to smoothe the way. Almost like a blind date. Not that I've been on any date, blind or otherwise, in the last dozen years! But how I imagine a blind date might go. 

Friends do seep back, if the gods will it. I was very pleased to recover a divorced friend from twenty years ago in 2019, twice meeting him in person in 2020. And we plan to meet up this year, when I'm pitched on the Cotswolds. Maybe the same gods will push another friend my way. If so, I will take a chance and see what happens. Life's too short to hesitate.