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It might be important at this time.....

This week, I have been phoning old UK friends and getting numbers for others because I am so worried about them. Everyone I have contacted has been fine, most surprisingly they have not been vaccinated. They have been amazed and delighted to hear from me. In some cases it has been more than a decade since we last spoke but once we got chatting, it was as if no time had elapsed. I really recommend that everyone does this. My phone bill may be a little fat this month but it will be money well spent on a heart now happily at rest.

Obviously it hasn’t been all good news.

At my age, 70 years young, we do tend to hear of occasional losses. One old friend contacted me and told me of the passing, in one week, of three guys I was very close to when we were all young. That was what inspired me to begin my quest to contact others and enquire after their health. I also asked everyone for phone numbers of mutual friends and my list is growing well. Everyone was so touched that I cared to ask and I was touched that they wanted to chat about their lives and how things have changed for them. All said that they had often remembered me. It was emotional.

You see, I have been a bit of a recluse since 2004.

I had sold up in the UK and went travelling and then, in 2006, I lost my mobile phone somewhere on a mountain track in Spain. Dopey me had no hard copy of my contact phone numbers. Thankfully, after being unable to contact me for a month or so, my son contacted Interpol and reported me missing. Two young men in black with dark sunglasses arrived at my friend’s flat in Madrid where I was staying. They gave me my son’s phone number and proudly announced that it had taken them only 11 minutes to find me. “How?” I asked baffled. “You have a tracker chip in your passport!” they said. I thanked them profusely and went to look at my passport. Sure enough, there on the back page was a tiny chip with circuitry laminated into place. I had never noticed it before. For once in my life I was truly grateful for surveillance technology!

Since then I have never set about trying to reconnect with the old friends whose numbers I had lost. Some silly notions in my head like “they won’t worry” or “they won’t care” always stopped me from making the effort to reach out. Besides, I was building a new network of friends in Spain; I was flat out, busy reinventing a life for myself. Occasionally I would call my son and hear snippets of gossip, but he was never one for keeping in touch with old friends either, so things slipped and slipped until now.

Now things are different. Very different.

Now I am seeing that vast numbers of people are getting terribly sick and even dying. You only have to look at the meticulous work of Substacker Mark Crispin Miller to feel the chilly shadow creeping up on us all.

It is playing on my mind that I have been awfully remiss, even returning to the UK and still not bothering to contact old friends. I have settled in a completely different part of the country from where I grew up and I have no friends here at all. I talk to my lovely neighbours and that is about it.

So….

Next on my 'to do' list is to get in touch with more old friends and even my Spanish friends somehow. I have lost touch with so many of them since I was de-platformed from Facebook, Discord and Twitter. Why should social media algorithms and community guidelines be allowed to deprive us of our networks? I never gave them permission to steal my life!

I am determined to make an effort to find and speak to everyone I think about, as soon as they enter my consciousness. It might be important to do this.

Maybe it is the right thing to be reaching out at this time.

Share the love, mis amigos!

ONWARDS! xx