Childhood friends really are the best, aren’t they? They’re the ones who knew you before life got complicated — before careers, mortgages, responsibilities, and the slow creep of adulthood started rearranging priorities. They knew you when your biggest worry was homework, your greatest joy was a sunny day, and your most pressing drama was who fancied whom this week.
We’ve known each other since primary school. We played camogie together, and somehow ended up as runners-up in the All-Ireland set dancing competition — an achievement that still makes us proud. We were there for each other through teenage heartbreaks too, offering sympathy, outrage, and occasionally very questionable advice when some fecker inevitably let one of us down.
And now? Decades later, we’re still here.
Life has taken us in different directions — different countries even — but whenever we find ourselves in the same place at the same time, we make it happen. Dinner is arranged. Drinks are ordered. The laughter starts before the starters even arrive. It’s like no time has passed at all.
Or so we like to think.
This week, we managed one of those long-overdue reunions. About an hour into the conversation — somewhere between the starter and the dessert— I was suddenly struck by a very sobering realisation.
“Women,” I announced dramatically. “Do you realise that for the past hour we have been talking about retirement… pension plans… and hip replacements?”
There was a brief silence.
And then absolute howling laughter.
Because it was true.
It only feels like yesterday we were gossiping about who was shifting who off the hurling team, dissecting teenage romances with forensic intensity, convinced that every emotion was the biggest emotion that had ever existed in the history of humanity. Now we’re comparing notes on joint pain and financial planning.
What has happened to us?
Time. That’s what has happened.
Time — that strange, slippery thing that moves so slowly when you’re young and accelerates without warning when you’re older. The years that once felt endless now seem to collapse into each other. School feels recent. Our twenties feel like last week. Yet somehow, we’re talking about pensions.
But here’s the thing that really hit me as I sat there watching my friends laugh until they cried: while time has changed the details of our conversations, it hasn’t changed the foundation underneath them.
We’re still the same people.
We still tease each other mercilessly. We still share the same shorthand language that only decades of friendship can create. We still show up for each other — whether that’s for heartbreak at 17 or life stress at 57. The topics evolve, but the connection doesn’t.
If anything, it deepens.
There’s something profoundly comforting about friendships that have survived entire lifetimes of change. We’ve seen each other at our most awkward, our most confident, our most heartbroken, and our most triumphant. We’ve watched each other grow into adults — sometimes gracefully, sometimes kicking and screaming — and yet the bond remains intact.
Maybe that’s the real magic of childhood friends.
They carry pieces of your history that nobody else can fully understand. They remind you who you were before the world told you who you should be. And when you’re with them, no matter how many decades have passed, you can still access that younger version of yourself — the one who believed life was wide open and full of possibility.
So yes, we may be discussing retirement funds now instead of teenage crushes. We may compare aches and pains rather than exam results. We may need reading glasses to see the menu.
But the laughter? Still the same.
The loyalty? Still the same.
The craic? Absolutely still the same.
And if we’re lucky, we’ll still be sitting together years from now — possibly in a nursing home, possibly arguing over whose turn it is to make the tea — still laughing about life, still supporting each other, still friends.
Here’s to childhood friends.
And here’s to still having the craic, no matter how old we get.
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