Friends

Ah, the weekend: Time to relax, unwind, catch up with friends, and remember what’s important in life.

Or, is it?

Amid the mad juggle of work and family, we tend to see less of those who matter most.

I don’t know about you, but my garden of friendship needs a good weeding.

So last weekend I ditched the kids and spent the day with my best friends from school, who I hadn’t seen in years.

Age had indeed wearied us.

We were no longer the wannabe Goths, suffering existential angst while dancing to Joy Division in a dingy nightclub, circa 1980.

(Memo Gen Ys: For Goths, see Emos. For Joy Division, refer to New Order).

We still wore black, admittedly for slimming purposes instead of trying to look cool.

But despite the passing years, we slipped into an easy repartee, as if we’d seen each other only yesterday.

Our riff began with the ravages of age: boobs like fried eggs, according to one friend; saggy knees, said another; catching your reflection in a shop window, only to see a middle-aged woman looking back.

(Why is it that we still feel 17, until we get up in the morning and realise someone has stolen the spring from our step?)

Talk eventually came around to who-was-doing-what from the old school days, specifically those nauseating brag-posts on the Friends Reunited website.

“Oh, yes, well we’ve just returned from our lake house in Italy so Joyce could finish her much-anticipated second novel. Our Lachlan is the youngest boy to be accepted into Harvard, so I suppose we’ll be moving to Cambridge, but we’ll have to sell the waterfront pile in Point Piper, mwah, mwah…”

That particular post was written by a chap whose nickname at school was Spinner.

Last time I saw him, he’d smoked too much hash and was whacking his back to get rid of a giant cockroach.

One friend admitted she used a false name to log on to this website, to get a laugh at all the crap people wrote about themselves.

After discussing how much we loved/hated our children (depending on the time of day) we got to the nitty gritty – loved ones lost, mistakes made, crises faced.

There was the devastation at breaking up with pimply-faced boyfriends; the jobs in factories and pubs to pay for uni; the sheer terror and indescribable joy at becoming a mother.

I could say that we laughed and we cried, but that sounds trite.

‘Bonding’ is definitely overused.

And I won’t trot out that old song about silver and gold.

But there is something deeply enriching about spending time with old friends.

A searing and unflinching honesty. A reckoning of life’s mysteries.

We are all the poorer for restricting this time to the odd text message, tweet or email.

So this weekend, pick up the phone (no, I’m not getting a kickback from Telstra) and make the call.

It might be the best thing you do all weekend.