Catching Up

I met an old pal, Nige Manning yesterday, over a Costa coffee. 30 odd years had elapsed since we last met, but it felt as though one of us had just popped out to fetch the paper, while the intervening years compressed into minutes. The best relationships dissolve time quicker than a soluble aspirin, and allow us to carry on where we left off without the impediments of jealousy, social convention and one-upmanship.

We traded memories about our time in Staffs Police Cadet force, each filling in the gaps made by the other. My present circumstances, being unemployed, skint and single didn’t seem to matter, even though Nige had risen through the police ranks, gotten married and had two sons. It would have been easy to embellish my own chequered past, or to omit the catalogue of personal traumas and apply a thin sheen of success over everything, but I didn’t. It felt ok to talk about our own private battles at home or at work. No matter how we dress up our lives, or airbrush our experiences there are always shared incidents or parallel circumstances that conspire to pull down our pants and laugh hysterically.

It is these common denominators that cement the best friendships. None of us wants to feel alone, stupid or worthless, so by playing the game of ‘you show me yours and I’ll show you mine’ we quickly realise that no matter how much our lives seem to change, essentially we are all the same. Given enough time and enough practice, anyone can bullshit their way through life. It is only when we interact with like-minded individuals that our true selves emerge from the dark recesses of our minds, sighing and stretching like dozing ghosts.

We’ve all dreaded those moments when we meet old school mates, praying that their open gambit won’t embarrass or humiliate us, especially if our own version of past events bears no comparison with theirs. I attended an Army reunion last year shortly after I’d lost my job, my wife and my sanity. On the journey over to Shrewsbury I practised all manner of alternate histories, searching for that note of authenticity amongst a plethora of lies and overblown successes. In the end I just fronted-up and told my old nursing buddies the truth. Most of them were sympathetic, a couple smiled thinly and stared into their respective glasses, but nobody sought to patronise or offer up some quick-fix panacea.

It seems that, for the most part, honesty is usually the best policy. I suspect that most people can smell bullshit at fifty paces and those that can’t are usually too steeped in it themselves to notice.