Somehow we lost touch, you move home and they move home, and then you move home again, it was friendship that you just bounce off each other with; you don't realize how important it was to you till you look and its gone.
We had grown up sharing our Goon's humour at school  John Nicholas top left, John Sarson top right, and myself bottom right. However we both saw school as a prison sentence; it was a hair brain school, where you learnt little, just learnt to look after yourself and keep away from the little Ceasers. A teacher even had a heart attack at our school so it was no sad day when I left Barnfield Secondry Modern School, that was March 1960 .
John Nicholas and I still met up, but your life changes when you leave school, within two weeks of leaving I was at work doing a 5.5 day a week job, for £1 and 10 shillings a week, and still pay your train fare into town give your Mum some money, then what's left do what you can.
Well we did do things like, met Yuri Gagarin at Earls Court in a Motor Show. We Cycled to Southend-on-Sea a good 140 mile round trip, I was knackered.
As the years moved on I met Miriam, who I fell in love with and married, John Nicholas met Avril and they fell in love, John Sarson he met Jean and they fell in love. We went bowling together with John and Avril, John and Jean came to our flat in Friern Barnet, but the last time we all met was in 1967 .
As the years turned into faded pages in a diary, we all seemed to drift, in fact John and Avril moved out of the country, that I did not know.
I guess we obviously were too busy with life and its ups and downs, and some of the downs were affecting John Nicholas and I. Both our mothers were ill, had been for years when we were at school, maybe that's why we had a friendship that did not fade.
I did call on John's parents a few times, it was then I knew he was travelling in different countries. I left our address, but we moved again so it was not going to make contact.
In the 1980's I tried to search but things had changed, my father had died, my mother was ill, things got lost in the transit of, "I must do that."
In the 1990's I was now feeling a chunk of my life was missing, John had been the only close friend that I had through some crazy years as a kid. By now the internet was an emerging media to search, but it had its limitations, it did not have what the 2000's bought in, social websites. I was not aware that John had been looking for me, and we had always had ex-directory telephone numbers just to make it more complicated.
So it was the month of June 2008 , despite John paying a visit to the UK in 2007 and almost passing our front door, not knowing we lived there, that things took a turn. Avril had a friend who suggested look on Facebook, you might find John's friend there. My daughter, Farrah, had also at the same time encouraged me to look on Facebook to find John.
The long and the short of it we finally caught up with each other 41 years later, and both in retirement, each as far away as you could be from each other.
John sent me a picture of himself which my Goonish humour made me rearrange on a computer; his picture became the character of a book, "Father Nick Milligan of Golders Green" and a series of fictional letters "The Father Milligan Tales" Our humour has not changed
- Though our faces rearranged,
- But that's what years do
- They try to change you.
- Our friendship
- As it was
- Just a lot of catching up
- Because,
- But who cares what it was.
