All's well that friends well

 Douglas Skelton at the Type M keyboard.

A couple of years ago I was invited to attend the annual prizegiving at a Scottish high school. My job was to shake hands, congratulate each prizewinner and then pass them their certificate or trophy. I managed it without any serious difficulty. 

Young people often get a bad press but they’re not all video game playing hoodie drop–outs but the students I met were bright, energised, engaged and active. 

However, it set me thinking about my own school days. They weren’t so long ago – after all I’m only 30.

I’ll pause here to allow those who know me to guffaw and snort tea down their nostrils.

I had a love-hate relationship with learning. I would have loved to have been an egghead but hated the idea of working towards it. My head, as we say in Scotland, was too full of broken biscuits and more than one teacher observed that if I applied the same amount of effort into studying that I did into basically acting the fool my grades would be much improved.

It started off so well, too.

Apparently on my first day of primary school I came home at lunchtime and announced I wasn’t going back because ‘I knew it all.’

I don’t recall this and I’m not sure what particular all it was I knew but that arrogance didn’t last long.

Truth be told, I was not the brightest bulb in the box. I’m still not.

Neither was I proficient at anything sporty. Science was beyond me. And maths and arithmetic were a mystery. That’s still the case, apparently, because just recently someone told me the plot of one of my books just didn’t add up.

What I could do, though, was string words together. Sometimes even in the right order. And I could make stuff up. As an adult, I eventually gravitated towards an occupation where being able to string words together and make stuff up came in handy.

Naturally, I became a journalist.

(I’m kidding. No angry letters from outraged reporters, please!)

School has changed, though. In my day, computers were something in ‘Star Trek.’ Even calculators were akin to science fiction. My fingers were my calculators. For complex sums the shoes and socks came off. Not a fragrant experience on a hot day. And examiners frowned upon a question like ‘what is 5x4’ being answered with '10 plus 10 little piggies.’

However, as I said, the complexities of mathematics were beyond me. I thought a logarithm was a dancing lumberjack. And when a friend told me he’d passed Highers in French, German, Latin and Algebra, I wondered how you said ‘Good Morning’ in the latter.

What you have just seen was an example of why I didn't do well at school. There is a serious point to my blog this week but I go for the laugh. That point occured to me while I was writing something on spec that, at its heart, deals with friendship - and a realisation that all my fiction is based firmly on the concept - and that in turn prompted a memory of that ceremony.

During that prizegiving, a terrific speech from the outgoing school captains underlined the value of friendship.

I still have a few friends from my youth. I don’t see nearly enough of them but they mean a lot to me. And they know that everything I’ve said above is very nearly true. They’re also the ones wiping the expelled beverage from their upper lip at me being 30.

There are a couple of lines about friendship from the film ‘Stand by Me’ (I’m not sure if they’re in the original Stephen King novella, ‘The Body’). One is, ‘Friends come in and out of our lives like busboys in a restaurant.’

That is true. Friends can come and go. I hate that they do, and sometimes it's been me who has done the come and go routine, but as a wise perspon once said, that's life.

The other line is this – ‘I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?’

That is both true and false.

There’s something about friendship when you’re young. It’s not something you think about at the time, analysis comes when you’re an old fogey like me. To the young, friendship is just something that is. Friends at that stage in life are more important than anything, even family.

As you grow older, you drift. Pressures of work, of family, of life take precedence. Soon those people who you roamed the streets with, who you played with, who you fought with, who you thought would be there forever are gone. Maybe in later life you hook up – a reunion, more likely a funeral – but the spark of what had once been sparks no more. 

So I think myself lucky that I’m still at least in contact with a couple of people who knew me way back then.

Of course, I’ve made more friends since school. Good friends. Close friends. Friends I rely on. Friends I know will be there when the solids hit the air conditioning. Friends I no doubt annoy regularly but are still there. Some are authors, some are not. Some are recent, some I’ve known for years. But they, like my old school chums, remain as vital a part of my life as the need to breath. I’m glad I have them.

I've lost friends, too. Sometimes my fault, sometimes theirs, sometimes nobody's. They let me down, I let them down, or that old saying That's Life did its thing. 

The school captains said their friendship would last.

Wouldn’t it be great if they were right?