Old Friends

I heard somewhere that there are one hundred billion galaxies in the universe, each containing approximately one hundred billion stars, and astronomers estimate that most of those stars are likely to have planets. Ooh, that's rather a lot of planets, isn't it? Now, say only one percent (1%) of those planets is inhabited, that's still a lot of people out there because if those planets are anything like ours, that's about six billion people per planet. Hmm, quite a lot of people to choose from if you're looking for a partner, wouldn't you say? However, I know people who still have more Facebook Friends than even that. Some people seem to collect friends like jars full of sand.

Take my Great Aunt Dolores for instance – she's not on Facebook because she's dead, although I'm sure that doesn't stop some people, but she had friends everywhere we ever went. I remember once we were travelling in South America (we'd been panning for gold in Patagonia – another of her hair-brained schemes that came to nothing), and we'd hitched a ride with an Argentine battleship that had dropped us off in Uruguay. We'd had a whale of a time on board that ship and made many friends there too – that was despite Great Aunt Dolores fleecing almost the entire crew out of their hard-earned pesos by cheating at poker (although it was funny how she strangely managed to 'lose' me to the ship's cook in one game, and so I was forced to work in the galley as a pan-scrubber - and worse - for a whole week).

Anyway, as we waved them all off from the dockside in Montevideo ("I've spent some time on that ship before," said Dolores, "it wasn't called the General Belgrano in those days – it was called the USS Phoenix and it rescued me from a life raft in the Pacific just after Pearl Harbour. I took those Yankee suckers for all their dollars then, too. Why can't men play poker properly?") my Great Aunt informed me that an old friend of hers lived in Montevideo and that we should pay him a visit.

We took a taxi to a faded old villa on the outskirts of the city. It lay behind high, peeling walls in which were set a pair of magnificent – if slightly rusty – iron gates topped with two equally magnificent eagle heads in tarnished gold. After ringing the bell for what seemed like an eternity, we were finally let in by a decrepit old retainer wearing lederhosen and a feathered trilby. As we walked up to the house, I noticed that a decaying old open-topped Mercedes had been pushed into the empty, overgrown, lizard-infested swimming pool. I couldn't help thinking that it must be one of Dolores's more eccentric friends who lived here.

On the terrace we were greeted by a bent old man with a thinning grey fringe and a yellowing (but well-trimmed) moustache. "Mein liebster Dolfie," said my Great Aunt, "wie geht es dir?" The man turned to gesture towards a rather flushed and dumpy woman sitting in a deckchair. "Wir sind sehr gut, danke. Eva, mein liebster, Dolores ist hier, mit ihrem Neffen."

I was rather shocked by this encounter – I didn't know who these people were, but my Great Aunt had always professed a certain disdain for Germans, ever since her third husband had left her to run away with a young Weimar soldier in 1932. Anyway, they all chatted along in faultless German (which I barely understood) and we were served tea by the retainer's equally decrepit old wife. I think they were all a bit bonkers, to be honest, and I was surpised that Dolores counted them amongst her friends. For example, I noticed that the retainer and his wife both addressed the old man as 'Mein Führer' which I thought was a bit over the top, like he was Hitler or somebody! I mean, delusions of grandeur, or what??