Only those who 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. 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.)
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.
Looking back and remembering Solly, he wasn’t a particularly
friendly imaginary friend. His general demeanour toward me was that he was
somehow the wrong imaginary friend in the wrong imagination, like there had
been some sort of administrative error. Maybe he should have been the imaginary
friend of some young hoodlum on the streets of Bethnal Green and not at the beck
and call of a rather timid young boy in East Kilbride. Bobo was scared shitless
of him!
The good thing about imaginary friends is that you are free
to imagine them doing anything you want. They climb trees with you or applaud
you when you jump a burn. Generally, they are there to provide friendly
companionship and esprit du corps. This was not the case with Solly. At every
turn he sneered at my boyish efforts and oft times just stubbornly refused to
play along at all. He’d want to sit with my dad and watch the racing on the telly.
In fact, in time, he became my dad’s imaginary friend.
Which was just fine by Bobo and I.
