Who's The Daddy: Good friends can just pick up where they left off

Because you weren’t always this hollowed out husk, whose hopes and dreams were trampled into the dirt so long ago that you’ve forgotten what they were. Decades of work and spirit-crushing responsibility have done this to you. And it’s probably why you’re like you are now.

They know what you were like when you were feral, without a pot to pee in and didn’t give two hoots about anything, apart from bars, nightclubs, football and women in their early 20s. Thank God smartphones, the internet and social media weren’t around back in the day because, thanks to the shady stuff we all got up to back then, you’d be absolutely unemployable.

Last weekend yours truly met up with three friends from uni days who I’ve known for (subtracts 1988 from 2023 on a calculator) bloody hell, 35 years, ostensibly for a Charlatans gig at the O2 Victoria Warehouse in the looming shadow of Old Trafford.

Every time we meet up, which is shamefully less frequently these days as we busy ourselves with family lives and jobs, it’s like one of us nipped to the bar to get the drinks in and returned 18 months later and carried on our usual chit-chat of football, indie bands of the late 80s and early 90s, wives and children, at the point where we left off.

Two of us don’t drink now, which would’ve horrified our 18-year-old selves, who used the sauce as a suit of armour in social situations in a vain attempt to appear less boring and give us the confidence to talk to women.

Now we’re hitting our mid-50s we’re practically invisible to anyone under 30, don’t give a **** what other people think and miss the hangovers and crippling morning-after anxiety like a hole in the head (four months dry now and don’t miss it one little bit).

Anyway, the Charlatans. Have you forgotten how good they are? Because I had. Tim Burgess and the lads romped through around two hours of a Charlatans jukebox, hit after jangly hit, with a backdrop of footage of what they looked like back in the days of The Only One I Know.

And they played like they meant it, unlike some bands of that era who schedule lucrative reunion tours to fund divorces and unexpected but crippling tax bills and physically hate the sight of each other, to the point where the singer doesn’t go within 20 yards of the guitarist all night. I’m thinking of one right now but have omitted their name in anticipation of some strongly worded legal advice.

Daughter #1 was out in Manchester’s Northern Quarter that night and texted to ask where we were going after the show. Er, bed. We’re 30 years older than you. And we’ve been standing up for nearly four hours and our backs hurt.

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