As Mark pointed out to me, it’s prob­a­bly rather strange to pick for your Best Man some­one who you’ve seen only three times in as many years. But although some small part of my brain insists that some time has passed since I left uni­ver­sity, it’s eas­ily over­ruled by the rest.

I mean, grad­u­a­tion was about four weeks ago, right? And Joseph’s about three weeks old. Wait, what? Three years? Does not compute.

In that time I’ve made some friends, it’s true — and don’t get me wrong, they are good friends — but see­ing some­one once a week, or once a month, just doesn’t reg­is­ter in my brain as strongly as do those I lived with, even though the time I lived with them was long ago.

To my shame I’ve spo­ken to those Uni­ver­sity friends less and less as time has gone on. The major­ity I don’t even reg­u­larly IM any­more — we’ve become Twit­ter friends, Face­book friends, peo­ple who com­ment on each oth­ers’ blogs. I feel a strange kind of buzz talk­ing to any of them, even just over IM, but yet I barely do it. I bash out a 140-character reply to some tweet of theirs, and my need for con­tact with my best friends is sated for another few hours. Nor­mally I don’t feel too guilty about that, but some­times it hits me that I’ve been doing that for four long years, and then, as now, I realise just how bad that is.

So yes, it’s really bloody strange that what I think of as my best friends, and my Best Man-to-be among them, are really those friends that I talk to the least of all. But hav­ing iso­lated the cause of that as my own reluc­tance to start instant mes­sen­ger chats, at least I have some­thing I can work on.