Imaginary Fiends

Only those that inhabited the world of imaginary friends knew of its existence. Its boundaries were endless: an infinite ether containing a simulacrum of beings: shadows, ghosts, fleeting, virtual beings. Insubstantial but as real as their present and former owners needed them to be. Figments of many billion imaginations going back to the dawn of conscious human thought itself.

Cro-Magnons imagined primitive facsimiles of themselves if only not to feel so alone in their wild, feral world. Plato discussed his Forms with an imaginary friend he named Celebrium, a situation he considered ideal as there was no chance to express his regard in any physical sense. In fact, Nelson’s final words were to his imaginary friend ‘Hardy’, and Oscar Wilde had an entire salon of imaginary friends on whom he practised his epithets and epigrams. Russell Brand had an Albert Hall of adoring imaginary fans that he performed to when he was on the toilet. Human beings could have as many imaginary friends as they liked. One of them only had two and they had been neglected for a very long time.

I sometimes wonder how my imaginary friends of so so long ago are doing. I lost touch with them over half a century ago without a thought probably because I’d discovered the communality of football or the possibility of ‘real’ friendships with other human kids (who in turn may have begun to neglect their own imaginary friends.) Solly and Bobo mine were called. 

How had these names come about? I mean, Bobo is a typically childish sort of a name, but Solly sounds like a middle-aged Jewish bookie from London’s east end. Had I befriended in my imagination a grizzly semi-gangster with three days growth on his face and a pencil behind his ear? How odd.