A few years back, a friend from Newcastle was down in London and I was giving him a tour of the town. At various points I stopped and pointed out where various friends had lived. ‘That’s where my late friend X used to live.’ ‘That’s where my much-missed friend Y had his shop.’ Eventually my delightfully straight-talking friend stopped me and said: ‘Are any of your friends fucking alive?’
I’m happy to report that the answer was ‘yes’, but it did make me think about something I’ve unwittingly done all my life – which is to have a disproportionate number of friends who are much older than me.
One of my closest friends died last week at the age of 93. He was one of the best people imaginable, and we probably ate more meals together over the past 20 years than I have eaten with anyone else. I think that latterly, as almost all of his contemporaries had fallen off the perch, our friendship deepened. I certainly know how much his friendship meant to me. Not just to have someone to speak to who was older, wiser and had a lot more life experience, but to have someone whose longevity allowed him to encourage me, tease me and push me.
Sometimes our life experience aligned exactly; at other times we mulled on the ways in which they couldn’t. One thing that my friend found absolutely incommunicable was the nature of ageing.
Even a man of his experience was baffled in the face of this. ‘You’ve no idea – how can you?’ he used to say. Whenever I took a stand in this magazine against government plans for euthanasia, he told me I had no right to talk about it because I had no idea what I was talking about – because how could I? I wouldn’t take that from many people, but I was willing to take it from him.
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