Julie and I have been friends for nearly 44 years.

We’ve worked together in several places, she was bridesmaid at my first wedding, and she has spent a significant proportion of the last four decades pretending to listen to me.

I talk.

A lot.

Apparently I also don’t require the continued presence of the person I’m talking to.

Julie can leave the room while I’m halfway through a story, disappear completely out of earshot, come back several minutes later and I’ll still be talking to her.

I don’t stop.

I just carry on in a sort of excited stream of gibberish until she reappears.

She says it’s the monotone that gets her.

Eventually she zones out.

Which is dangerous.

Because occasionally I test her.

I’ll be happily rattling away about something that actually happened and, without changing my voice, my pace or giving any indication that anything unusual has occurred, I’ll switch to complete nonsense.

This once resulted in me telling her about the enormous koi carp that had jumped out of the pond and attacked me.

“Yeah.”

I carried on.

“Oh yeah.”

The koi situation became increasingly serious.

“That’s interesting.”

I looked at her.

“You’re not listening, are you, Julie?”

Of course she wasn’t.

So I repeated what she’d just enthusiastically agreed had happened to me, and we both dissolved.

That’s pretty much how we’ve always been.

We met through work and somehow ended up working together in several different places over the years.

We also got into trouble for talking and laughing.

Quite regularly, as I remember it.

And of course, we were only temps.

Lowly temps.

Admittedly, we were temps with a two-year contract, which rather stretched the definition of temporary, but apparently that didn’t qualify us for everything.

When the proper employees went out for the office Christmas lunch, Julie and I had to stay behind and man the phones.

So we had our own Christmas party.

I can’t remember whether anybody actually rang.

I suspect we were having considerably more fun than the people at the official lunch anyway.

Somewhere amongst all of that — the jobs, the talking, the laughing and the years passing — Julie became one of those people who never really left my life.

She was bridesmaid at my first wedding.

Then eventually I moved to the other side of the world.

We can now go years without seeing one another.

It doesn’t seem to matter.

When we meet again, there’s no awkward catching-up stage.

We just carry on wherever we left off.

Although presumably I’ve been talking throughout the intervening years and Julie has only just come back into the room.

While I’ve been staying with Julie, we went to see her dad.

I hadn’t seen him for about 35 years.

He’s 89 now and lives in the most beautiful care home, with a gorgeous medieval view across the quaint old town outside.

I genuinely didn’t know whether he’d remember me.

Thirty-five years is a long time.

We walked in.

He looked at me.

And he knew me.

Immediately.

Not a vague I think I know you from somewhere sort of recognition.

He knew exactly who I was.

And then came that lovely Northern Irish accent I remembered.

Within minutes he was joking with me and bringing up stories from all those years ago.

And suddenly 35 years didn’t seem very long at all.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been quite so surprised.

Back when Julie and I worked together, she’d go home and tell her family about whatever peculiar thing had happened in my life that day.

There were apparently so many Nicky stories that her family decided I ought to write a book.

It’s only taken me several decades to get as far as a blog.

And there we were again.

Me talking.

Him joking.

Both of us being cheeky with each other.

As if we’d only seen each other yesterday.

He’s such a special man.

Funny, warm, gentle and just completely adorable.

And sitting there with him affected me in a way I hadn’t expected.

It didn’t really feel as though I was visiting somebody else’s dad.

It felt a little bit like I’d been given the chance to visit my own dad again.

I wasn’t prepared for that.

Eventually, of course, it was time to leave.

And saying goodbye was hard.

Really hard.

I live on the other side of the world. Realistically, I may not be back in Britain for several years.

At 89, there are some things you don’t really need to say out loud.

I think we both knew it.

We hugged goodbye and I could feel myself welling up.

Then I looked at him.

His eyes had filled too, and his bottom lip was quivering.

Oh God.

That nearly finished me.

I think it nearly finished him too.

And then Julie started talking.

Just talking about something — anything really — to bring us both back down to earth before we completely fell apart.

Which worked.

Just about.

For once, Julie was doing the talking.

And I was very glad she was.

After 35 years of not seeing each other, saying goodbye again suddenly felt far too soon.

All those years ago, Julie used to go home and tell her family stories about my strange life.

Thirty-five years later, I walked into her dad’s room and he remembered me immediately.

Maybe Julie talked about me even more than I talked to her.

And that’s saying something.

There are people in our lives with whom the years in between don’t seem to count in quite the way you’d expect.

With Julie, we just carry on the conversation.

And with her dad, somehow 35 years disappeared too.

As if it were yesterday.