Coincidences - ain't life just full of 'em?
My best friend at Manchester Poly made me deeply envious twenty years ago when she got a well-earned place as a trainee journalist for a big news organisation. So envious that it made me get my finger out of my arse, buy an Amstrad word-processor and start banging out book reviews and features for a local magazine. My career started there.
Fast forward to 2009.
I meet up with same friend after 17 years. We get on like it's yesterday. She invites me down to her place in a little village down south. She's got a lovely husband, three lovely kids, still enjoys her job, lives in a sixteenth century farm house. With a fucking turret, for god's sake!
I'm envious again, but this time there's no coming back. I'm not ever going to ease comfortably into middle age with the mother of my son, leaning on each other while we watch him reach adulthood. I'm not going to enter my child-free mid-forties with someone I've known and loved through my twenties and thirties. And I'm certainly never going to live in a house with a turret, not unless I marry a rich widow.
We hate it when our friends become successful, so says Morrissey. I don't hate it, but I do feel an irrational, tired, resigned envy - let's call it Turret's Syndrome.
