Sometimes people disappear out of your life, and sometimes they come back. So it was with one of the Systems Administrator's school friends. They went to different universities, but kept in touch by dint of a few term time visits, and of course in the vacations they were living in the same town. This was, if younger readers can imagine it, in the days before Facebook, texts, or snap chat. If you wanted to get in touch with the SA during university term you had to write, or leave a phone message at the porter's lodge (which is how it fell to a college porter to break the news to me that my grandmother had died).
After university the old school gang would meet sometimes for drinks after work, and when we moved out to north Essex the school friend was already entrenched half an hour's drive up the road in Suffolk, where he ran his own business, so we continued to see each other. He is an intensely gregarious man, and there were usually other friends of his about, as well as a lodger. One lodger metamorphosed into a girlfriend, to be succeeded by a different girlfriend, followed by a baby. And gradually we began not to see so much of them.
That was probably for lots of reasons. We were both commuting, working long hours and perennially knackered, so we didn't put as much effort in as we might have done, and the arrival of the baby put paid to evenings in the pub. At weekends the Systems Administrator wanted to go sailing, while I was embarking on the garden. If truth be told neither of us felt we really gelled with the girlfriend, or had the slightest interest in babies. Meanwhile the rest of the old school gang had also settled down, and had babies, so the after works drinks in London tailed off as well. And so things drifted to the point where we didn't see the old school friend any more. You don't know when that day is, of course. It isn't as though there is a grand scene, or act of repudiation, or declaration that it's all over, but at some point the penny drops that you have stopped seeing somebody.
We ran into the old school friend at a couple of reunion parties, the sort of large bash people put on to celebrate big birthdays or just because they can, where you meet people you haven't seen for a decade and declare that you must meet up properly, and then go home and resume your normal lives and don't meet up at all, not even because you don't like each other, but because you are creatures of settled habits and limited spare time whose routines no longer include each other and who live too far apart to go out for a quick drink. At the second of these parties (actually, I missed the first one because one of the cats was ill) we discovered that the old school friend had moved to Brighton, and were introduced to his son, who is now considerably taller than I am, and his current girlfriend, who looks disconcertingly like the previous one in terms of colouring and features, only about five inches taller.
And then yesterday there was a phone message to say they'd be visiting Colchester today and did we fancy meeting up? He managed to find our house, which is quite a feat for someone who can't have been here for ten or fifteen years, and we went to a local pub for lunch. As we set off in our separate cars, in case they wanted to go straight on afterwards, I asked the SA if he could remember the old school friend's new partner's name, but the SA couldn't. Over lunch it turned out that they were not just visiting to sort out something to do with his old house in Suffolk which he kept on as a rental property when he moved to Brighton, but were moving back to the area. They are about to go on holiday, then should be exchanging contracts on a house near Stowmarket. So just like that, the old school friend is back in our lives.
I like his current partner, from what I've seen of her in our two meetings, and luckily the old school friend referred to her by name so we were spared the embarrassment of admitting that we'd both forgotten it.
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