Unlike the inestimable Herb, I do not often give you The Haps from my life because they are a) few and far between, b) of no interest nor consequence to anyone but me, and c) no laughing matter generally.  Truthfully, so little that could constitute the pith and substance of a decent post happens to me these days that often I am obliged to cast my mind back to a time when my life did not trundle along the bottom of the Sea of Ordinary… except wherever I cast it, that is exactly where it touches down: a life more ordinary.  Happy, content and largely uneventful: nothing to write home about…

In common with most of my contemporaries – not all, I did after all go to an all boy’s grammar school –  my overriding need was to get a girlfriend: preferably one who would pay for herself at the pictures* and, perhaps share her Poppets**.  I have always been successful with the opposite sex, but seldom in the ways that I desired.  For most girls of my age, I seem to have had considerable boy friend promise, but minimal boyfriend potential: for a teenage boy, the conjunction was everything.  Girls liked having me around, but not – as it were – having me around.  I was never short of female company: I had many girl friends, but no girlfriends (the lack of conjunction being something they all worked very hard to maintain) and this knowledge played merry hell with my self-esteem.  Everyone else, it seemed, had found someone to hold hands with on the bus whilst I just had to walk home alone.  I wrote very detailed lists of everything that was wrong with me and, to the very best of my knowledge, never found a single way of remedying any of them.  I still haven’t – although my wife has given me plenty of pointers.

Today, of course, I understand that friends – of whatever persuasion – are a priceless gift.  I enjoy being a friend and I try to be a good one – even if my capacity for emotional support occasionally stretches little further than a cup of tea and a Hob Nob – I have begun to master the art of listening – properly listening – if not the art of having anything useful to say.  My gift for saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong circumstances has never left me, but experience has taught me to butt out from time to time.  Friends don’t need to know the answers; they just need you to be there to listen to the questions… I think.

Of course, if I’d have had a friend like me when I was a kid, I would just have asked why I hadn’t got a girlfriend and then, as now, I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea – other than, perhaps, for the need of a few more haps in my life…

*The cinema

**Tiny little chocolate covered peanuts, caramel, coffee cream, coconut and chocolate – yes, chocolate covered chocolate is a thing – that you bought by the scoopful in the foyer of the cinema and not (obviously) anything to do with what you were thinking.