Reliving my youth with old friends

This trip was my first solo vacation since I’ve become a dad, untethered from the responsibilities of childcare, work travel or a home trip, or even the structured orderliness of a wedding or stag do. This was, in short, a mature city break for a grown man, the kind of trip my younger self could never afford, but likely imagined adulthood would eventually provide him with, several times a year.

I am, alas, no longer that younger man. The week before I left, my wife shot me sympathetic glances when Dave told me he’d be playing a DJ set until 5am on the night I arrived. Once, this would have been wondrous news, but I greeted it like a letter confirming throat surgery. She consoled me as if I’d just been told a beloved dog had drowned. “Think of all the standing,” I muttered quietly, as she patted my shoulder and told me everything would be OK.

Twenty years ago, when Dave, Rubio and I first lived together, the prospect of standing posed no such terror. We slept rarely and shared everything – meals, CDs, heartbreaks – at a time when living every waking moment with your friends was as natural as breathing. Rubio is from Dublin, but Dave and I had moved there from Wexford and Derry respectively, falling in with a like-minded crew of DJs, artists and idlers, with whom we obsessed over music, put on gigs and cohabited in a series of chaotic house shares. It’s from this time of my life, between 18 and 25 years of age, that most of my deepest friendships stem. Bliss it was to live on techno, cigarettes and chicken rolls, but to be young was very heaven.

We came of age at a time when the Irish economy had shat itself so completely that youth unemployment was near 40%, and a second childhood descended on those of us in Dublin who found ourselves profoundly over-educated and resolutely jobless. We were all engaged in artistic pursuits that seemed allergic to generating money, which didn’t matter because all of us were on the dole. In the end, we launched so many unsuccessful cultural ventures that some of them actually stuck: Rubio in art, Dave in music, me in “remembering things that happen to me, writing them down and adding jokes”.

And then – quite rudely, I would argue – we got old. We obtained vaguely respectable jobs and accumulated five kids between us. We all moved away from Dublin and our friendships migrated to a series of groupchats dedicated to exchanging old house-music white labels and football-transfer gossip, a life-sustaining thread that binds us together still, albeit across distances we bridge too rarely in real life.

Arriving in Kraków, I was heartened to discover very little had really changed. Dave’s gig was a maelstrom of house and electro that saw him play back-to-back with two other DJs with whom he shares a residency in a small club near Kraków’s old town. I was there until 4am, and knew my wife would be proud. I know this because I texted her to ask if she was, and she said yes.

The three of us promptly settled into the same routine we’ve enjoyed since we were boys: ruminating on tunes, half-remembering things that happened at parties 20 years ago and assassinating the character of the closest of our friends not currently present. Only now, this was interspersed with talk of child-rearing, playground politics, the steady accretion of bodily ailments from advancing age.

Dave and I discussed the increased frequency with which we walk into rooms and forget why we did so. Rubio and I compared our retinue of supplements: his a sprightly concoction of milk thistle and St John’s wort, mine a nine-pill medley of cod liver oil, glucosamine, zinc and B vitamins. These we praised to each other like crate diggers recommending rare vinyl, before ambling into town for a day of sedate sightseeing. We marvelled at Kraków’s stunning architecture and its lively picturesque squares, where we sat in the sun and ate pierogi while the world – and at least two troupes of Christian breakdancers – passed us by.

And amid all this carefree ambulation, we missed our kids, and spoke of how much we did so. Pictures were shown, stories told. We spent Sunday evening with Dave, his partner Eliza and their three-year-old son, Theo, who is such a 3D-printed replica of Dave that if you drew a moustache on him, he could easily commit fraud in his father’s name.

We took a dusky stroll through Błonia Park, competed quite pathetically for Theo’s attention and pledged that the next time we came for a sunny ramble with old friends, it would not be to recapture lost youth. We’d do it with all our kids in tow, so that we could share this with them, and we all might be young and old together.