Jack Tame: There's nothing like a day out with your oldest friends

I was trying to think how long it had been since we were all in a room together.

It was before Dayle and Jeremy each had a family. Before Matt became a doctor. Before Alex announced to everyone that he’d taken a job in West Africa and by any chance did anyone know what the weather was like in Togo at this time of year?

Five mates who grew up in the middle-class Christchurch suburbs and all knocked around a high school together. We read the same stuff, watched the same shows, studied the same subjects, played in the same sport teams and chased the same girls – all, with mixed success.

And then one day, like dice in a Yahtzee cup, life shook us up and we scattered around the World.

Since we last lived in the same city, we five mates have lived in five different continents between us. Alex lives in Tel Aviv and speaks Hebrew. He spent years guiding people through Jerusalem and the West Bank. Matt’s medical career has taken him from Melbourne to Medellin. Dayle’s a doctor too – recently he worked out of the back of emergency helicopters and he prides himself on differentiating different models by the thump of their rotor blades. Jeremy’s the only one of us to have visited Angola on business and was the first of the group to take on perhaps the greatest adventure of all – he has a wife and two wonderful kids.

But how long since we’d all been in a room together? Sheesh. My best guess is that it was for someone’s 21st birthday, back in the day. The kids who were born in our final year of high school are now in their final year of high school. We’re starting to see age in each other’s faces, each other’s wasitlines, each other’s hair.

Part of me thinks it’s the one big benefit of being part of the Facebook generation: Social media didn’t exist when we were in school, but it came in soon enough afterwards that we could keep in touch over the years. But the five of us still had to want to keep in touch. I think that’s an important point.

Last weekend, Alex held a lunch to celebrate his marriage. It was a perfect, still, Spring day in Christchurch. Having travelled here from the Middle East, he and his wife gathered with his family and a few friends at Mona Vale.

After a few hours, after lunch wrapped and everyone else had pushed on, we sat down on the banks of the Ōtākaro/Avon River with a few beers and a bottle of champagne. The sun was glorious, twinkling through the leaves of the trees along the riverbank. There wasn’t a breath of wind. Families, kids, wives, girlfriends all lay down on the grass and for that little moment, the lives of my oldest friends all came together once again. I laughed and laughed until my belly ached.

It struck me on Monday when we split once again, farewelling each other and returning to our respective corners of the Earth: After all this time, all these years, all these experiences and jobs and relationships in isolation... everything’s changed and yet somehow, nothing’s changed.

And I reckon that might be the best definition of friendship there is.

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