The Year of Reconnecting

My eldest sister’s funeral was the last time I went back to the UK.

That sentence has been sitting rather uncomfortably in my head lately, partly because of what it says and partly because of what it doesn’t. It says that my last journey home was made for a funeral. It says that the last time I saw my other sister was on that same visit. It says that although I have lived in Spain for many years, the geographical distance between us has gradually become something rather more significant than a line on a map.

It also says something about time, and time has a particularly sneaky way of doing things. It doesn’t announce itself. There is no little bell that rings when you’ve crossed from “it’s been a while” into “bloody hell, when did we last see each other?” You simply carry on with life, assuming there will be another opportunity somewhere down the road.

Then you look back and discover that the road has been considerably longer than you thought.

My eldest son lives in York. I haven’t seen him for many years. My youngest lives in Sweden, and I haven’t seen him for around six years. Six years is an extraordinary amount of time when you actually stop and think about it. In six years, children become teenagers, teenagers become adults, people change jobs, move house, grow older, lose hair, acquire grey ones and occasionally discover that their knees no longer negotiate stairs with quite the enthusiasm they once did.

Life happens.

And perhaps that is the problem.

Life happens so convincingly that we can mistake it for an excuse.

I’ve never been particularly good at pretending that everything has to happen according to somebody else’s timetable. Living in Spain has meant building a life here, making decisions around distance and money and practicalities, and accepting that being away from family carries consequences. When you live in another country, particularly when you’re separated from people by several hundred or several thousand miles, seeing one another stops being something that simply happens.

It has to be arranged.

And arranging things is where good intentions go to die.

There is always something. The cost of flights. The timing. Work. Family commitments. Health. Weather. Money. Christmas. Birthdays. The dog. The car. The house. The fact that August is apparently the month when half of Europe decides to move simultaneously and the other half charges accordingly.

Then there is that wonderfully human phrase...

“Perhaps next year.”

Next year is an extraordinarily accommodating place. You can put almost anything there.

We’ll visit next year.

We’ll get together next year.

We’ll sort that out next year.

We’ll spend more time together next year.

And because next year hasn’t happened yet, it doesn’t object. It simply sits there patiently accepting all our postponed intentions.

Until one day you realise that “next year” has been doing quite a lot of heavy lifting.

There is another peculiar thing about modern life. We have never had more ways of staying in touch. I can communicate with someone in Sweden almost instantly. I can send photographs, messages, videos and nonsense from the internet with very little effort at all. I can know that someone is alive, roughly what they’re doing and what they had for dinner without actually being anywhere near them.

We have become extraordinarily good at communicating without necessarily being together.

And perhaps that distinction matters more than we like to admit.

A message isn’t a conversation over a cup of tea. A photograph isn’t a hug. Seeing somebody’s face on a screen isn’t the same as sitting across a table watching their expressions change as they tell you a story. Even the best video call still has that strange quality of being both intimate and distant at the same time... rather like talking to someone through a very sophisticated letterbox.

Technology has solved the problem of distance in one sense while leaving the fundamental problem untouched.

We still have to turn up.

That has been on my mind rather a lot recently.

My eldest sister’s funeral was, in a sense, a reminder that family gatherings are not guaranteed simply because everyone involved would like them to happen. Sometimes the gathering happens because something has gone terribly wrong. Sometimes the people who finally bring everyone together are circumstances nobody would have chosen.

And that thought is rather uncomfortable.

Because funerals have a peculiar way of concentrating the mind. People travel enormous distances. Flights are booked. Cars are hired. Time is found. Arrangements are made. People who haven’t seen one another for years suddenly find themselves standing in the same room, embracing, talking, remembering and wondering why it took something so awful to get them there.

I don’t want my next family reunion to require a funeral.

That is probably the simplest way of explaining what has been going around in my head.

So I’m looking at 2027 rather differently.

I think 2027 is going to be my year of reconnecting.

Not reconnecting in the fashionable social-media sense, where you follow somebody you haven’t spoken to since 1987 and then spend ten minutes looking at photographs of their holidays before returning to whatever nonsense the algorithm has decided you need to see.

I mean actually reconnecting.

Getting on an aeroplane.

Driving somewhere.

Sitting in somebody’s kitchen.

Having a proper conversation.

Seeing the people I haven’t seen for far too long.

There is something rather liberating about admitting that this matters. Not because there is some magical deadline attached to it, but because eventually you reach an age where you begin to understand that time isn’t an unlimited resource. None of us are getting a replacement supply delivered next Tuesday.

At 66, I am increasingly conscious of the difference between having time and having an indefinite amount of time.

Those aren’t the same thing.

When you’re twenty, six years feels like an enormous stretch into the future. When you’re sixty-six, six years is a significant proportion of the road behind you. You begin to understand that “one day” is not a date in the diary. It is a possibility, and possibilities have a habit of disappearing if nobody acts upon them.

That doesn’t mean I intend to turn 2027 into some military-style campaign plan with objectives, milestones, logistical support and a chap standing beside a whiteboard explaining the critical path.

Although, having spent years in the RAF Police, I can’t entirely rule out the possibility of a spreadsheet.

The point is simpler than that.

I want to make the effort.

I want to see my sister.

I want to see my sons.

I want to sit with them rather than simply know about them.

And perhaps there are other people I need to reconnect with as well. Old friends. People from earlier chapters of my life. People who mattered enormously once but gradually disappeared beneath the accumulation of work, distance, responsibilities and the ordinary clutter of existence.

I suspect most of us have a few names like that.

People who occasionally cross our minds for no obvious reason. We wonder how they’re doing. We might even find ourselves thinking, “I really should get in touch”.

Then something else happens, and we carry on.

Maybe they are thinking exactly the same thing.

That is the absurd part.

Two people can care about one another, both genuinely wanting to reconnect, and yet neither makes the first move because life has somehow convinced them that there will always be another opportunity.

Perhaps there won’t.

That isn’t meant to be morbid. If anything, I think it is the opposite. There is something strangely positive about recognising that time is finite because it gives the present a little more value.

We don’t need to wait for a crisis to remind us.

We don’t need a funeral to discover that somebody matters.

We don’t need another six years to pass before we decide that six years was rather too long.

So 2027, for me, is going to be about making some of those journeys.

Some will be long. Some may be complicated. Some will probably cost more than I would like. There will undoubtedly be delays, cancellations, expensive airport coffee and the usual collection of minor logistical disasters that accompany travelling anywhere further than the local supermarket.

But I think it will be worth it.

Because when all the practical arguments have finished having their say, there remains the rather stubborn fact that people matter more than most of the things we spend our lives worrying about.

The house can wait.

The paperwork can wait.

The website can wait.

Even the bloody inbox can wait.

People don’t always wait.

And perhaps that is the thought I want to carry into the coming year.

Not that I need to fix everything, repair every relationship or somehow recreate a past that has already gone. Time doesn’t work backwards and families are complicated creatures at the best of times. Reconnecting doesn’t necessarily mean returning to what once was. Sometimes it simply means finding out who people have become.

Maybe that is the real adventure.

To meet your own family again as adults rather than carrying around old versions of them in your head.

To discover what your sons have become rather than remembering who they were.

To sit with a sister after years apart and realise that, despite all the distance and all the years, there is still a shared history sitting quietly between you.

There will be stories I’ve missed. Things that have happened while I wasn’t there. Ordinary days that became important without me knowing about them. Small triumphs, frustrations, arguments, meals, birthdays, illnesses, jokes and countless completely unremarkable moments that make up a person’s life.

You can’t recover those moments.

But you can create some new ones.

And perhaps that’s enough.

So I’m making a quiet decision.

2027 is going to be the year I stop putting people into “next year”.

I’ve spent enough time allowing distance, circumstance and the peculiar inertia of everyday life to make decisions on my behalf.

It’s time I made a few myself.

I don’t know exactly what those journeys will look like yet. I don’t know how many flights I’ll take, how many miles I’ll drive or how many cups of tea will be consumed while attempting to catch up on several years of life.

I only know that somewhere between Spain, York and Sweden there are people I love who I haven’t seen for far too long.

And next year, I’m going to do something about that.

Perhaps that’s what getting older really teaches us.

Not to fear the passing of time...

but to become rather less willing to waste what remains of it.

Dominus