Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Having been an expat brat since year dot I’m used to people coming and going in and out of my life. When you live somewhere like Kuwait or Bahrain, any friends you make tend to transient.
It’s easy enough to promise to keep in touch (and genuinely mean it) and for a while you do but then time goes by and bit by bit you lose touch with the very people you used to spend your every working moment with.
In all my 32 years of going from country to country, I’ve been lucky enough to get to meet a lot of interesting, fun and seriously lovely people.
I’ve had best friends I’ve shared some of the best times of my life with and people I know will always be there for me in my time of need as I will always be for them – people that you might not keep in touch with but if your paths were to cross you would have a great time catching up with.
But there is only one person I can think of that has and always will be in my life till the day I die – my girlie girl Libby.
We’ve known each other since school days, some 20 something years and we’ve probably been out of touch for more years than we’ve been in touch but every few years or so we manage to find each other again, always by some random stroke of luck.
In the years we’ve been incommunicado we’ve missed each others marriages, my divorce, the birth of my son and if this week hadn’t been my lucky week I’d of missed the birth of her baby girl too.
An old friend that used to live here five years ago has just moved back to the country and brought with him the Holy Grail … Libby’s latest phone number.
He just happened to mention in passing that he’d been in touch with her a couple of months ago and I practically ripped his mobile phone out of his hand to get her number.
I sent her a cryptic ‘guess who text’ thinking it would take her a while to work it out but before I knew it my phone was ringing and I heard the voice on the other end say just two little letters: “MC?” – roll back the years and we were screeching like teenagers!
Over four years had gone by since we’d spoken but after talking to her for just half an hour it felt as if we’d never been apart.
With moving about and the changing of phone numbers, home and email addresses we managed to lose each other but the beauty of a true friendship is the ability to reconnect in the blink of an eye no matter how many years go by. I’d like to say we’ll never lose touch again but no one can be sure of the future. The only thing that is for sure is the fact that aged 90 we’ll still be screeching like teenagers down the phone at each other!
