Can you imagine us years from today/ Sharing a park bench quietly?/ How terribly strange to be 70!” sang Simon and Garfunkel in 1968, in Old Friends. There is something to be said for the constancy of old friends, those who have seen the many versions of the person one has been and could potentially be. Held one’s hair as one threw up in the loo after a wild night out, nursed one’s broken heart, careful not to roll their eyes and say, “I told you so”.
Friends who stood one step behind like faithful shadows through marriage, childbirth, bereavements and milestones, knowing the script of each others’ lives more intimately than families ever can, even as youth slips into middle age into dotage.
What does it mean to be friends like these? Six friends walk into a pub. And they do so every Thursday for 56 years to share a pint and their lives. In these years, their hair has turned to the colour of winter. The conversations have veered from their love lives to their flagging health, from soccer to pensions. In this age of virtual connections, the story of this six-decade-long friendship in the UK’s Yorkshire, reported by the BBC, speaks of the precious platonic intimacies that gird lives IRL, in which convention dictates that marriage and family take precedence.
As in life, so in films and literature, friendships have drifted to centre stage sparingly, the drama of fortuitous meetings and lifelong connections playing second fiddle to romantic relationships. But from Farhan Akhtar’s coming-of-age Dil Chahta Hai (2001) to Sally Rooney’s millennial Normal People (2018), if there’s anything the complicated yet liberating, solid yet amorphous world of friendships have shown, it is this: That there is something to be said for the largehearted generosity of those who have your back, for the quiet reassurance of growing old together, discovering new eccentricities and feeling secure in the knowledge of old ones.
For friendship promises one thing — the assurance that you’ll never be adrift.
