I meet up with my old friends a few times a year. We talk about our lives, our families, the shambolic world we live in. We slag a lot and laugh even more. Sometimes we drink too much. Usually, we drink just the right amount.
One friend is the Mammy of the group and organises dates and restaurants (getting together in a location convenient to us all can be UN-level complicated), while another has taken up the role of the documentarian. He’s the one who always remembers to ask a passerby to take a picture of the four of us, which is then shared in our WhatsApp group.
Most recently, it was outside a Dublin pub during the May heatwave. Shades on, pints in our hands. But that photo, or iterations of it, has been taken over many years in various locations around the country and in various parts of the world. France. The Netherlands. Scotland. The US. When they read this, they’ll message me to tell me all the places I’ve forgotten; along with all the places we’ve talked about going to, but haven’t managed yet.
If you were to look at the pictures, you’d probably see four fairly unremarkable-looking old lads: two of them completely bald, two of them still in a relative state of denial. Or you might study the photos in sequence, to observe how the bellies have gradually swollen or the necks got more jowly: how time and age is slowly kicking the crap out of us.
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But when I look at the pictures, I rarely see that.
Some years ago, a woman I knew, who was single, had re-established contact with a former boyfriend she went out with when she was 20. It turned out he was single again too. So, after a gap of more than two decades, they met up. Afterwards, I asked her had he changed much physically. She conceded that he had, but added: he was beautiful when we were going out. And I could still see it.
The way she phrased that struck me forcibly at the time: she wasn’t just seeing him as he was now, but also as he was back then. The mental template for her old boyfriend merged with the man she met, conjuring someone outside the constraints of linear time. The adult and the boy, existing simultaneously.
This is not uncommon. The way we view ourselves tends to be in temporal flux. The age we feel can often fail to tally with the face we see in the mirror or in a photograph, and the same must also apply to people we have known for a while. In the case of my friends, I’ve known them as children, as teenagers, as young men and as not-so-young men. All those versions are there in the pictures on WhatsApp.
It applies to our children too. Even if they are grown up and have children of their own.
After a long sojourn with us, Daughter Number One, the two grandchildren and future son-in-law returned to France. Because of ferry bookings and a passport delay, they had to depart in stages. Daughter Number One was the last to leave, her two-month-old daughter strapped to her chest: facing into a long journey that would involve cancelled trains and 40-degree temperatures. I watched her head up the escalator in Dublin Airport and as always happens when I say goodbye to a child there, I got a lump in my throat, along with a vague feeling of panic: because this was my little girl; a child who shouldn’t be doing this on her own. But an adult too. They got home safe and sound.
My friends will read this and wilfully misinterpret it to mean that when I look at pictures of them, I see their inner beauty. They may mention it when we next meet. But only around 20 times.
