We grow up taking so much for granted. As we get taken over by careers and families, ambitions and disappointments, we do lose track of things that are important, and often we do not realise that until it is too late. This year it is fifty years since I left home and started college in Portsmouth, an event which sometime this year will probably be marked by a small and simple reunion. I know that when I left home, I did leave behind a lot of friends almost completely. I was never a writer of letters and of course we had no mobile phones and no computers in those days, so maintaining relationships was not easy. Moving on meant making new friends, and that was pretty easy in those days with all those young bodies oozing hormones were thrust together into a quickly declining regime of partial retriction. The sixties were a time of teenage rebellion as we all know and were a time when respect for established authority was changing somewhat.
Hall rules were paid lips service to and by the time we left they had almost vanished except in the small print of the college handbook. So people could spend a lot of time together, in groups of in pairs or whatever you chose to do. Many deep relationships were forged in those days and many couples were drawn together into lasting relationships. My wife and I met in my last year at college and apart from her my links with college are now very few and far between.
Thanks to social media, a dear friend from 1967 recently made contact and we have been in communication on a more or less daily basis, sharing memories and histories. We of course took different paths and our stories are very very different. It has been lovely recalling some of those shred memories and it makes me struggle to remember others that mattered at the time, even if it was only for a short time.
There are phases to our lives as we grow up, one phase is weddings, then christenings then a long hiatus, followed by funerals. It is the saddest of phases in that we slowly lose those people that we once held dear. I seem to have lost all but one of my original family and many of my old friends, so finding some that still are there is a wonderful thing.
Old friends are the best friends - they have stood the test of time.
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