Tuesday, September 13, 2005

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Last Wednesday night I met up with my friends Lara and Jon. We met each other in 1991, when I was studying at Swindon College of Art, the year before I went off to university.

As can be expected, much has happened to the three of us over the years. These days Lara lives just outside London with her boyfriend of 10 years, Toby, and works in a law firm. Jon did live in London for a long time, but now lives in Marlborough with his boyfriend, James and is a PA at an environment agency.

We each have remarkably different lives from each other now than we did in the days when we were at college and we would skip class, drive out to a remote hill overlooking Bath, listen to The Smiths on my car stereo and get really, really mashed from smoking cheap weed sold to us by Stoner Leo in life drawing. These days Jon likes nothing better than potting orchids and walking his dog, Moshi, over Wiltshire fields while Lara DJ's for fun once a week after transvestite bingo nights at her local S&M club.

And me? Well, you know. I do my thing.

But despite all of this, however much we've each moved on, however much water has gone under the bridge, however infrequently we see each other, all of those things ... within four hours of meeting up in Soho Square the three of us had got really drunk, been complained about by fellow customers for being too loud in a posh restaurant, tried on hooker shoes in a sex shop, looked at kinky sex pictures in an Erotic book cafe and taken stealthy pictures of cute boys in a gay bar.

I was nineteen when I met Lara and Jon and I'll be 33 at the end of this month. I've met a lot of people and made a lot of other very good friends since meeting the two of them. And I still have a lot of fun, a lot of the time. But every so often it's good to have 19 year-old fun. And to be reminded that while, yes, you are a bit older, you're not always a lot wiser.

Because who wants to be old and wise if it means that you can't accept your friends sticking paper napkins up your nose without seeing it as a sign of affection?

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