John's Quavering Pencil

Today I had lunch with three of the friends I made while at university as an undergraduate. Although we first met some 40 years ago, we did have a similar reunion in 1995. That still provides a gap of 16 years since the last time we got together, and within that period there has been, of course, much scope for change: children have grown up; retirements have come into focus;bodies have physically aged.

There was no awkwardness when we met at York station. Within minutes we were laughing, joking, and having a good time. As we walked across the city to the restaurant we had booked for lunch, we fell into step in pairs. I talked with Christine and I suppose we exchanged rather a lot of information at that stage as to what had been happening to us and what we were currently up to.

Lunch was a very leisurely affair and, apart from enjoying ourselves, we did reflect from time to time on how our reunion was going. Given that the three of them had worked as counsellors and therapists, I suppose that was not surprising. We did wonder how it had come to be that we all became such good friends as undergraduates and Klaus suggested that the common factor was that we were all passionately interested in psychology.

Klaus said at one point that he hoped we wouldn’t get too nostalgic and I think we managed to avoid that. Although from time to time we pooled snippets of information that we had about people who we had known at university, there was no yearning expressed to actually be back there again. I think nostalgia could be said to involve an overly romatic desire to time travel back to the good old days. By way of contrast, I felt we were trying to understand our experience of university in terms of how it had affected our subsequent life stories, and how we were each construing our separate present(s) and, indeed, future(s).

It has to be said that when we were at university our adult working lives lay before us. As undergraduates, we did not just talk about how we were going to approach the essay of the moment or that week’s practical work; we spent some time talking about our plans for the future. It may be a rather obvious point to make but, clearly, such conversations are now no longer appropriate to us.  We made our career choices long ago; we have each done our thing, as they say. In fact, our collective careers in psychology are more or less past their zenith (even though Julia is still active as a major conference organiser within her field). In my own case I am five years into retirement and the world of work is starting to seem a long way off.

I did wonder whether the fact that there was no mileage to be gained from speaking about career plans might leave a conversational vacuum, as it were. Of course, that was rather silly of me since the hole was filled by the recounting of our four separate potted histories. I don’t think that these were revealed as crafted autobiographical tales. Rather, we splattered fragments of our stories into the conversational cauldron, gave it a stir, and bathed in the semantic aroma we jointly created. Maybe we are now good friends not just because we once were 40 years ago, but because together we can still cook up palatable conversation that we each savour in our own separate ways. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Passing the Minster on the way back to York rail station