“I’m selling up”, he said, “moving back to the UK. It’s time.”
I read his email with no small measure of anxiety. It had been nine years since I’d seen my good friend CM. Nine years of must gos, must comes, and next years. I must go see you. You must come see me. Soon. I’ll go soon.
Then life got in the way. As it does.
CM isn’t travelling much anymore. His mid-80s legs aren’t what they used to be and his days of swanning around the world are closing in. But while his body might be giving up the ghost, cell by cell, his mind is as sharp as it’s always been. Sharper even. He has an acerbity about him that is sadly going out of fashion. He doesn’t hold back. On any subject. It’s so refreshing.
We had a five-day window in September – so we booked flights via Zurich to Nantes (Brittany isn’t the easiest of places to get to from this part of the world).
Memory is a curious thing. I seem to remember people as they were when we first met. They never age. We met about 20 years ago while I was taking photos for a report for a think tank I worked with in London. Some years later, coincidence took me to his corner of Sussex and I looked him up. He was one of the small group of friends at my 40th.
I visited him in France shortly after he moved there and he, in turn, came to see me in Budapest.
But it had been a while. I wasn’t prepared.
His git up and go might have got up and gone but it wasn’t out of choice. Age takes its toll on all of us.
We enjoyed a lovely day in Josselin – a gorgeous French town with a curious Hungarian connection – and spent our evenings setting the world to rights.
When we were leaving, we drove to Rennes to catch the train to Nantes. After we had lunch, we stood by the car and said our goodbyes.
We were grateful for his hospitality. He was grateful for our visit and was delighted to have finally met himself.
Then he said: “I don’t know if we’ll see each other again.”
It hit me hard.
I covered that sick feeling in my stomach with assurances that we would. Indeed. Absolutely. Of course. No question.
But he’s nothing if not pragmatic.
“We may not”, he said. “We may not. But it’s been special.”
On the train to Nantes, that was all I could think of.
My dad isn’t long dead; I’m nowhere near ready to lose anyone else. But C wasn’t talking of dying. He hasn’t a notion of dying any time soon. It was about the logistics. About how life interferes with the best of intentions.
We did a road trip in the USA a few years back where I was very conscious that I might not see some of those friends again. Life proved me right. The four months Dad was sick had me wondering each time I said goodbye if it would be the last goodbye. And then it was.
Goodbyes are part of the ageing process. And while it saddens me to think that we might never meet again in person, we can talk and write and do as we’ve been doing for the last nine years. Getting on with it. Because that’s what we do. What we’ve always done.
I’m ever so grateful that we finally made the time and went to visit C and that himself got to put a face to the name and a memory to the stories. My friend; he really is one of Kerouac’s crazy ones.
