Bold Brigand: Meeting Pockets

In 2004, I spent two months on "unpaid work experience" on the south coast of England. The experience was fantastic - the time of my life, in fact - and I was able to acquaint myself with great swaths of West Sussex, visit London once or twice, and hit a few other hot spots before embarking on an epic two week holiday around Scotland, Ireland, and France (after which it was back to the States for my last year of undergraduate study). I also acquainted myself with some great guys, one of whom was a guy around my age who was known as "Pockets" because of his habit of keeping his hands in his pockets when they ought to have been hard at work. ("Idle hands... ") Following my Orcadian respite, I had a long travel day that happened to take me through my old digs in Sussex, and I was able to rouse Pockets from his current gig as a journeyman embalmer to pick me up from the train station and join me for dinner.

Despite the fact that I've gained about seventy pounds, grown a beard, and lost a lot of my hair; and the fact that Pockets has grown a beard and gotten a helluva lot more ink, it was just like old times. We laughed like schoolboys, remembered the good times of 2004 and all of the great guys (and also the wankers) we worked with, and then took a stroll down to the beach front so that I could have a quick look at the place where I'd made so many memories so many years earlier. With that done and dusted, Pockets and I shared a last laugh and a hearty bro-hug goodbye, and I was back on my way.