By Kerre McIvor on 12th November 2013, in Columnist
You would think that organising three old friends to get together for a catch up would be a relatively easy thing to do.
However, given that one of us is a very busy executive, the other is in the process of buying two houses and selling one, and I am only available for Friday lunches or the weekend, it’s been a huge mission.
We decided we would meet up for one of our twice-yearly lunches when we bumped into each other by chance at the hairdresser’s – three months later, we have yet to actually sit down at a table and discuss each other’s lives.
A flurry of emails managed to see us agreeing on a date in September, then I realised – a week out – I would be in Tauranga that Friday.
I sent the two women a grovelling apology and suggested a second rendezvous. However, after initially confirming a date in October, they both came back to me and said events had conspired against them and they wouldn’t be able to make it. Now we seem to have agreed on a date in November, so fingers crossed it happens.
Despite the to-ing and fro-ing, I think it’s important to maintain links with your friends. It’s not good enough to have a hurried catch up over the frozen foods aisle at the supermarket or the wine chiller at the deli.
Relationships, important ones anyway, take effort. That means sitting down and finding out how the people you care about are really doing.
That’s what I miss most about not living in the same town as my mum – and what I really miss about not living in the same country as my daughter and a couple of my best friends.
Of course, we do phone and email and, in Mum’s case, I can visit, but it’s not the same as being able to pop in and get a second opinion on a dress you want to buy or having extra whitebait you want to share, or sitting down at home, enjoying a coffee and catching up on the week, face to face.
I was looking at buying a lovely dress the other day as I have a number of events coming up, but the back was very low. I’ve lost a bit of weight, but perhaps not enough to let me get away with such a cut.
And then there’s the texture of older skin. Less is more when it comes to my age. It doesn’t help I’m completely delusional, and when I look in the mirror I see what I want to see – not what’s actually there.
Talk about being trapped in the wrong body – I feel inside my round, little frame with its truncated limbs there is a raven-haired, leggy beauty with pert breasts and a tiny waist just dying to get out.
I really needed Kate with her brutally honest assessment to guide me, but she’s had the temerity to go off to London with her husband and leave me without an unpaid stylist and fashion consultant. There’s always Skype. I’ve become good at Skyping, remembering to cover every bit of me when I leap out of bed in response to the call, and learning to position the iPad so I don’t loom out of Kate’s computer with goitre eyes.
There is Facebook too, and I’m very grateful I’m not living a generation ago, when we depended on aerograms written on thin blue paper that arrived every month or so with news that was out of date.
But even with modern technology, it’s just not the same as hanging out with people you love – sharing both the minutiae and the momentous occasions in life with them.
As well as reading her column, listen to Kerre on Newstalk ZB, Monday to Thursday, 8pm to midnight.