Falsity
Every week I meet up with my friend Bert in the local pub. I have known him for over thirty years. He is eighty five years old but he still keeps going. Usually, he walks to the pub up the long hill that we call Ecclesall Road but sometimes one of his sons brings him along. He lives several hundred yards away. Bert is famously upbeat and cheerful, often singing snatches of songs from long ago. Everybody likes him but earlier this month he said to me alone, "You know you have been a good friend to me. a true friend and I always look forward to seeing you". I felt chuffed to hear that. On the face of it we are so different. He left school at the age of thirteen with no qualifications whatsoever. Whereas I spent most of my working life teaching schoolchildren, Bert was a manual worker in a range of jobs including the tanning industry, casting concrete and refurbishing railway carriages. Bert rarely complains about aches and pains, batting them away like irritating flies in...
