They say you only really have around 5 friends that are really and truly your friend. Any more and you are spreading yourself too thin on the ground and you start running out of time and all that. I believe this to be somewhat true. I see people on Facebook that have 3567 friends. Now I know Facebook is a bad example but these people still only really has 5 or 6 good friends. The rest are all fluff. In my life I moved around alot with my job so I found my friends come and go. I have my friends sort of divided up. There are the current work friends , the past work friends from different locations, the childhood friends and the college friends. I was gone from my home town when I was 18 and I have lived in 9 different towns and cities since. Portlaoise , Naas, Dublin , Leixlip, Las Palmas, Dortmund, Essen, Frankfurt, Tipperary.
I do have around 5-6 friends in each location but when I leave that location , I normally lose 4 and I am left with one or two people that stay with me for the rest of my life. It's hilarious. It's hard to keep the effort with everyone so there needs to be some effort on both sides to keep it going and I find the people who make me laugh the most tend to stay on as the life long friends. These are the friends that are no drama and if you text them after a year then it is the same as it ever has been. But sometimes when I am back home and wondered if I didn't travel as much then would I have a bigger pool of friends from back in my hometown. Probably but when you get older and have a family there isn't really as much time as before to meet up so it's all swings and roundabouts I think.
I worked with a guy for one day in 2010. We went out that night and ended up having a mad night in Innsbruck, a sleepy skiing village in Austria. The worst country in the world for a bit of craic. Jimmy used to moan about the level of anti craic down in Innsbruck so we painted the town red when I came down and tried to get into the most trouble possible in 020 conditions on the sky slopes. We still text every couple of days and now meet up quite a bit.
Another friend from my first job told me that the fact I had replaced his only other friend in the world in their job, I had to take up the vacant spot of being his friend. It was a weird way of going about friendship but I like the weirdo friends the most. I was quite happy to take up the vacant position because it meant I had someone to go to the pub with. We soon moved in together and spent the next decade inseparable. Whenever I got moved he came with me as part of a package. Brendan and myself are still in touch on a daily basis even though he headed to Canada. He is probably still my best friend in life all because I filled his vacant only friend position.
Most friends of mine were met in work or in the pub. Usually work and we head out for some drinks which cements our friendship even more. I have quite a few girlfriends (who are just friends ) from my time in Germany. The ones that were a bit Rock n Roll and I have stayed in contact with them still. Carmel and Martina were my drinking buddys abroad and they both did not like each other as they were entirely different. Martina wanted to get me on the cigarettes telling me she would start me on 3 a day and work my way up to 40. I politely declined. Carmel used to drink too much and was once found in a German park asleep under a swing. Both happily married now and always a great craic.
Then there are the mad ones who are the risky friends. You worry about going out with them but once you are out they push your boundaries and you end up getting up to all kinds of mad shenanigans. My two mad friends are Flood and Antonio. At my stag for example we ensure that Flood and Antonio shared a room because we only wanted a problem in one room and not two. Antonio would get in a fight at a convent. Flood was as mad as a bag of monkeys and I have always wondered how he is still alive. He called an ambulance one morning when he was so hungover he thought he was going to die. He shook hands with the paramedics and jumped onto their stretcher counting notes out for each one as a tip for bringing him to the hospital. Flood is on another planet.
There are some good friends I have stayed in touch with and when I paid them a visit things had changed completely. Either their life had moved on or my life had I am not quite sure but I have always known when the chapter was closed . I was in the Netherlands in a place called Breda recently in one such case at my friends wedding. I had moved home and settled down and had kids while he was still partying in the same places. He had new friends and he didn't really make an effort so myself and my wife agreed that that chapter was closed in my life. I felt a bit sad about that one but I had moved on to better things or was it he was still living the good life. I am not quite sure.
So at the moment I have my hangers on from my past, the couple of childhood friends, a couple of college friends and a few of my current work colleagues. A couple of more will fly in and fly out in the coming years. This is friendship. It comes and goes but the best ones last much longer. Would you believe leaving my last job , I became good friends with a young 21 year old West Ham supporter and now we head to matches together. We have a few pints and a bit of craic and it's great. That's the good thing about Ireland sometimes. You can befriend an old grumpy guy in the pub and you would end up running through walls for him s My father who was always the life and soul of the party said about making friends.
"To make friends , you have to get out of the house."
He is right as always.
It is getting harder to meet people in these times as everybody is stuck in and working from home. We are all gonna have to get out of the house more.