pasts coming together

I guess I've always been super-proud of not, necessarily, turning my back on my past or my past friends.  I keep up with everyone that I want to, regardless of geography or others' opinions. Note - everyone I WANT to!

But that means, of course, that the past collides with the present sometimes. 

The begining of the end of the intense period of friendship that E and I experienced began during university.  We're still friends now but this was the moment when we enterted the 'new phase' that we are now, arguably, in.  She came to visit me at Uni for a ball.  She didn't have the best of times.  Neither, frankly, did I.  She wasn't having the best of times at her college.  I wasn't sure what I was having.  It was awkward.  I don't think she came back.  We still wrote alot.  She told me about this guy that was making a play for her - she was finding it excrutiating - he was a Cornish organist with a pasty in a plastic bag.  She ended up marrying him.  It was a happy ending in every respect. The pain that she was experiencing - the loneliness - the uncertainty (both at college and when at home too) - caused me pain too.  But life moves so quickly, in so many different directions, when you're that age.

The 'boys' came a great deal.  They'd sleep, five or six of them, on my bedroom floor. They'd drink a great great deal.  The 20p pints in the Students Union were very exciting for those of them who had gone straight out to work.  Some of my newer friends found them interesting.  Some of them found them baffling.  Especially the incident around the time of a birthday that involved a blowup doll.  The increasingly incessant socialising covered off a number of different cities.  We visited each other - went to others' parties and Uni Events. Sometimes as a 'pack'.  Other times as individuals.  Lives crossed over and sometimes complicated social and sexual tensions would arise.  Old politics would meet new people who didn't care about the past.  They didn't know about it.  Did I mention that there was lots of drinking involved.

I guess the culmination was a plethora of 21st birthday parties - in a multitude of towns and cities.  Mine was at Uni but shared with S, who was at college elsewhere, and with R.  Old and New colliding.  People came from all around.  There was a suburban lads' drinking party in one room.  There were hippies in another, dancing and experimenting with Thai Chi moves. The next door neighbours' husband had died the day before.  We checked with her whether it was OK to carry on.  And we did.  We partied on.  You could say things like that then.....

E...

Only one more friend from Uni really warrants an individual entry.  A saxaphone-playing Dane who took forthrightness to a whole new level.

Oh the Danes and their directness.  As we shall see, I have extensive experience in this area.  And she, I think, was the first.  An ability to say what she thinks and to cause unbelievable degrees of upset and offense and to not be able to take, in the moment, responsibility for one's actions.  All because there's nothing wrong with "getting it out there" and saying what you think.  Oh the Danes.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  She introduced herself to me in the Music class that I was taking as a 'subsid'.  She said that we were doing the same class combinations.  I hadn't noticed.  And guys noticed E.  The scandinavian blond with, I am told, perfect breasts.

We fell asleep in that class, together, alot.  We studied for it, together.   Well, I did.  She wanted to chat, gossip and tell me the latest news of her and her lank-haired boyfriend (the announcement of who's existence put paid to my asking her out - a pre-planned strategy that fell on its face for a variety of reasons, at all stages, including that one).  We got told off in that class for all of the above.  That was embarrassing.

She became one of the 'gang' but kept a discrete distance - she notably didn't fancy R and he didn't fancy her.  She had terrible teeth.  But I don't think that was anything to do with it.  She became very close friends with U - something that continues to this day.

She was very into jazz - something that I resurrected my own interest in thanks to her - she didn't cause it, per se. She played a mean "Starsky and Hutch" - something she did to great roars of approval in the 'ballroom' of the Student Union for a 'Ball' - the inverted commas are due to the fact that those definitions are somewhat exaggeratations.

And towards the end of the first year she turned to me, in a class, and said that she'd heard me say that I was planning on travelling to Indonesia after University, to hear gamalan music played first hand.  I was planning on going with J - emulating his free, grass-smoking spirit in a way that I wasn't quite sure I could fulfil.  She said that she would like to come too.  Would that be OK?   My first instinct was surprise at the presumption, the directness and, even, the imposition.  I, of course, said "yes".  She, of course, held me to that promise, two years later.

U...

U was, perhaps the cause of my lengthy forray into hippy-dom.  She was already sporting what we tended to call "guatamalan tops" as well as beads, indian pants and the smell of rollups before she arrived at University.

She lived at the Halls of Residence across the road from mine.  Hers were self-catering and, somehow, she'd been given rooms adjacent to some kindred spirits.  On reflection, the suburban dorks that I was quartered next to were probably good matches, on paper, for me too!

She was also on the same course as myself, L and R and, as a result, we would find ourselves walking back to our Halls together.  As a result we became friends.

And what drama. She had, as a British, second-generation, Pakistani, lapsed Muslim... issues.  She certainly had issues with her mother.  And she had issues around every guy that she dated.  An abiding memory of those early days - that first year - was of standing in the rain, watching tears run down her face, as she silently mourned the betrayal of a man called Tim.  I hated Tim for a variety of reasons of my own - principally, because he was a member of the 'JCR committee', a bunch of second years who 'ran' the halls of residence - they were self-consciously cool, creative and slightly aggressive.

And what drama.  Her experimentation with drugs.  He inability to hold her drink and her determination to drink more and more and more.  Her experimentation with other religions.  Her total inability to eat.  She got thinner and thinner.  She ate the occasional slice of toast.  And smoked an inordinate number of rollups.   When she wasn't introducing me to the wonders of Superkings.  The cigarettes of suburban slappers.  Suburban slappers, me and U.

She loved dancing, poetry and occasionally swifting from chaos-ridden hoarder, to stripped down minimalism (to the point where, on occasions, we thought that she was either preparing to leave or preparing to die). 

She, of course, had occasional issues around self-harm and an inability to contemplate a future - a future back living with her mother, a life where all the freedom she was now experiencing would be taken away in a trice.

Complex barely covers it.  The coolest person I'd ever met. 

We're still friends.  She's gay now too.