Sweet Sixteen

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I've mentioned The Lads here many times, and as recently as the other day: the extended group of [formerly school-] mates that continued long after we had left secondary education, until we became our own diaspora spread far and wide around the UK and the world. Some of us survivors of this once extensive clan still stay in touch via email, the boomer's choice of remote communication. We sometimes get to meet up in person, in ones and twos, although a much larger gathering was formed at the funeral our dear friend Johnny Kyte [blog posts passim]: with representatives a number of the 'sub-tribes' that formed the Venn diagram of friendships within the larger 'super' grouping that was 'The Lads', which, by the time we hit the pubs of Birmingham in earnest back in the early-mid seventies, became very much a larger, mixed gender grouping, as we all started relationships and most got married.

We had an email round yesterday to that effect, as it is sixty years ago this week that we all started at the same secondary school. We formed sub-groups like the arty types, the sporty types, the alternative types and various different musical taste groupings which often overlapped. We coalesced from the first small core in 1969 - around ten of us at the time - around the epicentre of my parent's little terraced house at 16, Winson Street, which became a base for our growing tribe throughout the 1970s. At our drinking and socialising peak in the last half of that decade, we would number around twenty or so, occupying entire corners or rooms of our favourite pubs between seven in the evening and chucking out time, around eleven; often splitting off into smaller groups to go clubbing or to hit the local Indian restaurant du jour, or both.

I seldom, if at all, arrived home before midnight, quite often as dawn broke, even if I'd got something on the following day. The point is though, that we matured and developed together lifelong memories of those times through socialising: mostly talking, drinking & smoking cigarettes, but dancing, playing Sunday football in the park before a few lunchtime pints, the cinema, and well, just hanging out, too: always talking and sharing ideas and music. I'm so glad we grew up when we did with no internet, mobile phones or social media, and to be frank during the very greatest era for popular music [I'll brook no argument on that one, at least with reference to the 'sixties and much of the 'seventies]: what was created was a very special bond between us that lasts implicitly to this day with a few of us survivors, and on the occasions that we few do meet up we're all just - to use a Midlands phrase - daft bits-a-kids again, albeit tempered by age and experience and all that that entails...

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