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M'funky FizzBok page unreliably informed me that a former colleague o'mine was sixty-six years old this week. I don't suppose that I ought to have been surprised, just as I'm sure that those of you who know me you won't be at all surprised either to find that I chose not to comment upon it at the time in those pages.

After all, I don't really "do" birthdays...

And I'm not really a fan of using that kind of venue for the passing on of greetings and good wishes. Apart from the fact that it seems too public, and far too open to ridicule, mostly it just seems to lack that personal touch and sincerity that I would like to try to achieve for myself and perceive in others.

But reading that reminder did set me thinking…

Way back in the so-called when, I was but an earnest-faced youngish boy artist, not quite fresh out of Art School, but not so very far away from that. The intervening year-and-a-half since being kicked out into the great big and rather uncaring world hadn't been too kind to my non-burgeoning non-career and so, at the second attempt (for I found a long-forgotten rejection letter once…), I took a job at the blunt end of advertising, hoping that six months or so of that would give me the experience to move on to bigger and better things.

Then, as is often the way with such things, I stuck with that job for more than a decade.

There is a point to all of this back-story, I assure you, so do bear with me.

As you may already be aware, I've always been an early bird and, one February day, a little over six weeks into my sparkling new career, I arrived at the office in Didsbury to find jolly japes and pranks were afoot, and that the office was in the process of being "decorated" in a mildly unkindly manner in preparation for the arrival of this self-same colleague upon the occasion of his fortieth birthday…

The image bank had been raided for pictures of old men in wheelchairs with plastered limbs, and suchlike, and these had all been blown up to A3 size on the office photocopier and stuck all around the room in places prominent enough to be entirely noticeable upon his arrival. There was much giggling and hilarity from my new colleagues, some of whom I had hardly got to know yet (On the whole, it takes me a good long while to even talk to anyone new to me, and this was still very early days…), and one of whom might have been my manager, although I don't recall the object of their light-hearted derision being too pleased about it all when he did finally arrive.

I think the pictures disappeared fairly quickly but I'm also aware that, if he is anything like me, he was probably quietly chuffed to be remembered like that, even if he never would have admitted it at the time...

Can that be over a quarter of a century ago already…?

Could I really have been only twenty-three years old on that day…?

Could we really have believed that turning forty was so very old…?

I stayed for that decade, and left when that same person was now a fifty-year old, (which kind of passed unremarked upon, as we'd become a much less frivolous outfit by then…) and, I think, we'd become friends and allies over those years because, despite not appearing to have all that much in common (and me still being referred to as"the prat in the hat" because of what I wore to my first interview), we both had a cynical streak that the other appeared, at least, to appreciate. He was certainly an appreciative audience to some of my cartoonery and scribbling, and featured in a fair few of them in that gently mocking way I used to have back in those days when I still tried.

As is the nature of such things, I seldom went back afterwards, despite the possibility cropping up, from time-to-time, that my "new career" wasn't quite working out as planned and my hope that I might still have a "safety net" of a kind if things went too wrong, and "office life" in the old place moved on and new people came and went and my own small role in the great history of the company became little more than a dusty, forgotten footnote to what was happening right then.

Years passed and, sadly, that company finally bit the dust, at around the time I first started writing these blog postings, and I attended the party which was organised to mark its passing and was surprised to find that m'colleague still had a lot of my old drawings stashed away, some of which were used to decorate the venue on that sad but glorious evening three-and-a-half years ago.

Which just goes to show, really, that none of us are ever really truly forgotten whilst there are still people who remember us, even if we sometimes think that nobody was paying any attention at the time, although, when the history of my old Art School is written, I somehow doubt that anyone will recall the ghost who flitted around in the shadows trying not to draw attention to himself, but that's another story...

So, a belated happy birthday, you old curmudgeon, and many more of them, old sport… :-)