Richard Baum

Contrary to the picture painted in “Hello” magazine and various other society journals, the life of a suburban Lib Dem Councillor isn’t one canape party after another. In fact, quite often I am bored to tears at weekends and forced to flick through the Sky TV directory until I stumble across the inevitable repeat of “Only Fools and Horses” somewhere.

This weekend though has been nothing short of a social whirl, as weddings, farewells and gatherings have collided to make it seem for a brief period as if I do indeed have some semblance of a life. Unfortunately, the social occasions have merely re-affirmed my suspicions that my emotional development is not sufficient enough to cope with the rigours of having friends. In particular, there seems to be a glut of my mates leaving for foreign shores at the moment. And my fragile ego isn’t coping at all well.

A few years ago it was fine. My friends lived in various bits of the UK, but nowhere that couldn’t be reached in four or five hours by car, even with a stop for a Ginsters at a service station on the way. So I would see them all a few times a year, and birthdays/christmases wouldn’t come and go without at least an evening somewhere loud.

Now though my life is taking on a definite international flavour, and not in the cosmopolitan way that I’d like. It all boils down to the fact that my mates are deciding to live in various parts of the other side of the world, and leaving me rattling around England getting bored and fat.

Saturday night saw me in a pub in Altrincham, bidding farewell to a girl I’ve known since I was at school. And bear in mind that I went to an all-boys school. Finding a girl friend at all against those odds is like digging up potatoes from the garden and unearthing the Cullinan Diamond. But I did find this one. I didn’t mind that she went to university in Durham, because I was in Birmingham anyway, and at holiday time there we both were, back home. Now though she’s going to live in Hong Kong. And that is far too far away to pop out to for a drink when I want reminding I can’t be old because, look, here’s someone I knew from school!

And with her go all the other friends, the hangers-on who I know through her, see twice a year, and am reminded each time that they’re actually a lovely bunch. I never think of them beforehand, and don’t notice if they’re not there. But after two hours chatting to them I realise that my life is touched by a hundred lovely people I never see as much as I should. And last night on my drive home from Altrincham, probably the only thing that kept me from crying about that was Tam sitting next to me offering practical tips like texting them once in a while.

This Hong Kong revelation has come hot on the heels of another very good friend of mine informing me that he is emigrating to New Zealand, a place so far away that it’s a long haul flight further on than Australia. It took the crew of Apollo 11 only marginally longer to fly to the moon than it would take me to fly to Auckland. And so rather than being able to meet up in Manchester and drown our sorrows after the typically horrific working week, now any meeting requires buying shares in Qantas. It’s awful. I won’t lie to you like I’ve lied to him. It’s just plain awful.

The guy I used to live with, and had two of the most dangerous years of my life sharing a bathroom with, now lives in San Francisco. My sister is one step away from packing it all in and going to live on a commune in the Ganges. A former colleague to whom I have come to rely on an unhealthy amount for emotional reassurance informs me that she’s chucking in Chorlton for Dorset. Fair enough it isn’t Cape Town, but it’s beyond the end of the M5, and that’s far enough away to warrant serious pre-planning. Others around me are planning their various escapes, all requiring passports. Is there a disease here I haven’t heard about? What’s the rush? Where’s the need?

My oldest friend, to whom I was introduced my my grandpa at the age of 0, now lives in Melbourne. Granted, it’s a handy stopping off point on my epic journey to New Zealand, but his presents living arrangements are very inconvenient indeed for someone who enjoys wallowing in self pity and contemplating the passage of time as much as I do. Just flying there would give me enough free time to depress myself into oblivion. He is back in England at the moment, and in the snatched few hours we’ve had together between him showing his Antipodean girlfriend the London Eye and me messing about delivering Focus leaflets, he told me he mightn’t be back for two years.

What can a I say about that? Two years? These people I love leading their lives so far away, for two years??… How can friends stay friends when lives go by in different time zones?

People tell me to look on the bright side - that at least I won’t have to pay for hotel rooms. But frankly I like hotel rooms, and I don’t like using other people’s bathrooms. Nor do I want to get off a 24 hour flight and have three nights on a sofa to look forward to. There is no plus side in this. Not for me.

My address book is beginning to resemble the call sheet of the United Nations switchboard. One after another the players in my life are stuffing their wallets with weird currencies and jetting off into the sunset, then the sunrise, then the sunset again, before landing somewhere so far away that they cease to exist in reality and are just an email address that beeps at me once in a while.

The best argument I could hear right now against globalisation is that without it, people like my friends wouldn’t leave people like me. Two generations ago, adventurous people might marry an actress from Melton Mowbray. But they’d still come back for birthdays. Now they dice with death living on top of the San Andreas fault line or commute to work via the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And they don’t come back for two years. Or five. Or ten. Or ever.

The best argument against an expansion of air travel isn’t that the world and everything in it might die from carbon overload, but that if they cancel flights people I know can’t go and live in New Zealand.

I’m not leaving. I love this country. I start getting home-sick in the airport departure lounge because they take Dollars at the tills. But I wonder how much of what I love about it is because of the people in it? And, no joke, the best ones I know are all leaving. Not because they believe the rubbish in the papers about being stabbed or paedophiled to death here, but because they don’t get sweaty-palmed at Passport Control. I can’t stop them going, but I wish I shared their outlook, or they shared mine, because frankly I like my friends, and making new ones is far too nerve-wracking.

Anyway, work in the morning. That’ll cheer me up…

Rick