As the year turns, I’ve been having pangs for the past. It’s a classic autumnal vibe: nostalgia. But I feel as though this year we have so much more to be nostalgic for – because we’ve missed out on so much. Our friendships have missed out, too. I’m talking about festivals; about long, gin-soaked days pinballing around packed bars; holidays with girlfriends where you could apply suncream to each other’s backs and lick each other’s recent relationship wounds; impromptu office lunch breaks where you could meet a friend in a sunny square and have an edifying, perfume-doused, beautifully human hug.
Of all of the things absent from this lost summer, festivals feel the saddest. It doesn’t help when your social media constantly throws out photos from last year, as though saying, ‘Hey! Remember this, when things were normal and you were having a good time? Look how happy you were!’ And there’s a picture of you in a field, your face ablaze with joy and abandon, your arms around people not in your household, drinking tepid cider from a cup that god knows how many people had drunk out of before. You’d probably just been to the toilet and used anti-bac afterwards and thought, ‘Eurgh, I hate using anti-bac, I’m pretty glad I don’t have to use this every day!
Ah, innocence!
Still, I wish social media would stop rubbing salt in the wound.
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Festivals have felt extra precious in recent years as a lot of my friends’ responsibilities have grown and so we just can’t see each other as much. Spending quality time together in those brief sojourns outside of the normal routine felt like a real investment. These were the times when my friends and I really watered the friendship. Whether it was getting lost in a wood, stumbling across a music or comedy act that we’d never heard of before but swiftly became a new shared fave, or becoming part of those strange little weekend families you create.
One of my friends, Katie, has a friend she meets every year at Glastonbury in the same spot at the same time. They never see each other anywhere else, just there. There’s something massively romantic about this, and about festivals in general. At Green Man last year I met up with a friend who I never normally see and we relished the time together and reconnection like people might relish a holiday romance, knowing that when we went our separate ways at the end of the weekend, we probably wouldn’t see each other again much in our ‘normal’ lives. But it didn’t make that time any less sweet. If anything, it made it sweeter. It was nice when we could choose our own abnormal, rather than having it thrust upon us.
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But it’s not all doom and gloom. I’m getting my glow on. I’m saying: bring it on, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. I am READY for all of your mellow and all of your fruitfulness. I love so much about autumn, and it holds great potential for friends, too. Strolls through crispy parks. Woolly hats and scarves in beer gardens – albeit two metres apart (or is it one now? I’ve lost track). Kids back at school, so you might have time for that lunch break with a friend now.
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Autumn is a good time to be outside. And metaphorically, it’s a time of renewal. A chance to blow away the cobwebs. To look forward. Maybe it’s a good time to be thinking about the work we can put into our friendships too – the pruning and nurturing that is ultimately expansive. I never liked tepid cider all that much anyway.