For a reason, a season or for a lifetime...

When I left England sixteen months ago I had it in my head that I would meet only wonderful people on my travels. I thought that somehow there would be a connection between travellers, a unique bond, some kind of secret, shared knowledge that would allow us all to commune on a higher level than those we left back at home.

All bollocks, of course, as I soon discovered. There are just as many idiots on the road as there are at home. It's all relative of course, I suspect many of these so-called idiots consider me to be an idiot, although you'd surely have to be a bit of an idiot to think that, wouldn't you?

I take it from your silence that you agree with me.

Yes, you'd have to be a complete idiot, like the London geezer who sidled up to me as I was skinning up at a party late one night. He started bragging about how much cocaine he snorted, smoked half my spliff, promptly fucked off and the very next evening called me a prick. How would he know? The coke-addled twit wouldn't let me get a word in edgeways.

Fortunately, my travels over the last month in Thailand and India have afforded me the opportunity to spend time with a lot of lovely people - people that I probably wouldn't get the opportunity to mix with under normal circumstances. For example, during the new year festivities I spent a lot of time hanging around with a group of relative youngsters, guys and girls ranging in age from eighteen to twenty-three. I reckon the only place you could meet teenagers as cool as these characters is in a country like India, on a beach like Palolem, in a place like Tony's Coco Huts.

At the other end of the age spectrum was my old friend Foxy, who joined me on Palolem with his girlfriend Kristine and their friends Stuart and Julie. They proudly held aloft the flag of maturity, experience and restraint. Once my young friends had left the beach and dispersed to various exotic corners of Asia, I was left to pick up the pieces of my sleep-deprived and alcohol fractured mind and body... well, that's what I would have done if I'd had the opportunity. Instead, I embarked on another week-long bender with Foxy and the gang, who, not to put too fine a point on it, turned out to be mentalists and wronguns of the highest order... in the best possible way, of course.

Well, you are as old as you feel, they say. At the conclusion of my time on Palolem Beach I felt about ninety-nine years old and needed a Stannah Stairlift to get up the steps to my hut.

But I digress.

New Years Eve gave me an opportunity to spend time (and yes, okay, party exceedingly hard) with friends old and new, some of whom I suspect I will never see again. This particular night, with its seemingly random and limitless potential for sociability, offers me a fairly convenient platform from which to expound my views on the nature of friendship.

A wise man once said to me, "We all have friends for a reason, a season or for a lifetime". Cute, I know, but it's also quite true. It's something that can be hard to accept - the idea that no matter how much you like someone, no matter how much they like you, no matter how much you have in common and how much experience you share, friends come in and out of your life all the time. When you travel, they sometimes flit through your life at ridiculous speeds. Sometimes you become friends with someone because you need them and they need you, as was the case with double-hard Alon, my Bombay wingman. We were able to support each other through that first stressful day in India, but it never crossed either of our minds to exchange email addresses.

Well, I exchange email addresses with people all the time, but I know that with many of them it is an empty gesture. It isn't even the case that you make a conscious decision to keep in touch with some people and not with others. Co-incidence often seems to dictate whether you will see someone again, whether your relationship will strengthen, whether you will ultimately become friends for a season or longer. Sometimes it's the most unlikely people that you end up bonding with.

Another wise man once said, "Hold onto your friends". It's hard work keeping in contact with people if they're thousands of miles away living different lives and dreaming different dreams! I'm sad to say I've lost people this way. However, there must be a reason why we sometimes lose our friends. At risk of sounding trite I'm going to illustrate my next point with another common saying: When one door closes, another one opens. Our personalities and our relationships are not static, they are forever changing, and we're all changing in different ways. It would be naive to resent someone for not keeping in touch with you if their lives are following a different path to your own.

So what is it that makes someone a friend for a lifetime? Luck surely has a lot to do with it, as do perseverance, acceptance, understanding, forgiveness and not a small amount of faith. Maybe it isn't about the stuff you have in common, it's about accepting the stuff that you don't. I don't really know, so I'll conclude by resorting to one last cliche in an attempt to tie all this rambling speculation up...

Love, of course, is all you need.

This blog entry is dedicated to those people I've passed on the journey and also the guys and girls partying at Tony's on Palolem Beach on New Years Eve. Whether we're friends for a reason, a season or for a lifetime, there will always be a bit of my heart devoted to you.

Keep in touch!