When I was in the Royal Navy, I served on HMS Boxer, and one of the best runs ashore I had then was when we visited Hong Kong. My mate Duffs and I went ashore, to put it politely, made the most of it. We made Mick Jagger, Black Sabbath and them Gallagher brothers look like pansies.
But however much of a state we got ourselves into, we always found our way back to the ship. We couldn't always tell you which street we were on, or in some cases which country, but we could find the lights on the ships mast. We'd stumble along, look up, spot the lights at the top of it, and steer for them, singing and dancing our way through Hong Kong, honed in on those lights the whole way. The Navy (you the taxpayers) spent good money teaching us navigation. It turns out the most reliable method was two drunken lads and two lights on top of a floating can.
I can still picture it. Two lads, one from Washington and one from Wrexham both miles from home, both completely sure of themselves, because with the two of us together and those lights in the distance, we were never really lost.
What I didn't understand back then was that I wasn't only steering by the mast lights. I was steering by my mate Duffs as well. It took losing him to see it.
The people we measure ourselves by
Most of us have a handful of people we steer by. We don't choose them in any deliberate way. But over the years we start measuring ourselves against them. What would he make of this? Would she laugh at that? Am I doing alright, by their standards? They become fixed points in our subjective world, and without noticing, we work out where we are in life by where we stand in relation to them.
The strange thing is how rarely we see it. A reference point is something you look past, not at. You tend to notice it only when it moves, or when it's gone.
I've lost more of my fixed points than I'd like. My dad, My mate the mad para Chris and Duffs to name just a few. Each time, it wasn't only sadness. It was something harder to name, like looking up for the lights and finding nothing there. Not knowing quite where I stood anymore or which way I needed to go.
A backstreet pub in plymouth
Me and Duffs had our local in Plymouth. It wasn't a sailors' pub. Hardly any other sailors went there, which was half the appeal. Most of the regulars were civilians, and they took a bit of convincing that two matelots weren't trouble, but we got to know them all and it became somewhere we felt at home. A safe place and a fun place, away from the ship.
Navy life is always moving. New ships, new crews, new places. The Navy has a talent for sending your best mate to the other side of the world the minute you've got used to him. After Boxer, Duffs and I were drafted to different ships, and that could easily have been the end of it, the way it is for so many friendships in the forces.
But the pub didn't move. Pubs rarely do. Whatever ship we were on, it was still ours. When everything else was changing, it was the one place that stayed put. Our constant. Another fixed point to steer by.
I think that's why it matters so much to me now. That pub held the friendship when the Navy kept pulling us apart.
The things we never said
Duffs and I never once sat down and talked about what we meant to each other. God forbid. Two sailors having a heart to heart would have caused a riot in the bar. It was built in the doing instead: the runs ashore, the wild nights, the shared life of being on board a warship and sharing a few pints in Plymouth, both miles away from home.
I don't wish I'd said more. I just wish I'd known then what I know now. It was a different world. Emotions weren't just something you didn't talk about. If you did talk about them, you got ripped apart for it. I sometimes think about what I'd say to him now, but I suspect the old me would kick straight back in and I'd stand there, completely silent like a speechless 18 yr old in Amsterdam. Some habits run deeper than any counselling degree.
I left the Navy in 2004. Duffs stayed in. We lost touch, the way people do. He got on with his life and I got on with mine. Honestly, leaving was probably the best thing I ever did. That lifestyle wasn't doing me any favours, and if I'd stayed, I'd probably be dead myself by now.
About thirteen years ago, I found out Duffs had died. It wasn't the Navy that told me. It was one of the civilians from our pub in Plymouth, who'd managed to reach me. By then it was too late. I'd missed the funeral, and my chance to say goodbye.
I think about that a lot. The pub that held our friendship when the Navy kept pulling us apart was the same place that found me at the end. Even then, it was still our fixed point.
When I think of him now, it isn't anything either of us said that I go back to. It's the lights on the mast. It's the pub. It's the two of us, together, somewhere, usually up to no good and surrounded by chaos.
I think that's true for a lot of people. The closeness lives in the shared experience: the match, the walk, the job, the long drives, the same table on a Friday night. You might never have told someone how much they mattered. You just kept turning up together, and over time that shared experience sets like concrete.
It's why certain places and activities can carry so much weight. They aren't just things we did. They're where the relationship actually was. And places can become reference points in their own right, just as people can.
Why we need them
There's a thread in existential thinking I come back to again and again. The psychiatrist Irvin Yalom described four things every one of us has to face sooner or later: that we will die, that we are responsible for our own lives, that in some deep way we are alone, and that life doesn't come with a meaning handed to us. Cheery stuff, yeah I know but stay with me.
That last one matters most here. If meaning isn't given, it has to be made. And one of the main ways we make meaning is through connection. Other people give our lives shape. They give the things we do a reason. They help us feel less alone with the big questions, even if the closest we ever get to discussing them is a nod over a pint.
I sometimes hear connection talked about as though needing people is a sign that something went wrong earlier in life. Our history can shape how tightly we hold on, that's true. But building a life out of connections isn't a symptom. It's what people do. It's how we create a world we can live in. It's how two lads with a skinful find their way home through a strange city.
If meaning isn't given, it has to be made. And one of the main ways we make it is through connection.
The ones I steer by now
It would be wrong to write all this and leave it on the people I've lost, because I've still got fixed points, and I know exactly who they are.
Lyndsay and my boy come first. That goes without saying, so I'm saying it anyway. Then my mam, who's thankfully still with us, and my sister and her fella John who's my brother from anotha mother.
Then there's Danny. He's a fair bit younger than me, and I like to tell him the only reason I'm friends with him is that friends my own age keep dying. He laughs. I laugh. It's the kind of joke you can only make with someone who knows it's not entirely a joke. Our families go on holiday together, we go to the football together, and he's helped me a lot in building my business, from networking to just being someone to think things through with.
And there's Chrisso, my mad Australian mate, who came over about seventeen years ago to marry Lyndsay's best friend and never went home. Our kids are the same age and have grown up together, going on camping trips and all sorts of other daft adventures. When my dad died, Chrisso was there. His ridiculous sense of humour and his whole approach of just getting on and living life were a big part of how I got through it.
None of them would describe themselves as anyone's reference point. They'd take the p*^^ out of me for even saying it, which is probably why I've never said it to their faces. So I'm putting it here instead, where they can't interrupt.
The ones you steer by
So here's something worth sitting with, whatever is going on for you at the moment. Who are your fixed points? Who do you quietly measure yourself against? Where are your places, the ones that stay put when everything else moves or becomes chaotic? And what is it you share with those people, the thing that holds the connection together?
You don't have to do anything with the answers. Noticing them can be enough. But if your fixed points are still here, it might be worth telling one of them that they matter, in whatever way works for the two of you. Even if it's a joke about them being the only mate you've got left who isn't dead.
Often we only realise how much someone held for us when we lose them. In the next piece, I want to look at exactly that: what happens when one of our reference points goes, and why the world can feel so strange afterwards.
