When I was six years old, I had a best friend called Lola. Lola was black; something that didn't really register with me unless I was using her nickname of 'Chocolate' (she called me 'Strawberry' - well, we were only six!) But Lola's skin colour did register with some of our other classmates, one of whom taunted her on a daily basis over it. One day he came up to us in the playground, roughly pushed her and called her a "black Paki". I didn't know what a "Paki" was, and my little brain raced to find something to say back to him on behalf of my friend. "Well..." I said, "you're just a horrible white Paki!"
This made him stop and stare at me for a moment, and then he laughed. Everybody within earshot laughed at my strange little comment, even Lola herself. I was mortally embarrassed in the way that only six year olds can be, but my outburst had had the magic effect of completely diffusing the situation (in much the same way that Derren Brown recommends you diffuse the threat of attack by simply saying something random and mad to throw the person completely off-course). And later that day Lola told me I was her best friend in the whole world because I had stood up for her. I went home with a song in my heart, convinced that we'd be friends forever.
The following week a new girl joined our class. She was a bit quirky, with wonky stained teeth and the owner of the best handwriting I'd ever seen (I tried and failed to copy it myself) and Lola gradually became her best friend instead, ignoring me completely in the process. This is the cruel hallmark of schoolgirl friendship; you give yourself wholly to one person, and you completely ignore everybody else in the process because you haven't quite worked out how to share the emotional bond of friendship with more than just the one person at a time. But it's a painful lesson when that person decides to move on to somebody else, as I was starting to realise.
But I didn't actually lose that heady, optimistic "we're going to be friends forever!" feeling until many years later. I have a theory that you don't quite buy into it until you've hit thirty and become a lot more cynical. Aged nineteen I made up a quarter of a fun foursome of friends who went out every Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights...including a memorable, drunken weekend at Butlins where we sat through 'The Full Monty' six times because the cinema was the only place you could go to sleep off a hangover. The four of us were so close that I was convinced we'd be seeing in our nineties together. Now I'm still friends with only one of them - on a social networking site on which we never 'speak'. I saw one of the others' names on Friends Reunited a while back, but declined contacting her. Mainly because our friendship had been based on us all being young, free and single. What if she were still single (this had been a bone of contention with her even then, yet she'd hated the idea of being married) and bitter about it? What if she'd become boring? What if she thought I was boring? All those great memories would be trashed in a second by the reality of...well, now. It's a sad thing to think about, sometimes. I've had other great people breeze in and out of my life; at some points you just assume they'll be there forever, and then life moves on and suddenly they're not any more.
But...I have a small, exclusive group of friends who I actually do know will be my friends forever; who have been with me right from the start and who I just know will be with me at the end. These friends are part of the reason why I don't really fear getting older, because they'll be right there getting older with me, laughing at and lamenting our wrinkles and embarrassing mishaps. So in some senses, I still haven't lost that "we're going to be friends forever!" feeling at all. And long may that mindless sense of optimism continue.
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