In September 2003, I was reunited with my old school friend and fellow Stockwell man, Micky Boyd. I hadn’t seen him for thirteen years. He picked me up in his courier van from the corner of Fentiman Road, SW8. Within moments, I found myself struggling to adjust to his massive weight gain, since shed, and the hair loss. His ginger mullet – he claims it was strawberry blonde – went in the mid-nineties after years of, in his own memorable words, ‘pushing it around’ as he looked to cling onto it.
Meanwhile, it required some effort on Micky’s part to get used to my new nose, which he’d picked up on straight away, and our friendship had resumed just as I was on the cusp of going into my most intensive rhinoplasty period. Micky had fixed his own nose – much mocked at school – too. Early on in our reunion, as we got to know each other again, swapping rhinoplasty stories filled in any awkward silences until pretty soon, the comfortable friendship of old had been re-established and we didn’t need to rely on nasal surgery stories so heavily.
Micky remembers my mum well because according to him, she was the only person who thought him good looking during his childhood. Funnily enough, years later, my aunt also remarked on Micky’s good looks. It’s as if only the women in my family find the man, whom I consider to be a good looking fellow, attractive. Over the course of the ten years, Micky has bought me a considerable number of meals, but I like to think the compliments paid by my family in regards to his looks mean it’s not all been one-sided.
Eventually in 2010, after two years of talking about it, we recorded a podcast, Please Don’t Hug Me, that went out every week from the hotel I was living in. I recorded and edited the show myself. It was an arrangement much like the school magazine Micky and I used to do, Mick and Dan on the ball, where basically I used to do all the work, and he’d lend his name to the project, much like George Foreman did with the grill, though my research shows that Foreman had a little more input on the grill than Micky did on the podcasts. It never looked right. Two men recording in a tiny room, one sat in a foldable chair in a pair of three-quarter length shorts, his weekly arrival every Thursday picked up by the hotel CCTV cameras.
For several years prior to the reunion, I had been preoccupied with finding out what had happened to Micky. It was extraordinary that we only lived ten minutes away from each other until he left the area in the mid-nineties, and yet for six or seven years, we never ran into each other.
Then, in February 2000, a few days before my mum died, I’d had a strange dream about Micky, totally out of the blue, after not seeing him for what at that point was eleven years. I was so unsettled by that dream that I jotted it down in my notebook. I still have my notebook from that day. ‘14/2/00 – Dream about Micky Boyd. Bouffant hair. Definitely him. Looked like he was trying to warn me about something’.
I couldn’t shake that dream from my mind for the next few days. I remembered that Micky was the first friend I’d known lose a parent at school. That is what I took from the dream, without fully appreciating how difficult that must’ve been for him at that age to lose a parent given what I went through with my parents in my mid-twenties.
We’d first contacted each other again at the end of 2001. Micky had just become a dad. I was already on my third flat in just under a year since losing my mum. In hindsight, I should’ve waited a little longer before telling Micky about the dream. It’s not really something you tell someone you haven’t seen for eleven years, ‘Hey, I had a dream about you. You were warning me about something and my mum died a few days later’. I think it unsettled him. I didn’t hear from him for another two years.
When we finally reunited in the autumn of 2003, I realised as good a guy as he is, there was very little about him that was as profound as his bouffanted dream version. But still, he’s a good friend. A little slow on putting together junior-sized desks as I discovered last week, and borderline aggressive if you mention the varicose vein on the back of one of his calves, but overall the reunion has been a success.
Now it just feels odd that for thirteen years we weren’t in each other’s lives. Having said that, I’m glad that we weren’t in touch for the big events, like his wedding and the christenings of his kids because I have an awful track record when it comes to attending those kind of big showy events. It’s likely if we’d been in touch at that time, my no shows would have broken the friendship.
This is the way it was meant to happen.