Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play by Danny Wallace

for the week… and yet somehow it seemed Jimmy Savile
     was far happier to grant the wishes of children who wanted to know how a
tire factory
worked than to pile the A-Team into a chopper and send them 40,000 miles across the world. I couldn’t understand it. Meeting
     the A-Team was
much
better television than a visit to a
tire
factory. It was almost like
Jim’ll Fix It
was cheap TV.
    “The Wimpy’s still there,” I said, and Anil nodded, as amazed as I was.
    “Shall we go see your old house?”
    So we drove down Forest Road, and up towards Spinney Hill Drive—the road I’d lived on and cycled down for so many years. We
     parked outside the house and stared at it. It looked a lot smaller than it used to. They’d put up a basketball net, and a
     new window in the roof, but they weren’t fooling anyone—the house had shrunk. They had a car painted one of those weird colors—the
     kind of sparkly aquamarine you occasionally see and assume must have been bought after a short-sighted man had purchased an
     issue of
AutoTrader
with printing problems.
    But it was weird that someone else was living there now. Sleeping in my room. Hanging out in my garden. Eating in my kitchen.
    “What was that room, again?” said Anil, pointing at the one closest to us.
    “That was my dad’s study,” I said. “And where the computer was.”
    My dad’s an academic. A professor of German studies. Our move from Dundee to Loughborough had been from university to university.
     Our next moves would be, too.
    “I never went in your dad’s study.”
    “You
must’ve!
Surely! You must’ve played Way of the Exploding Fist on the computer in there.”
    He shook his head, sadly.
    “Nope.”
    Crikey. He’d never played Way of the Exploding Fist. He’d never played Jet Set Willy. I was beginning to identify serious
     holes in Anil’s youth.
    The house backed onto university grounds, and growing up, me and my friends had always sneaked on in order to get chased by
     the security guards. It was fun. We were tiny kids—they were fat old men in dirty blue vans. In our heads, we were doing the
     most daring thing imaginable, stepping out into enemy territory. We’d hide behind trees, or in bushes, to try and avoid the
     all-seeing eyes of the bad guys, who were right up there with the KGB and CIA in terms of or ga ni za tion and power. And
     when we
were
seen, when those dusty vans awkwardly mounted the curb to give chase across a field, their exhaust pipes rattling and trailing
     the ground, there was nothing more exhilarating than the collective cry of “PEG IT!” and the mad rush home.
    Suddenly, it was all very tempting again.
    “Why don’t we sneak onto the university?” I said. “We might get chased!”
    “We’re nearly thirty, Dan. We’re older than the students. The guards will probably think we’re
lecturers.
”
    The idea instantly lost some of its appeal. Christ. We were
old.
We were
too old
to look suspicious. How
depressing
to look so
un-suspicious.
What had happened to our youthful menace?
    And then we noticed a curtain twitch and a middle-aged lady staring back at us with what looked like real concern in her eyes.
    I waved, as if to say “Hi! I used to live here!,” but then realized we were essentially two grown men parked outside her house
     staring at her property. And now I was waving at her, as if to say “Hi! Me and my Asian friend are going to rob you!”
    “PEG IT!” I shouted, and we did.
    Anil lived down by the little row of shops, just next to a small and tatty green we used to play football on. Everything looked
     exactly the same. A little greener, with better-tended gardens, but just the same. The newsagent still had the same name above
     it—A. MISTRY. I had always hoped that A. MISTRY had solved crimes in his spare time, and that running a small newsagent’s
     was his eccentric passion, like Inspector Morse and classical music, but it turned out that he was just a newsagent. Life
     is full of