There are the precious few who still write at Christmas, pen and ink and entreaties for news.
How to respond? It's always a dilemma. A quick gobbet of an update circling the pre-printed sentiments in the card is the best bet, with its implication of a crowded life and an agenda so packed that reams of Basildon Bond would never quite do the job.
Occasionally there is the optimistic (if unexecuted) promise "thanks for your letter, mine to follow".
Some years I opt for Pinteresque brevity, shorn of detail but laden with menace, suggesting my life is dark and brooding and you're better off out of it.
Occasionally I begin a full tale, the A to Z of it all, with its inherent dangers (self-effacement may be taken literally and need to be counterbalanced with full-on bragging; shameful episodes must be given full context by way of an excuse).
Whatever form they take though, these vignettes are underscored, shot through and overwritten with guilt.
Another year passes, another tranche of friendships wilt without the nourishment of contact.
The only saving grace is that my rising stock of misanthropy ensures this diminution gets less onerous by the year.
Return ticket
- There must be a list somewhere, in a drawer or tucked in the Yellow Pages or scrawled in the corner of a City Hall agenda paper.
It is a list of the blackmailers, the screw-turners, the money-grabbers, the opportunists.
Those who don't see a public holiday, a festival, a moment of joy that they cannot dampen with the threat of a strike for some extra dosh to put upon the pile of dosh they wrested from the system last time people want to have a good time in a central location without decent parking facilities.
The list is short. Just three words - London transport workers.
One day, one day, perhaps in 2013 when we've got nothing on... that's when karma will exact its retribution.
