Been away from the blogosphere for a few days – largely because I was away visiting the city of X (sorry to sound like a 19th century novel, but I have to protect privacy) seeing two of my dearest friends. Two hugely different men moving in profoundly different circles (though they themselves are good friends) and providing two very different but equally valuable takes on life. Let’s call them Q and Z, to be very slightly original.

Q is a prosperously proportioned professional gentleman who appears outwardly to epitomise the comfortable bourgeoisie, but manages not to have internalised any of the attendant bullshit. He has a standard-size family, with two children who have real personalities and are awesomely bright, but have equally clearly not been brought up to compete with the neighbours, get into Eton or end up in an investment bank; they have simply grown up with parents who have a lot of interests and take the trouble to draw the kids into them. (I think I can modestly claim to have done the same with my own.) At Q’s house one gets a warm welcome, loads of booze and massively diverse conversation, but no sense of having to mind a preconceived set of Ps and Qs. At my age shittiness is so all-pervasive that its absence is immediately and powerfully noticeable, like the sensation of stopping banging your head against a wall.

Z is equally widely knowledgeable and diverse in his interests, but his life has taken a completely different path. Debarred from the bourgeoisie by a complete inability to fit in with its rules and practices, he moves among those who have similarly fallen off the edge, though keeping quite a tight rein on his own life; his acquaintance teaches him, after all, what awful fate attends those who let go. Our pub-crawl took us to places frequented by people who have served time for anything up to and including murder (Z, who is no sort of hard man, is known and loved there and thus as safe as if attended by an SAS phalanx) and it ended in the company of a friend of Z’s who was excellent company, but with whom I was rather glad to have been vouched for, as it were. Z’s friend had just returned from the wake of another of Z’s extended acquaintance, and was far from sober, exhorting the virtues of Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin as heroes of the 20th century.

We were joined by two ladies in early middle age who were mourning the death of yet another friend – funerals and wakes play a devastatingly large part in the lives of people in their forties in this milieu – and who were drunk, weepy and utterly charming. One of them came on to me to an extent that might have caused difficulties, especially as she evoked powerful memories of a princesse lointaine of thirty years back. In the end the ladies simply swept out in an alcoholic haze, and considerable firmness was necessary to escape from Z’s friend’s demand for a continuation of the symposium.

It was all very Irvine Welsh, and I mean that without a trace of disrespect. C S Lewis said, admiringly, of an unsuccessful friend of his that “he despised nobody”, and that is true of Z (actually it isn’t – he despises himself, with no good reason that I can see, but at least that fact prevents him from despising anybody else) and, I rather patronisingly hope, of myself.

Finally, a rather wonderful link, for which I must credit my friend The Exile (see Links): here