The Loss of an Imaginary Friend

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.