I met my old lover, the other day

Actually, it wasn't my old lover - it was a building I had once worked in. In fact, I worked in this building for two decades and then we moved to somewhere new. The old building lay empty for a while, before becoming a restaurant, which is how I ended up in it again. I think there is a line in Don Henley's song Boys of Summer which goes something like "don't look back, you can never look back". But sometimes you can't help a backward glance, and, a bit like meeting someone you were once close to, you think "Wow you weren't like that when we were together". So it was that I, and the group of colleagues I was with, spent a large proportion of our time in this building discussing changes that had been made. We shouldn't have been too surprised, it is now a restaurant, after all.

But buildings are powerful repositories of memory and none of us could help but look at what had happened to the place where we spent so many of our waking hours. We laughed and reminisced and it was difficult not to recall the people we had worked with who were no longer with us, either because they had moved on, or because they had been "called to glory", as the Salvation Army has it. Our reason for being there at all was because two valued colleagues had been made redundant and no doubt they will form part of the roll call of people we remember with affection.

The truth is that as things stand anyone, at any time, could find themselves out of work and maybe the best they can hope for is to be remembered with affection. I've been to a few leaving do's recently for people who have chosen to leave and for people who have been made redundant and the gap they leave behind takes some time to fill. I suspect that, for me, the impact of their departure has been made greater because of the loss of my dad earlier this year. No doubt, I will get over it.

As for old lovers, is it possible to make a comparison with a restaurant in the middle of Barnstaple? Probably not, although one of my old lovers (and we are talking about a very long time ago) became a lesbian and is that so different to the transition from office to restaurant? Anyway, the title for this posting came from a Paul Simon song called Still crazy after all these years, which somehow seems appropriate. I still feel slightly at odds with the rest of the world, but at least I'm more at peace with it.