When I was at school, I was really good friends with Glyn and Simon. We shared some (relatively geeky) passions, which in some cases we still do. When school finished, I took a year out before going to University. Glyn went off to York and Simon went off to Hull. York and Hull are quite close to one another so they kept in pretty regular contact. I kept in contact too, although slightly less regularly, and occasionally mooched up north to see them.
Our contact became slightly more sporadic when I went to University. I was in Bristol, and Bristol is not close to either York or Hull. So I tended only to see them during University vacations – particularly Christmas. When I stayed on at Bristol to do postgraduate work, I stopped going back to Norfolk for vacations and only saw them at Christmas when they were summoned back to their respective families.
Now, sensible people at this point would have prevailed upon e-mail as the perfect answer to this problem. Unfortunately, Simon wouldn’t buy a computer, and started working for the Ministry of Defence (and his e-mail suddenly became secret) – Glyn was a just a bit more hopeless, only apparently logging on about once every three to four weeks. I have friends in Mexico and Los Angeles who I am in better contact with.
Anyway. Nearly a year passed with absolutely no contact whatsoever, until suddenly a few months ago, Glyn announced that he was getting married. I went up to Leicester for the occasion, watched the ceremony and chatted to everyone there. It was a wonderful, bizarre, experience. And the strangest part of the whole day was when Glyn turned around to me about half an hour after the ceremony was complete and said, “I know this is the first time that we’ve really seen each other in like two or three years, but it’s great to see you. Which reminds me, there’s another fundamental reason we must meet up again. When’s the X-men movie coming out?“