diff'rent strokes

My friends are growing up. Five minutes ago we were all sucking down beers and happily talking utter rubbish. Slowly but surely I've watched them form couples and then relationships, and then the first wedding led, like a toppling domino, to the next and the next and....now they're in the having babies stage. And it's great, in an odd but very real way I'm excited and so proud of them. They seem preoccupied and tired at times, but happy and content in a way that I shouldn't have imagined as if they're suffused with a deep, warm glow. It's an infectious happiness too.

I'm not surprised that they're good parents, They're happy people, and they love each other, they all had full and interesting lives before they married, and they still do...they simply added another ingredient. We have fun in a different way now, it's more mellow, not the tigger scary sod-it fun, but fun all the same. (I have other friends I can still do that with).

I feel that they've out grown me, surpassed me somehow, moved on, and I'm so happy it's like an ache.

If I were stupid I'd wish I were like them, but I'm not, we're all built differently and their life isn't mine (remind me to tell you about the gypsy woman one day), and I'm content that I have a group of friends that accomplished all of this that I still feel comfortable with.

I was reading Evelyn Waugh recently, he's my bathroom book at the moment, and there was a wonderful description of a man who obviously didn't relish the idea of getting married, "Oh why did nobody warn me". "I should have been told. They should have warned me about Flossie, not about the fires of Hell". "They should have told me about marriage...that at the end of that gay journey and flower strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children".

"I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation".