Time spent with my oldest friend

I wrote in an earlier post about the difference between a friend and a friend. There’s just something special about the relationship you have with your friends and it can be different things with different friends. OK, I’ll stop doing that with the bold and italic, I can see it's becoming annoying and I’m sure you’ll have got the gist by now! I like to think that I have my fair share of friends, but only a few that fall into the friend (last time, honest) category. 

The length of time you’ve known someone doesn't always affect your friendship, but sometimes it really does matter. I met up yesterday, along with Alex and the boys, with our oldest friends (such a funny term isn’t it? They’re not ancient, we’ve just known them for a long time); Karen, Stevie and their lovely daughter Kirsty. I grew up living next door to Karen in one of the ‘matchbox’ terraces in Cumbernauld so we’ve basically been going out to play since we were about 2 years old - and we have as much fun now as we did way back then! Ok, so nowadays we don’t steal our mum’s make-up and plaster ourselves in it (or, worse, plaster our other best pal neighbour, Alan, in it), and we don’t dress up in old wedding dresses, and we don’t run around playing hide-and-seek, and we don’t spend hours listening to ‘singles’ on our record players, and we don’t do wee shows in our living rooms for our mums and dads (with hairbrushes as microphones), and we don’t go ‘up the town’ looking for the boys that we fancy, and we don’t have record sessions so that we can practice moonies and snogging (one time even with neighbour Alan – eeuwww!), and we don’t devise ways that we can communicate through the wall late at night (no mobile phones in those days kids!), and we don’t get into fights ‘behind the church’ when any of our pals are bullied or picked on (no, I’ll re-phrase that, Karen doesn’t get into fights any more – I was always a complete coward but I did have a very important job holding the jackets!), and we don’t spend hours talking about everything and anything...no, wait a minute, that last one’s wrong – we do still spend hours talking about everything and anything...and we do still support each other if our kids are being bullied or picked on, we do keep in touch by mobile phone (or, more recently, we got so with it on Facebook!), we do still dance moonies and snog the same boyfriends that we had way back then (yup, Alex and Stevie were our boyfriends when we were at school), we do still have sing-songs in our living rooms (with Budweisser bottles as microphones), we do still hear from our mums what the other’s up to long before we’ve had a chance to tell the other ourselves (they don’t live next door anymore, but our mums are still great friends) and we did still, as adults, dress up in wedding and bridesmaid dresses when each of us got married (with Alex and Stevie joining in, taking it in turn as groom and best man!). We don’t see each other all that often, but neither time nor distance has ever put barriers between us.

So, basically Karen knows me to the core. She supports, encourages and looks out for me (she’s also quick to tell me if she thinks I’m taking the wrong road) and I do the same back. A shared childhood is a special thing and it forms the basis of our special friendship – another one that I’d definitely be lost without.