Walter Mitty may have been on to something...

I once had a friend who, basically, lived a fiction. He was the ultimate J.D. Salinger / Keith Waterhouse character, except devoid of any endearing characteristics whatsoever. I had known him since childhood but we had drifted out of touch until I met him one morning on a train. At first he seemed totally different, a reformed character, an easy-going guy, albeit a little unfortunate (he was working as a post-boy and had been since he was fifteen) but this was, of course, just a part of his condition. We slipped into a routine where we would meet on the same early train every morning and the conversation developed to a point where we were considering sharing a flat together.

Around this time things began to unravel; it turned out he was “a little nervous of estate agents” and I ended up viewing several properties alone. In fact, now that I consider, I don’t think he was present at a single viewing. It was also at this time that the frequency and complexity of his self-promoting tales increased. He was “off to Turin next week, mate” or “travelling up to Manchester, you know, just to catch the game and do a bit of shopping”. Shopping? Manchester? It’s a four hour train journey, I thought. The game? As far as I was aware Manchester United games were expensive and inaccessible affairs. Occasionally he would flash me a ticket-stub or holiday snap (sans self) and allay my growing doubts about his sanity, at least for an afternoon.

In the end I called the whole thing off. I think it was when I asked him to go for a drink in town and he told me he couldn’t because he was “in his tracky bottoms” but I was welcome at his “local”, near the estate he lived on, a couple of miles walk from the train station. There is something about keeping company with a compulsive liar that makes you feel terrible, like you’re co-operating in the lies and that, somehow, you are the sick one. I just couldn’t handle it anymore.

Why am I thinking about all this tonight? Well, I’ve just been for dinner and, on the walk home, alone under the streetlamps, hearing distant shouts and roaring engines and thinking about this week’s uninspiring lectures and deathly silent seminars, I began to wonder which one of us was wrong! Yes, my friend, the habitual fantasist, did mess me around a little bit but at what cost? He didn’t defraud me of any money or defame my character; in truth, all his lies were self-referential.

On the other hand, I am no further forward than when I knew him: I am still studying in the same town, taking trains on the same railway line, thinking the same thoughts. In the intervening time I have travelled across the whole United States, been to Italy and lived, for the best part of a year, in Ireland, but I feel no different. I want to be a writer but I am getting nowhere. My friend had a little notebook where he was forever planning a script for the BBC (rather like Adrian Mole) but he seemed happy. When he was reeling off lists of his imaginary friends, he did it with a smile.

I am already self-absorbed but perhaps it would be better to go the whole hog and actually live in a fantasy world. I'm sure, whatever I built, it would be better than Surbiton...