I first met my friend Raghav when I went to junior school. We sat next to each other in class, I don’t think we chose to do that particularly, we probably just sat where we were told to on our first day of the school year, but we got on straight away and were firm friends from the age of about 8 until we left school to go to senior school, aged about eleven. We happened to go to different schools at that point, and sadly our friendship drifted apart, when we were younger though, we were inseparable.

Raghav and I had similar interests. We liked being outside, we liked animals (although neither of us could visit a forest together to see animals in their natural habitat), we enjoyed doing craft type activities (although he was really talented creating amazing pictures and artwork, whilst I just got stuck at the stage of colouring in!) My main memory is of us heading off together on our bikes for hours and hours at a time. He lived quite near to a large park, so I used to cycle to his house, and then we’d go to the park together with a picnic lunch and spend all day playing games together. I’m embarrassed now to think how we galloped around pretending to be animals or whatever the game of the day was, but it was fun at the time. We used to try hula hooping and dribbling a tennis ball too, seeing who could hold up a hoop for the longest or dribble without stopping by tapping the ball onto the ground with our palms. I have a feeling he was more accomplished than me at both these activities too. Sometimes we would try to find and catch butterflies (we always let them go) or we would just laze in the sun until it was time to go home. It was very different then. There were no mobile phones, and people were much more relaxed about letting their children go off and play all day, I’m not sure if you could still do that. Still, we were very happy and used to come back to his house tired and if we were lucky her mum would give us lemonade to drink and cookies along with tea. Happy memories indeed!

In terms of why we liked each other, well we just did! We enjoyed doing the same things, we could talk about anything to each other – complaining about schoolwork or annoying parents and other such troublesome worries of the time. Neither of us had a pet though we were fond of animals and always wanted see animals in their natural habitat. It probably helped that we lived quite close to each other and both had bikes too. We also both had a vivid imagination, it meant we could have remarkable adventures together pretending to inhabit whole new worlds that we had invented for ourselves.

We kept in touch for a while, but both eventually moved on. I think he went on to become an artist of some renown, which was not surprising given his early talent for art. Whatever he does and wherever he ended up I hope he is happy and successful too. I will always remember him as a brilliant companion from when I was young, I wonder if he remembers me too.