Old Gits Talk Croydon and the Golden Dawn

I met two friends from Croydon last night, Adam and Blair. We went up to the Three Kings in Clerkenwell for a pint, talking about old times in a room upstairs with a huge 60s print on the wall and a cabinet full of snowglobes. I generally catch up with Adam every 6 months and I hadn’t seen Blair for about 15 years, but we all soon fell into old patterns of behaviour. Basically, Blair and I used to – and still do, evidently – gang up on Adam and take the piss. It’s interesting how one conforms to a set script with certain people. You can feel a different persona – dominant, submissive, serious, funny – take hold and lock into place. So, although we’ve all changed over the years (all fatter, Blair is now an antiquarian bookseller specialising in occult first editions, married or getting married) we’re obviously not very different to those callow idiots aimlessly hanging around Croydon in their early 20s.