I thought all this kind of thing was long behind me – the nerves, the excitement, the little rush of seeing a certain name pop up with a message on your phone, the feeling of guilt at those you are betraying quickly repressed in the pursuit of pleasure – but it is all the more giddying for being so wholly unexpected.
I have – and I can hardly believe I am typing these words – made a new friend. I know. I thought that all stopped in your thirties too. To find myself here, well into my forties, still capable of venturing forth into this strange, misty field of endeavour is quite a shock to the system.
It really is almost like being in love. I have terrible mentionitis. Her name is Emma! Oh, Emma runs a charity barely linked to what you just said! We met through a friend of a friend and just hit it off! That restaurant? Oh yes, I went there with my friend Emma – she thought it was excellent and so did I, Emma’s new friend!
And so on. I’m extremely happy and, like all happy people, extremely boring.
Fortunately, there is a fly in the ointment. Because I have never made friends easily (something about being an increasingly crotchety gargoyle-shape in the corner of any social gathering radiating a longing to go home seems to militate against it) and because it is so long since I last met, let alone enjoyed, a new person, I had forgotten that you are new to them too.
So, over your first coffees, or lunches, or dinners if you are feeling spectacularly brave or confident, you gradually stand revealed before them and therefore – oh, dear God – to yourself. “Oh, would some Power the gift give us/ To see ourselves as others see us!” said Robert Burns (I have translated from the Scots, because Mondays are hard enough). Absolutely not. There’s nothing worse. We need to wrap ourselves in a few gentle self-delusions or life becomes untenable.
And this time around, with Emma, this awful, unnatural process is made much, much worse by the fact that she is younger than I am. By 14 years. Which, in these days of accelerated everything, might as well be 3,000.
We do not have the same frames of reference. She had to look up Shirley Conran when I mentioned Lace, and when she then went away and read Lace she kept calling me, whitefaced, on WhatsApp to ask if she had really just read the scene she thought she had read and I kept having to say yes, but this was 80s feminism and empowering because overall Pagan, Maxine, Judy and Kate became rich and stayed loyal to each other. And she kept going away and trying again.
She does not have my anger, my embitterment, my cynicism. I do not have her base energy level, her curiosity about the world, her belief that the men she dates will turn out to be okay. I know too much, she knows too little.
But – and here’s the thing – it is interesting. It is invigorating. It is challenging. It is a bit like when you have to help your child with its maths homework and feel that rusty part of your brain clank tentatively at first and then with gathering certainty into motion.
It reminds me that newness can be good. That change is not necessarily synonymous with destruction and ruination. And it reminds me that friendships are worth having.
There is a terrible tendency, the older you get, to let friendships fall by the wayside as the current of daily life carries you ever faster along, the accumulating stresses and strains, from its dreary appointments, bills, emails to plumbers, car and pet MOTs to the greater matters of caring for elderly parents or grieving the loss of them, bobbing around you like turds disgorging faster and faster from the nearest sewage outlet. See, this is the kind of metaphor you’d never get from Emma.
But we mustn’t. The advent of the new – though it has so many delights – has made me appreciate once more the value of the old. At least from my aged viewpoint I can see now the harvest you can reap after what will seem to Emma like an impossible number of years of crop-tending. My friends and I, who have all known each other at least 20 years, are still there for each other (even if this has been a welcome reminder to kick the emails and the meetings up a notch).
But I hope now that Emma and I can enjoy a future 20. Even if by the end, as I warned her, she may have to push me round in a bath chair with a tartan rug over my knees. “What,” she asked, “is a bath chair?” But on we go.
