A friend in need..? 17 12 5 (14) 25 1 30

This friend was my then oldest friend and a person I thought I knew better than any other, for he used to tell me everything that went on in his life, or so I thought in those far off days of 1999, as he was nursing his sick common law wife who would die in the autumn, his junior by 13 years aged 56, just a few months after taking early retirement from her job in a Girls' School where she had been head of History...

Meanwhile I, a mere junior of only 10½ y was going through a crises of my own, in my reasonably high powered job. 1999 would be the last year I would be responsible for claims handing for our US market after doing the job practically single-handedly for the past 10 years. I was given the job by my long since retired partner the other joint Research and Development Director and I had succeeded in reducing the load from a claims bill running at $200 000 pa down to just $5000, and with a new MD who, according to his own admission was just a bean counter, and a lady Marketing Director he had recently hired in this practically all-male industry, they deemed our quality to be so good they didn't need someone with my background to field the complaints. Never mind that I had had to fight previous marketing managers for the US market tooth and nail when every claim that came back they invariably attributed to poor quality or other failings on the part of Production and Research and Development Depts...

These then more of those misunderstandings that life dishes up from time to time. I recall how this particular MD who, after his first visit to our US operations, returned to tell me how he had had to field this claim of defective product in the sum of $3000, when he had looked the guy in the eye to determine whether he was being spun a line, and agreed to settle the claim there and then in full. That I then told him we never normally settle any claim without an investigation to determine whether the claim originated in our operations or the converting operations of our US agents, perhaps didn't augur well for future disputes I should have with him..?. When in this particular case a further claim for similarly defective product recurred after a few weeks he declined on that occasion to involve himself…

Not that I ever advised my friend to find himself a nice young woman to marry, rear a family and live for the rest of his live engaged in some worthwhile job and/or career, as I had done for example, as words in the situation he found himself aged 69 were worthless: after his first 26 y before we met he was already set in his ways, shunning friendships with people of his own age group he used to applaud, shunning thoughts of meeting a nice girl and getting hitched etc., etc., etc. It was all too late for him now with D on her death bed, and unfortunately for him my not being there for him in his hours of greatest need was now, I can see, unsurprising. As I have said I before I was perhaps his closest friend and also the first of his friends to be jettisoned, but as time went by news of first another and another came to one's ears. The latest from my sister M whose neighbour from 40 years ago, a man who took up with my friend’s cousin Maureen, asked of my sister whether she had heard anything from him lately, thinking she was a past girl-friend of the friend: how they had been to visit him in Fish Hoek in S. Africa where as a widower he bought himself a second home, but that then somehow they had lost touch..!? Have a good day everyone and don’t wait too long before you sow the seeds for the crop you wish to harvest in your old age..?