The Wedding To End All Weddings

I have recently returned from the wedding of one of my best, oldest friends - my most regular Drinking Companion for the past 20-odd years.

I was the first person he met at University, when, mistakenly arriving a few days ahead of the other Freshmen, he set off wandering around the near-deserted accommodation block randomly knocking on doors in search of companionship..... and found ME: a mad-eyed 2nd Year with a drinking problem! We were virtually inseparable for the next several years, and have remained in regular contact ever afterwards. He was always a dependable nostalgia fix, a ready conduit back to that carefree hedonism of our student days in the 80s..... because he never left. The most impressively unambitious man I've ever met (I am a very poor second to him in this), his career plan has essentially been to permanently omit to resign from his student summer job as a shop assistant in a secondhand book store. He is still hanging out in the same kind of bars, with the same kind of people, having the same kind of life that he was 20 years ago. Me, I wouldn't want to be doing that all the time; but it is nice to be able to revisit the past on occasion, and The Bookseller has always given me that option.

Of course, some people might view such a lifestyle as rather sad. I recently saw an American film called 'Kicking & Screaming', a cult favourite from the mid-90s on just this theme - a bunch of college friends who can't face the real world upon graduation and drift aimlessly into another year of hanging around campus. The ringleader, an insouciant depressive called Max (Chris Eigeman), at one point chides himself that, "What I used to be able to dismiss as just a bad summer is now in danger of becoming a bad life." Indeed, I have often heard such criticisms of The Bookseller from others of his friends - usually along the lines that he has "wasted his genius" in such an undemanding, unfulfilling job. I counter on two fronts. First, that notions of his genius are greatly exaggerated (chiefly by The Bookseller himself, who does not count intellectual modesty among his virtues): he's pretty smart, but no Einstein; his talents lie in the synthesis of large bodies of fact rather than in original interpretation and analysis. Second, that the job should not be disparaged: it has given him security and purpose and an adequate living all these years; more importantly, it has given him the opportunity to be paid for indulging his two favourite hobbies all day long - reading and being rude to American tourists (though he does this in a sufficiently veiled, is-that-disdain-or-just-the-famous-British-reserve kind of way that he rarely actualy causes offence). From other perspectives, it might seem a limited life, but The Bookseller has got the trick of contentment that most of us miss.

The Bookseller, alas, is so apathetic, so incompetent in such domestic matters as the keeping of up-to-date address books that he has fallen out of touch with all of our other friends of 'our generation'. I half suspect that I was only on the wedding guest-list because I made a point of inviting myself. The wedding was populated almost entirely by his new drinking buddies, people who have come up to University - and then failed to leave - in the 90s or the 00s. Most of them still live in the University town, or sufficiently nearby that they can and do visit at will. This meant that - although both a 'traditional' eve-of-wedding stag night drinking session and an untraditional weekend-before stag party (on this occasion, the two were pretty much identical - no road trips, no afternoon 'activities', no fancy dinners, no strippers or hookers or giant cakes, just a good old-fashioned pub crawl) were on the agenda - the pre-wedding celebrations in fact spread themselves over about 10 days of continuous drinking. I put on nearly 14lbs - which is refusing to come off again (a torpid metabolism being one of the most depressing features of incipient middle age, I find).

High old times - but when shall we see their like again? Although The Bookseller's bride is a cheerful and tolerant young woman, I imagine she will enforce some curtailment of her husband's former excesses. This 10-day party was probably the end of an era for me. Sigh.

Ah, well, perhaps it's better to move on. I can't afford to drink in English pubs any more. And the drinking scene - the bars, the drinks, the prices, the company - is generally far more amenable in my new adopted home in a far-flung corner of the globe.