One is silver, and the other gold.

I am very happy to say that I recently got back in touch with a very old friend. We have known each other since we were five years old, at school, and, over the course of our acquaintance, we upgraded to Best Friend Status for a while. Life happened since then and we sort of lost touch. No arguments ever occurred, we just found ourselves in different parts of the country, doing different things (one of us reproduced, the other travelled the world).

This recent turn of events got me thinking about the friendships we 'collect' over the course of our lives. I can only really talk, with any authority, on the experience of someone in their late twenties, but I imagine that the same patterns continue through time. I have realised that I have re-established contact with lots of old friends just lately- school, college, university, all of them are now back in my life, and it's great. I have also realised that lots of the friendships I have made in recent years didn't last the distance, and all fizzled-out within a year or so. Maybe it's me. Maybe I have forgotten how to make friends. Or maybe I have been unconsciously comparing them to my old friends- they know me best after all. The lady I have just got back in touch with has reminded me of this, picking up on things that I used to do when we were kids, and vice versa. We tell each other that neither of us have changed, which is strange, because I certainly thought that I had changed- so much has happened to me since then that I thought it should have had some effect on me. She could say the same too.

When I look at my five year old daughter, at the same age that I was when I made the first of my Old Friends, I wonder if the little pals that she runs around the playground with at school will still be there in twenty years time. Will she be asking herself the same questions as me? Perhaps she will, in the meantime, make some new and very intense friendships, and these will expire quite quickly, and she will turn back to the old ones?

Please don't get me wrong, I have a couple of wonderful friends, who I love dearly, and I met those in recent months/years. I haven't given up hope that they will still be close twenty years down the line. I know for definite, however, that those who were there to guide me through the years when we had just got to grips with not peeing ourselves in public, will be there to guide us through not peeing ourselves in public in sixty years time x