The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

MET.
ROB.
MORTIMER.

Rob was, I think, the first fool to start commenting on my blog [apart from some dodgy colleagues] so it was wonderful to finally be able to meet up with him after over 5 years.

Of course, it was slightly weird that we did it in HK, given he lives in Manchester and I live in Shanghai – but despite that, sitting down with him and his good lady wife left me feeling in a similar way as to when I met Lauren: normal.

I don’t mean that in a disparaging way, I mean it in the sense that it felt like we were old friends just catching up after a while and that we’ll be catching up again very soon.

Now of course I do hope we will catch up again very soon – however as much as Rob and I have conversed many, many times, the reality is I don’t really know him, I certainly don’t know enough about his life, and yet the feeling I had when we were chatting is some weird American dineresque bar, was this is an old mate.

That’s testimony to how nice he and his wife are, but it’s also another example of [in the positive sense] how friendship is evolving or [in the negative sense] the illusion blogging can create.

I’ve said for a long time that while I am a massive fan of technology, there are dark sides.

When I was growing up, you had to make friends with whoever lived near you or you’d be Billy-No-Mates and so, even if you had massive differences of opinion on stuff [best band, football team, flavour of crisps] you would work your way around them.

Nowadays it’s different.

You don’t have to worry about being a loner or a loser – at least not in the same way – you can find people who share exactly the same views and thoughts as you and while that is great in making you feel like you belong, it also stops people having an ability to debate or accept other people’s points-of-view and that is something I find very concerning and yet, every time I mention it, I get looked at as if I am advocating banning technology and going back to a quill and ink.

Technology is awesome, it has allowed me to make contact and friendships with a whole host of people – but personally, I am old school and think the term friendship can only be used when you know the bad sides of a person as well as the good.

That said, I was talking to a mate last weekend about how friendship has lost elements of its spontaneity.

That could be because I’m an old fucker or the fact I don’t actually know that many people in Shanghai – but I kind-of miss just knocking on a mates door unannounced and seeing if they want to go out.

Sadly that doesn’t seem to happen anymore – at least to me – possibly because we all have technology that allows us to see if a person is ‘up for it’ without actually having to make any effort though to be fair, even if they did, I’d probably end up grumbling under my breath about how my precious personal time had been invaded by someone being nice and spontaneous.

I am seriously only weeks away from turning into the grumbling old men off the muppets!

Saying that, one thing I kind-of-like about this blog is that we don’t always agree.

Of course you’re always wrong [ahem], but I like the fact we can have differences of opinion without either [at least in the main] character assassinating the person with the alternative view or writing spiteful anonymous comments and that’s why meeting Rob for real was so great, because while we didn’t really disagree on stuff, I got to know more about him – the person – and that’s why I can say we’re moving from online friends, to friends, even if the thought of that will quite rightly, horrify him.

Ahhhhh, I’ve just worked out why Northern has cancelled his trip to Singapore.