Day 66. For John (8/3/19)

If I were any good at ensuring synchronicity, this would have appeared yesterday. On Day 65.

I'm at a friend's 65th birthday party tonight. And that's the first time I've ever used that sentence. That's an age thing, your circle of friends is also ageing.

I've sort of known John Hodgkinson for decades. I'm fairly sure I nearly wrote for one of the magazines he published in the early-ish 80s But that's a long time ago and, honest to god, I struggle with anything that happened before lunch nowadays. Bear that fact in mind. All that follows may be variable and easily disputed by others with better recall than myself.

The fact that tonight's celebration is in a bar owned by another friend who I very definitely wrote for in the nineties seems extremely apt.

Sometimes it takes time for people to be fully in your life. You circle each other for years, being in the same room, going to the same gigs, passing in streets and theatres. Especially in a place like Liverpool. Liverpool is, we all know, a village. A fairly big village but a village nevertheless.

And if you're a gig goer here, you see the sea faces again and again. You nod at each other in bars. You know that you'll be in the same room again sometime soon. You don't necessarily pass anything other than a courteous hello.

Until you do.

A friend of mine, Graham, wrote a book. A book about record shops. Graham used to work for HMV. And then he was a rep. So our paths crossed. A lot. He wrote a book, a very good book, turned into a very good film (Last Shop Standing, you may have seen it) and he gave a talk in a room above a pub that The Beatles used to frequent.

And, at that talk, I had a chat with John.

And a couple of weeks later, at a show by Steve Roberts of 16 Tambourines, The Tambourines, Captain Pop and Steve Roberts solo renown, while waiting for the show to start (and the downstairs bookshop venue to fully open) I grabbed a coffee upstairs. Looking for a seat I noticed John with his wife Denise and singer/songwriter Lin Sangster and asked if they minded if I joined them.

Which is something I never do.

Until I did.

It's great getting older, you suddenly develop this confidence to actually talk to other human beings that you wouldn't have had in your twenties.

So, a conversation started. And the great thing is, it continues. A like minded soul with excellent taste in music, art, film, TV, we've carried on a conversation in the rooms we were always in and on Facebook. John and Denise have been to see my work, we've attended the same gigs and there's always that warm feeling of seeing somebody whose company you enjoy and who is genuinely pleased to see you.

Conversation is easy. Anybody who knows John and Denise will testify to that. And they know a lot of people. They move in interesting circles, they know interesting people. Because they are interesting people.

You don't necessarily keep the same friends your entire life. People come and go, move into different circles. We're basically all venn diagrams whirling round and intersecting. The great thing is letting the diagrams connect and realising how lucky you are to know good people, to have good people enter your life at the right time. No matter how long that right time takes to come around.

We know how lucky we are to have so many good people in our life.

So this one's for John, because momentous birthdays should be marked, should be celebrated.

Tonight we'll celebrate that. And I won't share this to anyone until I know for sure that the party isn't a surprise. Because this would be a hell of a way to let the cat out of the bag.

(Soundtrack: anything that make you think of your mates. You choose.)