Walking on the other side of the street.

Recently, I was walking back from a night at the pub with my friends, a pub in which I have dwelled in for many years and is situated in a village that I call my home. As I strolled to my parents’ home, through the blackness of night between cones of lamp light, besides red-bricked and tiny-gardened detached houses of an English village, with a westerly breeze off the Solent meeting my face, I wondered why I had lost two games of backgammon in a row.

Oh how I do love my local pub! Sometimes I envision myself writing a worthy poem for her; to honour her business which she deals with me. Her darkly hued counter, her tender masts hung from the ceiling that tell of the area’s trades, her comforting din, her jolly and kind barkeeps, her amiable air of voices, the pool table, the quizzie, the weekly pub-quiz (which I only partake from time to time)! Three good ales, or bitters are enough for me (and maybe another half depending on the rate of imbibing) and I might strike a cigarette before going home.

When I was little, I used to go to my friend’s house to play with my friend or/and our friends, with whatever toy, game or console we had at hand. These days I see my chums mostly in the local pub or down in the local town (in the pubs) – perhaps a sign of young-ageing. We hunker down with pints in hand and talk, mostly. But often, we still do claw onto our youthful romps by unashamedly playing Exploding Kittens, or cards.

Since many of our local younger folk have been wickedly drawn to London to find a career, we few are left behind to populate our local hole with our little assemblies. It is almost at the stage which T.S Eliot might describe as a ‘whimper’.

Alas, the days of our glorious ‘youth’ (that is to me being eighteen and legal) is now far behind us, and the congregations we had, that swelled around wooden tables, are now but a memory which is only every now and then revivified. Home is a place of the younger years – that is to say of very slowly fading memories.

This means not to me, in our shared pub, that we will never meet again. What it means to me, as I am feeling it, that there is a poignant moment happening, something called maturity. Quelle horreur! Who shall hold out to the last drop of blood? Life is moving on, as it always does, and I am more and more constantly aware that it is.

I think of all the books I have on the go right now, they lie on top of one another (I start dozens but only finish a few), each with bookmarks, some at a third or fifth the way through. I still have War and Peace, besides my bed, looming over me unfinished – barely. And this reminds me heartily of my friends, that they too are yet unfinished and they loom over me in my mind. I just hope they will not be as long as War and Peace.

I love my friends and I have realised in recent years that I am somewhat of an extrovert and need their companionship. I don’t need them there and ready at my every whim, but just there, in the background, ready to be reunited with. The best friendships are those that require not immediacy, but patience.

How does this bring me to the title of my article?

I was walking as I said, going down the normal and steepening road to my parents’ home, along the same pavement that I have always taken. I realised something then, that I have always walked this side of the pavement, and in fact almost every single time I have went this way. I had gone this path so many times before, just to see my friends, to go to school, to go to the pub, or to someone’s house; and all on one side of the road.

As I realised this I looked across to the other pavement and suddenly saw it anew. I had walked that side of the road before, many times, but those times are dwarfed by the number of times I have walked the normal route. I studied the other side for a moment, stopping to do so. Then I crossed the road and began to walk on the other side. It was a strange moment because it was the first time I had become conscious, in all the years I had live in that village, that there was difference between the two same paths. They ran parallel, but they were different!

Suddenly, my village became anew to me and I don’t know for certain why. I saw in a brief moment things I had forgotten or had not seen. The subtleties of that road had escaped me, but became now salient in my mind. In crossing the road to the other side I rekindled memories long forgotten (most memorably, the old man who had a heart attack during a village fete – perhaps the first time I had seen this sort of distress, a sort of death), but furthermore I saw things anew. I saw the dark village in the night as not just the place where I was from, but a place that was yet known. I asked. Who lived here? What has happened here? … Do you get it?

I had found an adventure (small be it) in my own village and had realised a hiddenness that was always before me.

Friendship is a part of this, it is the sudden realisation that a friend is not a known entity. In fact, they are an unknown entity, just like strangers. The only difference being one has spent more time with friends than strangers. I never cherish constancy with friends, save morals; I want them to be refreshing, driving, exciting. I love the sudden quip, the joke and the new turn of opinion.

Constancy is bland and rigidness is concrete. How long can we go along the same parallel path? No, I want junctions and perpendiculars.

But sticking to the question I posed above, ‘how does this bring me to the title of my article?’, what is it about walking on the other side of the street? Perhaps it is taking a silly moment, perhaps it is being courageous, or perhaps it is simply wanting something new.

To be in a friendship is not to run parallel, for how would you ever meet? No it is to run at an angle, to meet and to contest.

I often wonder when I come home, ‘why do I prolong my stay here?’. I sometimes rue coming home for periods of time because I want to be elsewhere, in foreign countries or with differing people. But I have come to realise that I have all that is wanted here.

There is adventure in the smallest object, the littlest movement and the tiniest impression. The world is not small, nor is it big, it is just right here.