A week or so over ten years ago I wrote a quick little blog entry entitled ‘L, C and E’. It was about three of my favourite people and best friends: Lyn, Charlotte and Esther. Looking back over it, I still value my relationship with all three women a great, great deal. Of course, an incredible amount has happened in the decade since I wrote that entry: most prominently, my relationship with Lyn blossomed, but has now wilted. Charlie is now married and working as a teacher, but is still the exuberant, dizzyingly energetic party animal I knew at university. Esther I hear the least from, but I often think of her and her family. She has been going through some dark times of late; far darker than she rightly deserves. I would really like to pay her a visit soon. Ten years on from writing that entry, these women are still three of my favourite people, and I still think all three are absolutely incredible in their own way.

I wrote that entry on the cusp of change, a few months before I moved down to live with Lyn in London. I could never have known what wonders the following decade would bring, or what life with Lyn would teach me. I have done things over the past ten years which I could never possibly forget, and which will always rank among the highlights of my life. Yet I now find myself on the threshold of another change: one chapter again turning into another. Who knows what this new chapter may bring, but I could never have reached it without the two preceding it, or without the friendship and support of people like Lyn, Charlotte and Esther. Just as I was able to thrive at university thanks largely to Esther and Charlotte, it was through Lyn that I got to know and came to love London. Because of these three women, there is no doubt in my mind that life’s possibilities are endless.

Naturally that list of three perhaps should now be added to. For one, I think John definitely now ranks beside them. I will never forget our trip to India, and the efforts he went to there deserve my highest esteem. On our adventure there, our friendship grew so much and John was so incredible that, as with Lyn Charlie and Esther, I resolved to regard him thereafter as something akin to a sibling: Perhaps the list should now be L, C, E and J. But then, such lists force one to decide between and rank people, which is rather childish. What ultimately matters is that I have many, many great friends; and that because of them I know that, whatever the future may hold, it will be truly awesome.