Changing nature of friendship

Yesterday I mentioned my wet day in Brighton.



Our friends from Exeter moved there last year, and have settled in brilliantly, it is a town that is very 'them', and although I am not sure I would live there it is a lovely place.

It was a great day catching up, Dave (a mutual friend from Exeter, and the other half of Words Fail Me podcast) visited as well, and we all chatted a lot about what we had been up to the last few months.

But it made me think about how friendship has changed. When in Exeter we used to hang around together for hours and just played silly games (Pass the Pigs, Poker, Uno) or just sat talking about random things for hours.

But when you have not seen each other for months, and have the time pressure of just a few hours before the train home then every bit of conversation seems to carry more weight, and it seems more important to find out what has been happening, and less time to explore the strange and random interiors of each others minds and thoughts. The conversation seems more important, but somehow you get less out of it.

I don't know what the solution is, other than spending more prolonged time together (and hopefully this will happen in the summer), but it seems sad to have largely lost this art of conversation in my life.

Bank Holiday in Brighton

I love the seaside. I lived most of my life just a few miles from the beach (Dawlish Warren a 2 stops away on the train), a year with a flat with a sea view (in Exmouth, if you stood on the window sill and there was no car parked on the street).

I now find myself in Buckinghamshire, handy for London, but not famous for having an coastline.

Any chance I can find to go to the seaside I will now take, and having friends recently move to Brighton is a perfect excuse to visit the coast.

We could not have picked a worse day to visit the seaside! It was great to catch up with friends (more of that tomorrow), it must have been the wettest and windiest day the south coast has seen this year, it rained from the moment we left our house in Wycombe in the morning, to the amusements on Brighton Pier, all the way back to Wycombe in the evening. My waterproof proved not to live up to it's name.

We had a great time though, catching up on news eating food, lots of coffee and plenty of copper coins lost in the arcades.

But hopefully next time I see the sea the weather will be more suitable for ice creams and sun bathing.