But Who Will Sing For Richard Neale?

Time for one of those rare blogs that isn't about death and existential angst. Who do we have to thank for this reprieve? None other than local songsmith and generally decent human being, the improbably bequiffed  Ric Neale.

This is Ric. He's trying to guess what instrument it is by touching it.

He thinks it's a harpsichord. He's close!

Ric has written, recorded and released an album of songs he wrote on his piano and sang with his voice. It's quite nice and you can find it using this link, should you so desire.

Click me to hear "All That Counts"

Anyway, that's not why we're really here. "Yes, yes," you think, "This stuff about Richard Neale is all very well Rob, but isn't there something brilliant you did which we can talk about instead?"

Glad you asked. For the album launch, Ric asked - nay demanded - that I perform a specially written poem, all about him. What a raging egotist! Luckily for him, so am I, and I quickly worked out that I could steal some of the attention rightly due to Ric by writing such a poem.

I read the poem out at the launch. Everyone agreed it was the best thing about the night and that really it would have been better if the evening was just about me, and not featured any piano at all. I'm pretty sure that's what they were saying. I did drink quite a lot of wine.

Anyway, here's the poem. If you don't know Ric, it will be almost completely meaningless. But hey - so is most of life. Don't blame me.

Poem For Ric Neale

I gaze into the perfect eyes of the man I most admire

His enviable hairline and finely chiselled face tell me

Everything is possible when in the presence of his holy fire

 

This is where I go when I want to know what’s real

I am standing before a full length mirror

My name is Richard Marshall Neale

 

I am no mortal man but rather

A being of infinite grace and wonder

Music flows from my fingers like dead skin drops from yours

Harmony and grace spring like beautiful sweat from my invisible pores

  

My voice is fine wine to your unworthy ears

My music an expensive meal

I’m the reason God invented tears

I am Richard. Marshall. Neale

 

Desired by women,

Envied by blokes

I’m Jimmy Carr with better jokes

 

I love Tom Cruise

For whom I’m often mistaken

I wrote and directed the Force Awakens

 

I’m Captain Kirk if he was cuter

I’m Paul McCartney’s music tutor

 

I’m not *the* God but I’m probably one of them

Did I ever tell you I played for Jason Donovan?

 

It’s impossible to fathom my unstoppable appeal

I am the alpha and omega

I am Ric Neale

 

I am the power

I am the glory

I am the literally never ending story

 

I’m impervious to bullets

I do not feel pain

I cannot be made wet by rain

 

I’m like Jesus but more tuneful

I’m like love only more truthful

I’m All the Young Dudes if the dudes were more youthful

 

I will be here when the human race has died away

In the ruins of these cities my songs will still play

 

Free of you peasants, finally unbound

My brilliant voice the only human sound

 

Carving statues of myself out of the trees

Finally happy in a world made of me

  

I am the full, not the partial, deal

I am the one, the only, Richard Marshall Neale

 

Fascist Bully Boy

 

When I was at school I liked English, because English was good and all the other subjects were stupid. And by 'stupid' I mean, of course, that I was no good at them.

The worst subject of all was PE, obviously. Cold, miserable bloody PE, with its mud and its shouting and its complete lack of sitting down reading a book. I was - and still am - completely rubbish at every sport. It wasn't so much that I was chosen last, as that the concept of 'last' was redefined to include 'after the eventual death of the Universe'. One of the things that worries me most about the afterlife is the possibility that I'll eventually have to be in goal for Jim McNulty's five a side team.

Next worse was languages. All languages. Because they are impossible. That's not hyperbole. I genuinely believe that they are impossible to learn. Oh, you can say some different words instead of the ones you were going to say, but that's just dicking about with sounds. A whole other system of communication, that you can think in? Poppycock. If you ever meet anyone claiming to speak another language, they are lying. They speak English and they are just trying to impress you. Have none of it. Report them to the authorities and call them 'a whore'.

Third worst was science.

Now, in principle I liked science. It was indoors, it was provably useful and it featured a great many things which you could set on fire. But our experience of science, back in the late 1980s, was subject to some form of localised teacher's crisis which meant that we never had the same person at the front of the class for more than a few weeks at a time. An array of supply teachers came and went, leaving us with little in the way of continuity. Mr. Johnson. Mr. Wright. Miss... Babadook, or something. And Mr. Pillay.

Poor old Mr. Pillay. He really didn't stand a chance. For a start, he was called 'Pillay', which, of course, sounded enough like 'Pillock' to make our adolescent minds jizz themselves with delight. Added to that was his status as our fourth or fifth supply teacher. Even relatively good students like myself had realised by then that having a supply teacher was pretty much a licence to do what the hell we liked. And so we did. I shudder to think what it must have been like trying to instil order on the selfish little bunch of pyromaniacs presented to him every Thursday morning.

To his credit, he always seemed pretty happy. He would sit at the front, grinning benignly and pretending not to know what 'pillock' meant. Maybe he was just waiting it out, knowing that we were bound for cold, bleak futures because of our frankly appalling attitudes, while he knew the love of a good woman. I don't know. Either way, I eventually got a B, but I still can't remember the difference between amps and volts. I do know that if you put too much of one of them through a resistor, it fills the classroom with smoke and gets Paul McGrath suspended.

Anyway. The reason I bring Mr. Pillay up, apart from possibly to exorcise some small measure of guilt, is because I've been thinking about language. No, not languages. We've already established that they don't exist. Especially Russian. Whoever invented that didn't even use real letters - just triangles and such.

No, language. Specifically its misuse.

You see, one of the many shameful things I did in my teenage years was to be genuinely abusive to poor old Mr. Pillay. He had issued me with a Code of Conduct. This was our school's version of lines - a print out of the school behaviour code, which a misbehaving child such as myself had to copy out on the back. Whoever devised it correctly worked out that it was a massive pain in the arse turning the thing over and over to copy the words out.

Anyway, I was even cleverer. Rather than copy it all out, I simply wrote out one sentence, again and again, on the back. Hilarity and mirth were mine as I handed back my code of conduct, covered in the phrase 'Mr. Pillay is a Fascist!'

This did not go down well. His happy grin fell away, the Head of Year was sent for and boy was I in trouble.

Did I know, asked Mr. Crowe - our terrifyingly large Head of Year - did I know what 'fascist' actually meant? Well the joke was on him, because of course I did. It meant someone who told me to do something I didn't want to. I'd learned it from television - specifically The Young Ones. I told him this, and threw in some free advice about how school might be better if it was more like television, with its creativity, its lack of PE and its relaxed attitude towards facts.

He was not impressed and rightly so. He did his best to give me some context for the words I was so carelessly throwing about, and tried to impress upon me the importance of not just using phrases for the sake of it. He said that words carried not just meanings, but the weight of their history and usage. They can be used thoughtlessly and, indeed, to avoid thinking.

I don't think I particularly listened, at the time. And I'm probably conflating some of what Mr. Crowe said with things I've learned from other people, in response to other dickish things I said. And he probably looked less like a cartoon eagle than I remember. But the essence of that encounter stays with me.

It seems that I was something of a trendsetter in my thoughtless use of 'fascist' as a catch-all insult for my intellectual opponents. I should have patented it. But then I would probably have found that I wasn't being original at all. Rather, I was just expressing a basic human instinct: why make an argument when you can use a catchphrase?

I get why this instinct exists. It's loads easier to deal with someone's point of view if you reduce it to a tiny set of ideas. And indeed, if you reduce them to a 'type' of person. Mr. Pillay could be safely ignored, because he was a fascist. That's why he resented my young, independent spirit of freedom. Not because I was an idiot. Because he was a fascist.

It's started to become a flag, for me, of a poor argument. Just look out for a regurgitated phrase and sure enough, the argument following it is likely to be half baked and tedious. And, thanks to the joys of internet arguing, this is becoming something of an epidemic.

Here's the ones that really get on my wick:


Social Justice Warrior

Dreamed up by people who don't like the fact that non-men and non-whites are encroaching upon the 'normal' world.

You don't have to follow an argument about injustice for long before someone will vomit this one up. Apparently, if you are a bloke who thinks that women get a bad deal, or a white guy who thinks non-whites suffer terrible injustice, then it's not because you've thought about it and come to an honest conclusion. No. It's because you want to impress others with your pretend virtue. Neat.



"Sticking it down our throats".

Used exclusively, it seems, by people fed up of the fact that they occasionally have to acknowledge that some people are gay. It's always seemed odd to me that a phrase with such a blatant homo-erotic charge should get used without fail by people who presumably wouldn't want anything sticking down their throat. Maybe that's the point. But how come they all use the same phrase? Was there a meeting, where approved homophobic language was set in stone?

Or is it, maybe, that mindlessly repeating half understood arguments leads to a tendency to repeat the language in which those arguments were originally made?

 Regardless, whenever I see someone complaining that gay issues are being 'thrust down their throats' I    a) dismiss their argument as derivative and thoughtless and    b) mentally picture them deep throating Freddie Mercury.



Heartless Tory / Bleeding Heart Liberal

Could we just agree that yes, there are some dickheads on both sides of the political spectrum, but there are also plenty of people who just have different opinions? And that those opinions lead to political affiliation, rather than the other way around?

My political views don't come from a desire to say the correct 'left wing' things. Rather, calling myself 'left wing' seems to be a 'best fit' way to frame the various thoughts and feelings I have on the world. I'm sure there are plenty of conservatives who feel the same - their right wing thoughts are a product of a thought process, rather than an identity.

Although they'd be lying, obviously, because they are Tories.

Joke.



Mansplaining

Ah, controversial. Plus, I'm a man, so what do I know? How dare I try to mansplain mansplaining?

Well, hopefully I'm not. And that's my point, sort of.

I think I understand the intention of this word, and I can see its value. It gives name to a phenomenon whereby men assume that they know more than women, not by virtue of actually knowing more facts, but by virtue of being more male. Is that about right?

And I guarantee I've done it. Absolutely. It's not just science teachers I'm horrible to. I bet there's plenty of times I've talked over a woman when I should have shut up and listened.

And I also bet that my theoretical understanding of 'mansplaining' seems pretty shallow compared to the experience of actually living it, all the bloody time.

Listen to me. Social Bloody Bleeding Heart Justice Warrior.

But I'm not doing 'mansplaining' now, I don't think. I'm just pointing out something I've noticed. Which is that 'mansplaining' seems to be getting used, quite a lot, to mean, 'How dare a man disagree with a woman!"

I've genuinely seen this quite a lot in online conversations. A man and a woman disagree. The woman accuses the man of doing the 'splaining. The man tries to argue that he just has a different point of view. This is, of course, just making him even more 'splainier. That's a word. Splainier. Look it up. No, don't. The dictionary will only lie.

And it sucks. Partly because it's bullshit. I've every right to disagree with a women, as long as I do it respectfully and not on the assumption that my sex makes me right. But more, it's a problem because I think it robs a potentially useful word of its true meanings. It stops 'mansplaining' having a real, proper use as a signifier of a social issue, and just becomes a slogany, argument-strangling piece of nonsense.


Feminazi

I know I've been saying we shouldn't group people by language, but... I think if anyone uses this phrase, they are probably a massive cockwomble.




Anyway. That's what I think. Of course, in saying this I'm probably using a whole load more assumptions about people, and using unhelpful words to do so. That's the problem with language, isn't it? Use it enough and it starts to accrue all sorts of secondary, stupid meanings that make it impossible to properly articulate thoughts. And once you stop being able to articulate thoughts, is it possible to really think?

Damn you language, you slippery, un-pin-downable beast. You are a pain in the arse.


Still. You're not as bad as PE. Bloody PE.

Clare

In a world without Facebook I would probably never have heard from Clare again.

She would have remained in the archives of my memory, a slow motion montage of her best moments. A girl from the late 1980s, all hair and all check shirts. Turning and smiling. Playing guitar by a campfire. Laughing nervously at my weirder jokes. Turning. And smiling.

Without Facebook I’d never have heard from her again. I wouldn’t have known that she was ill. And I wouldn’t have had a message yesterday morning telling me that she was gone.

Thanks Facebook. I think.

It’s been about 20 years since I last saw Clare, back at my first church in Bradford. We were part of a youth group, a bunch of friends who spent all their time together for a few years, as if nothing and no-one else mattered, and then drifted apart into real life.

At least I think they drifted apart. Maybe everyone else still spends all their time together, singing songs and explaining Leviticus and driving to McDonald’s at midnight. That’s entirely possible. Maybe it’s just me who drifted off.

But it seems unlikely. It was very much ‘a time’ and like all such times, it came to an end. Marriages happen. Careers happen. Slowly that process takes place whereby months and years pass and life cartwheels on, and suddenly you realise that it’s twenty years later. You tell a story or mention a name, but no-one here knows who you are talking about. Your life has shifted around you and none of the reference points are there any more.

My time at that church in Bradford – Church on the Way – is so far away now as to be a different world. With a couple of exceptions, all those relationships are gone. Social media lets me reconnect, here and there, with people I knew in the 80s. But these might as well be new friendships. We’re not the same people.

That was Better Call Saul. This is Breaking Bad. That was Happy Days. This is Joanie Loves Chachi. That was Pulp Fiction. This is that horrible insurance advert with Harvey Keitel. Some of the faces might be familiar, but everything inside has changed.

So I heard that Clare was ill. And that was weird because how could she be? She was fine, turning and smiling in that montage. The montage that passes for memory once a person drifts far into your past. And they live forever and they have good lives and they stay young. And you stay young with them.

Clare showed me how to play guitar. Well, my dad taught me the first few chords, I suppose, so when the history of rock is written, I guess that will be his claim to fame. But it was Clare I followed when I started leading worship at that youth group. She was unfussy. Sensitive. She’d just pick up her guitar and play, eyes closed. No sheet music, just a confidence in the way the chords felt.

And I would watch her fingers - I can still see them – moving around the fretboard, swift and precise. I would sit beside her, chasing those chords, trying to keep up. She’d sing the songs and we’d all sing along with her, following her lead. She made it look easy. And slowly I learned how to make it look easy too. And in doing so, learned that it wasn’t easy at all.

It’s fair to say I was in awe of her. She was only a little older than me, but we were young and small differences seemed big. Where other girls had to put up with my terrible, adolescent attempts at romance, Clare existed in a different place. I admired her. Literally. Together with my friend Ian, I created an appreciation society for her. With badges. And a newsletter. It ran to four issues. Much of the information was made up, like the fact that she used to be in Iron Maiden, but its spirit was pure and true.

She liked it. I think. In retrospect it was quite an odd thing to do. But like I say, she was unusual.

Without Facebook, she’d have stayed there, for me, forever. Guitars and newsletters and teenage nonsense. And now there’s an odd kind of grief. You can’t miss someone you’ve not seen for decades, I don’t think. And I never saw her as a grown up, changed by life and children and illness. But there’s a profound sense of wrongness and sadness that the girl I knew should be dealt so unfair a hand.

So I’ve written this. Hardly the most profound thoughts anyone will have about her life or about her passing. But an offering of memory. Turning and smiling, slow motion in amber. A memory of a girl in her early 20s who shaped little parts of who I am.

Goodnight Clare.

Oh no, don't say it's true.

Somewhere, in a parallel universe, there is another version of me. This alternate Rob did much better at his A-Levels. He revised properly for Sociology, and during the Communications exam, he probably didn't freak out and try to answer a question about praxis and lexis, when he'd never heard either word, ever before.

This superior version of me went to Cardiff University. He continued to prosper, the bloody show off, and is now working as a producer on Doctor Who. He's developed a slight Welsh accent and goes out with a raven haired Swansea girl called Vanessa. Or something. Either way, he's doing great.

In 1989, in the actual real universe,  I left Sixth Form with frankly terrible A-levels and, as a consequence of their terribleness, totally failed to get into any university. I sulked about for a bit, then decided to go work in a pub, called the Ring O' Bells. Regular readers may remember this as being the location of an exciting adventure with a bottle opener, which I recounted in an earlier blog.

Anyway. No matter how prosperous and successful Cardiff-Rob becomes, in his stupid alternative timeline, he's actually a massive loser, because he never went to work at the Ring O' Bells and, thus, never became part of a terrible covers band called 'The Dead Ringers.' The jerk!

The Dead Ringers comprised three people, all of whom worked in the pub. There was me, desperately trying to learn guitar as I went along. There was Jim, a forty-something Elvis impersonator and alcoholic. And there was Richard, who was 30 and in many ways looked like a rodent. We also had a drum machine, called Keith, but I don't think he really counted as part of the band, because he was a) made of metal and b) very unreliable.  Richard had attached a doorbell to Keith so we could operate him by foot during gigs. This doorbell/pedal exploded the first time we stepped on it, and Keith went into an unstoppable frenzy. I had to sing 'No Regrets' to a bossa nova beat, which does not really work in the song's favour.

 

Here we are. The Dead Ringers.

Richard, Jim (with Elvis sneer) and me.

I think we look quite cool, actually.

We played an odd combination of rock and roll standards, 70s pop hits and songs I liked because I'd heard them on TV. We played in a number of pubs around Bradford and no-one really liked any of it. During one gig, an exciting fight broke out between two of the spectators. They tumbled into the middle of us, taking our place on the so-called 'stage' in the Dog and Gun, as we retreated. People were visibly more excited by this, and seemed quite sad when the pugilists were kicked out and we carried on playing 'Gold Cadillac'.

It is at this point that you may be wondering why I am feeling so superior to alternate universe, Cardiff dwelling Rob. You probably think that playing terrible songs, badly, in violent Bradford pubs, sounds worse than producing Doctor Who and snogging Vanessa in Roald Dahl Plass. Well, when you put it like that it does sound quite depressing. Shut up! I must admit, I've started to yearn after Vanessa a bit, even though she only exists in my mind. And possibly in another dimension. But anyway, here's what you don't know yet, and why The Dead Ringers were important.

Jim, who wore shades indoors and spoke like Elvis even though he was from West Yorkshire, was nominally the leader of the band, because he was oldest and he could sing best. One day Jim revealed that he had been married for a bit, in the past, and, from this marriage, had a son. This son was called Shane and he was visiting us in Bradford. And, it turned out, he was joining our band.

 

There's Shane, being all thin and wearing a foolish hat.

And there's me, probably thinking "How do you play a D?"

At this moment in the life of the band, we used to rehearse in my front room. Well, I say 'my' front room. My parents' front room. When they were out at work we would set up and stumble through our nonsensical set, kicking Keith occasionally and marvelling at my inability to play 'F'. My brother tells a story of a time when he got home from school to find a PA set up in the living room, with three men he'd never met before practicing "If I'm a Fool For Loving You". Fearing he had walked into an episode of The Young Ones, he asked what was going on. By his account, the old man in the sunglasses, said "Well hi there, little fella. Your brother's gone to have his hair snipped!"

When I returned from the hairdressers my brother was hiding in the kitchen and Shane had a request. Could we possibly try to play some David Bowie?

Like every child of the 80s, I knew who David Bowie was, of course. He was the spooky clown guy who walked across a beach, singing 'Ashes to Ashes'. I'd probably heard Let's Dance, Modern Love and Loving the Alien. But I didn't really know much about him. This was to change.

Shane, it turned out, could do a pretty awesome approximation of Bowie's wavering tenor, and his range was good. Soon I was learning a bunch of songs I'd never heard before. Space Oddity and Ziggy Stardust were among the tunes he wanted to perform, so there I was, my useless fingers fumbling around Bowie's chord structures, wishing Shane shared his dad's obsession with Buddy Holly instead. I liked playing Ziggy, though. I got a distort pedal, and very much enjoying making the 'THRANNG' noise with a G chord that kicks the song off.  THRANNG! I was good at that bit, though it fell apart somewhat shortly thereafter.

 

Thrill to our rock and roll power.

It was exciting to discover these new songs - this massive history of weird, unusual music. I remember Richard grumbling one day, as we cleaned up behind the bar and discussed the next day's rehearsal. "Shane will be there," sighed Richard, "So it'll be bloody Life on Mars all afternoon." I thought he was being hilarious, riffing on Bowie's 'Spiders from Mars' thing. I didn't know it was the title of an actual song. And I didn't know that when I heard that song, it would be such a beautiful, transcendent experience.

Shane gave a me a tape of early Bowie to see if I could learn any of it. For the most part, the answer was 'no'. But what songs. The Bewlay Brothers. Five Years. The Man Who Sold The World. I was haunted by these muffled, slightly warbly songs on this scrappy C90. This was incredible, and I was very excited to see what Bowie would do next.

What he did next was retire.

Well. Never mind. This coincided with the release of a beautiful double-album Best Of which I scampered down to HMV to buy as soon as I could. I played it and played it and played it some more. I think it's fair to say I became fairly obsessed.

One manifestation of my love for Bowie. Here he turns up
in a comic strip I used to write for my own amusement.
Those little guys pointing guns at him are Shriblies. 

Our little band lasted a couple of years and then we drifted apart. I finally found a university that would have me and moved away. I saw Jim, Richard and Shane from time to time on Summers home, but by my second year that was pretty much it.

Bowie, of course, stuck around. Turns out that the awesome collection of music that I discovered that year was just about half of the music he would make in his ridiculously creative life. Every now and then he would come into the world and do something weird and unexpected, and another moment of my life would become caught up in his work.


Outside. Playing on a tape in my car. Teaching practice and the beginnings of my own song writing. It is cold and sunny.

Thursday's Child. I am in the house I have recently bought, laying on my bed in the evening sun. I have just quit teaching to start a business. I am afraid. I am excited.

Heathen. An open fire, Peter Lehman wine and a friend I can't trust. I play guitar a lot now, in front of many people, and I'm not bad. I'm not in love, though I keep pretending.

Where Are We Now? Driving through a cold January morning. My birthday. Out of nowhere, a new Bowie song. After nearly ten years. Slow. Fragile. Moving.

Black Star. Watching on my iPad in bed. Amazed that this man who has done so much stuff is still so vibrant, so creative. So alive.

Lazarus. 7am, Monday morning. News that makes no sense as I'm still shaking sleep from my head.


Alternate universe Rob would have found Bowie too, of course. I imagine he hooked up with loads of cool media people quite quickly, and developed a proper appreciation of him, and knew all the right things to say. Not like my odd, stumbling, haphazard approach to him. But I like my way. I would, of course.

I don't quite know what the death of David Bowie means to me yet. But I know I loved him. And I know I'm better for him. Thanks, Shane, wherever you are. I hope you still love him. Though it means that this week will have been unbearably sad for you too.

Old Acquaintance

Here you are, at the season finale of another series of 'Your Life". In an ideal world you will stand, surrounded by the key cast members, who listen in reverent, beautifully lit silence as you give a speech about everything you've learned in the series just gone. You will mourn your losses and celebrate your victories. Reflect on some of those really good episodes that defined your character's personal growth this year. Maybe you'll seed some of the major plot arcs of the next series. Then you'll all file out to watch the fireworks, but the camera will linger in the deserted room. And then fade to black. And credits.

In your mind, the new year is not just 'tomorrow'. It's a whole new series. A new title sequence, revamped sets, a brand new Big Bad and a fresh narrative direction. And it's in that new opening credit sequence that we see the biggest change of all. Unfamiliar names, as new cast members join the ranks of the show. And names that are missing from last year. Actors who have moved onto other projects, their characters written out or - like Mandy in the West Wing series 2 - just gone without comment.

 

I wonder how many names have been effectively written out of the credits of my show this year? Or, to be less self centred, I wonder how many other people's credits no longer feature my name? This time of year does make me realise that there are some people I simply don't connect with any more. I'll compile invite lists for Christmas parties and become aware that there are people on those lists who have drifted away.

Some of them are names I just skip over - faces on Facebook that no longer exist in my real life. Why are they still there? Should I delete them? No, we're still friends. Aren't we? Are we? I do click to like their posts once in a while...   But if we are friends, why has the entirety of 2015 passed without me seeing their actual human aspect even once?

Some of them are people who I wish I still saw, but for whatever reason never get back to me. Maybe I did something terrible to offend them. That's not unlikely, actually. I'm often saying dumb stuff online. And because we don't see each other, they forget that most of what I say is subject to nuance, or irony, or part of a complicated set of evolving thought processes that can't really be summed up in a tweet or Facebook comment. And I forget that they are human beings, with thoughts and feelings, rather than abstract opinion on a screen, good for a critical kicking. So those friendships become part of a circular loop, whereby our lack of understanding of each other contributes to an exponential erosion of relationship.

I finally find someone I can agree with.

It's an oddness. And one that until a few years ago might have passed us by. We don't really have opening credits. Well, we might have, I suppose, but we don't get to see them because we're stuck inside the narrative. Buffy the Vampire Slayer never got to look at her opening titles and think "Oh good, Angel's in it this week - I'll spend a bit more time on my hair." And in the same way we can't step outside our own stories and say "Oh, I see they've dropped Sharon from the title sequence. I guess she's not that important any more. No Christmas present for her!"

No. What we have now that we didn't have until about ten years ago, is a list of 'Friends' on social media. Whereas once Sharon might have drifted out of my life without either of us noticing, now she has a virtual presence that exists as a constant reminder. Here's a human being that you used to know. She's still a 'friend', but you know that's not the truth. Because it turns out 'friends' is a complicated idea that doesn't really fit into that catch-all definition.

Some people have hundreds of online 'friends', don't they? Fair enough, obviously - they can do what they want. But that can't be 'friends' in the way that I define it. I get a bunch of friend requests each year from people I've never met. I'm sure you do too. People who seem to collect 'friends' like you might collect whisky bottles on a shelf or ticket stubs of gigs. Really odd.

Because friendship is about action, isn't it? About choosing how you relate to someone and what that means. It's not a state of being, that just exists in space without you doing anything. Yet that's how some people treat it. I had a conversation this year where someone told me that they couldn't spend any time with me because 'life moves on in different ways.' And I thought 'OK', because I knew there were circumstances behind this, but then I thought, "Actually, no, that's total horseshit. Life doesn't move you anywhere. You decide to do things. I've got friends - good friends - who have in the past been utterly furious with me for very stupid things I did. And they've forgiven me. And there's people who have made my life very difficult here and there, but whom I have learned to value and respect anyway, because that's where friendship comes from.

Picture of me and Ric Neale for no reason whatsoever.

I'm very glad that my friends are not a series of narratively useful characters, thrown at me by the scriptwriters of my life. These are not characters who find their way into the show because that's where life has led me. They are people who have chosen to spend time with me, despite my constant demands for wine and attention and my propensity to try stroking everyone to see what they feel like.

And I've chosen them. There's no point me pretending that I 'lost touch' with certain people, as if it just happened without my consent. If I don't keep in touch with you any more, that's because on some level - possibly subconsciously -  I've decided to prioritise other things. That doesn't make me feel very good about myself, but it's a more honest evaluation of 'friendship' that generally seems to exist.

I think I did lose a few friends this year. Some are still 'friends' by the definitions of social media, but one or the other of us has decided not to make the effort. Some have probably deleted me and I haven't noticed, which means that the relationship didn't really exist any more anyway. One person deleted me and wrote me an essay on why. Credit to that person at least for making it an active choice and not just blaming the universe.

On the other hand, the friendships I do have are frankly amazing. I am constantly delighted that middle age has not consigned me to a dull circle of tired old forty-somethings, shaking their heads and saying, "No, I can't come out to play wizards, I have to stare at this wall all night and then die." I know a lot of funny, clever, creative people, from teenagers to pensioners, who definitely all deserve their place in the credits.

And then there's this.

This Summer I met up with two of my oldest friends. We hadn't been together as a threesome since we were teenagers. The intervening years have seen us drift apart to the point where we haven't really talked for at least 15 years. Marriage. Divorce. Careers, children, lost hair and expanding stomachs. Three people met up who were fundamentally different in almost every way to when they had last shared space.

We met up in the pub we used to go to in Bradford - the Malt Kiln. I got there first and sat alone, feeling some trepidation. What if it was like that programme Justin Lee Collins did when he tried to re-unite the actors from the A-Team in a pub? Mr T never showed and George Peppard was too dead to attend, leaving Dirk Benedict and Dwight Shultz to make uncomfortable small talk for half an hour. What if it was like that?

1988

A song came on. Forever Autumn, from Jeff Wayne's musical version of War of the Worlds. Unbelievably, this song had played 26 years ago, the last time I had been in the pub. If there are scriptwriters in my life, they are not ashamed of a bit of contrived coincidence.

Paul and Ian arrived. We ordered three pints of Purple Nasty - the drink that characterised our teenage foolishness. We talked for hours. I was loud and bossy. Paul was gently funny and self deprecating. Ian was in trouble with a woman. It was like no time had passed at all, and it was one of the best days of my year.

2015

Friendships are choices. No-one else is writing the credits of my show. I don't necessarily deserve the brilliant people that come into my life. But I am responsible for making those relationships work.

Thanks for putting up with me, everyone. Now bring me wine.

Happy New Year.