Tag: Best friends

The oldest are the best

   

My old school photo taken in 1981 using a camera on a rotating stand
If you moved, you ended up blurry like the boy in the middle of this picture

 

When I was visiting my mum the other day, who still lives in the house where I grew up, I found an old school photograph that I had forgotten existed. It was taken in 1981 and was a rare ‘whole school’ image. My school used to do this every few years and it was quite a feat to get everyone – pupils, teachers and other staff – to all sit still and and smile (or grimace) at the same time.

To get 450 or so of us in shot, we were arranged in rows of about 80 on a tiered platform. The photographer had to mount the camera on a tripod in the centre of the playground which then rotated from right to left. We were warned sternly that we had to stay as still as possible because if we were moving as the camera scanned us, we would end up out of focus in the final photo. One of the boys did not listen and is forever immortalised as a blurry blob. Another boy, whose ingenuity I rather admire, decided to try and appear on the final picture twice. He started off at one end, then planned to run behind everyone and get to the other end before the camera had finished its journey. Unfortunately for him, he was caught mid-run and unceremoniously plonked in between some much younger boys. He is easy to spot on the final image thanks to standing a good head and shoulders above those around him.

Because the photograph is more than three feet long, it never made it on to any wall, nor into a photo frame, and has remained curled up in a cupboard since 1981.

One of the joys of finding it has been to scan the faces to spot people I knew then, and people I still know now, while laughing at our fabulous 1980s hairstyles. I’m pleased to say that I am still good friends with quite a few of them.

Old friendships are very special, and a few weeks ago I asked if any of you had friendships longer than reader Gurli Svith from Denmark, who told us she had had the same best friend for more than 60 years.

Mary Raynar contacted me to say: “Not quite…Me and Janet met. 59 years ago! I can’t believe I’m saying that!” Mary is my sister Janet’s best friend and they met at primary school in April 1966.

Liz Davidson, who is 78, has the record so far. She still has pals from when she started school at age 5, which adds up to 73 years of friendship. Very impressive!

Lynn Catena, who is originally from Bradford but now lives in Canada, says: “When I visit the UK, I still catch up with friends from the first day of infant school in 1962.”

Artist Neil McBride adds: “It’s 63 years since I became a lifelong friend of my art teacher from secondary school.” I asked Neil if he still sought his mentor’s advice. He replied: “We talk in general terms about art, particularly painting. Where my paintings are quite commercial, his are very purist in contrast so any mutual advice is usually limited to painting technique as any questions arise during discussion. We have some strange discussions about how paint behaves due its physicality, if that makes sense.”

Michale Kilmartin’s comment demonstrated the important role long-term friends can play when you are going through a difficult time: “I’ve known friends since starting school at St George’s Primary in York in 1965. My friend Sean started with me. I became his best man in the 1980s. He supported me through chemotherapy and is still on the end of a phone.”

Lastly Clare Powell has many friends she has known for years, and she wrote me a message explaining her relationships with them from early childhood and into parenthood, where they became godparents to each other’s children. Then, as an afterthought she added: “Oops! I forgot to mention my most important lifelong friend – my husband! We met at school when we were 13 and were part of a gang that are still in touch today. We didn’t get romantic till we were 23 though and now have been married for 42 years.”

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 23rd and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 21st May 2025

You can lead a horse to water

A drawing of Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey from Vanity Fair magazine in 1893. Sir Ralph of Thirkleby Hall, paid for a roadside water trough in the village (Photo: Leslie Ward, public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

 

A few weeks ago I wrote about how my best friend and I celebrate the longevity of our relationship by having an annual weekend away together.

 

Gurli Svith from Denmark wrote: “Your column on friendship touched me very much because I have a very good friend I have known since I was 14 and she was 12. She was going to start at my school and came to my home to ask if we could cycle together. That was the beginning and now being 76 and 74 we are still close friends. We do not meet very often but when we do it is as if we saw each other just yesterday. We can talk about everything, and we have helped each other through hard times. For many, many years we have given each other birthday presents, but sometimes we have not seen each other for two or three years so it is like Christmas when we are sitting there drinking tea, eating cakes and unwrapping our presents.”

 

Is it true that many people are closer to their best friends than their own family? The saying goes, you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family, so if you could opt out of spending Christmas and Easter with relatives, would you? (I acknowledge that I might be opening a can of worms with that question!)

 

Let’s get back on safer ground with troughs. Regular reader Clare Powell says: “We do have a couple of stone troughs we bought in a farm sale in Rosedale in the 1980s (Paid more than we should have because my husband kept bidding against himself – much to the locals’ amusement!). We transported them in the back of a Volvo. No idea how old they are, so it was interesting to read your article. Like you, I never really thought about who made them, and how. And you’re right, your dad would have had the answer at his fingertips.”

 

He sure did, and I now have the space to tell you what I discovered inside his old file. There were a few cuttings, columns, and notes, one of which was in Dad’s handwriting dated 15th May 1993. He had written it during a phone call from a chap called Dick Thompson who lived in our village and whose family had made locally quarried stone troughs for years.

 

“Each trough was excavated with a pickaxe and drawn down to the road on a sledge,” he’d scribbled. “It took seven or eight days to make one trough – all sizes done. Circular pig troughs also made so pigs could eat together.” He added that the troughs were made on spec, bought mainly by farmers, although parish councils paid for communal troughs situated in villages.

 

Among other things, the file also contained a newspaper cutting from March 1973 written by the esteemed founder of the original Countryman’s Diary column, Major Jack Fairfax-Blakeborough.

 

“The wayside water troughs were a real blessing both to parched travellers and to horses,” he wrote, “Especially in the heat of the summer when roads sent up a cloud of dust. Many of the troughs were erected by landowners who knew their value to man and beast. Some of them have inscriptions which tell us of their donor and his consideration for horseflesh.”

 

He mentions one between Burnsall and Appletreewick in the Dales which has a Latin verse ‘De torrential in via bibet propteren exaltabit caput’ which translated means ‘He will drink at the spring on the way, and thereafter lift his head with joy’, which is the last line of Psalm 110 in the Old Testament. The Major (and my dad when he wrote about it 20 years later) could not shed any light on who had placed the trough there. Can any of our Dales contingent add any more detail about this particular trough?

 

Dad mentions another placed at Thirkleby near Thirsk, paid for by Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey (1848-1916), 3rd Baronet of Thirkleby Hall, who was an accomplished engineer, historian and artist. Its inscription, with a bit of poetic license where the rhyme is concerned, reads: ‘Weary traveller bless Sir Ralph, who set for thee this welcome trough.’

 

I have a feeling we have a lot more to come on these once indispensable features of our countryside highways and byways.

 

Do you have opinions, memories or ideas to share with me? Get in touch with me using the ‘Contact’ button on the top right.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 2nd and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 30th April 2025