Best Friends Club

This is the story of five couples, ten close friends, who all live in a mythical small village on the North East coast of England. A long-forgotten fishing village, it is now a quiet place where most of the children had grown up and left for university or work in the nearby towns and cities. There are a handful of people in their twenties who still lived in the village and used it as a beautiful base to commute from into the bigger cities and towns.

The population is mostly made up of around ninety permanent residents, with some people who use it as a kind of summer residence and leave to move to the city when the weather turns bad in the winter. There are around fifty houses and cottages throughout the village and surrounding farms. And they have become a close-knit community where people come to retire and enjoy the slower pace of life or enjoy the beautiful spring and summer before going back to civilisation for the more inclement weather.

Life is good in the village, slow, but good, and people care about each other, and look out for one another.

Our story begins...

The village of ’Burnfoot Dene’ lies between Bamburgh and Seahouses on the North East coast of Northumberland. It is little more than a hamlet really, with one main street that ran through the length of the village, with several small winding off-shoots leading up the hill and down towards the sea. There was one pub, a small coffee shop-cum-café, and a small church. There are Forty-one houses spread throughout the village and a general store which also acts as a post office in the mornings on weekdays.

The village lies less than five minutes from the sea and has miles of beautiful, unspoilt beaches that stretch all the way up to Bamburgh Castle to the north, and Seahouses to the south. It is a beautiful part of the country to live, but not if you are a young person or a child. There is very little to do in the way of entertainment, with the nearest town is over half-an-hour by car, longer by the infrequent bus service. Consequently, the average age of the inhabitants of the village is well into the forties.

The centre of the village life is the pub, ‘The Old Ship Inn’, which has been traced back to the early eighteenth century where there is evidence of there being a tavern on the site of the present-day pub.

It was in the pub where many of the inhabitants of the village met up at least once a week to catch up on village gossip, and life in general. Many groups of friends had their regular places where they’d sit in the pub, and although there was no ‘reserving’ of seats, the same people would gather, in the same seat, on the same nights, every week.

It was on such a night, a Wednesday that once such group congregated to enjoy a few drinks, some traditional ‘pub-grub’, and maybe a game of darts, or pool. One thing that the pub didn’t have was a juke-box. That was by popular demand of the locals. The owner would often play background music, but at a level where everyone could have a conversation without having to raise their voices. The only place where it was reasonably loud was in the games room, but even there, the music was often turned down if the guys just wanted to get away from the women and talk.

It was the start of winter, the nights were dark and cold early and the friends started to arrive. First to turn up were Alex and Laura Scott, they were in their early forties and had been married for over twenty years. They had two children, both of who worked in Newcastle, which was around fifty miles away. Sophie was twenty-two and their son David who was twenty.

Their kids, like most of the kids in the village, had left as soon as they were old enough to go to university, or start work. Sophie had gone to Durham University and gained a ‘first’ in Architecture and was working in Newcastle towards becoming chartered. David was at Newcastle University studying Physics. Alex owned a transport company that was based near to Newcastle, he only worked part-time these days.

Next to arrive were Geoff and Mandy, Both were in their mid-forties, and had also been married over twenty years. They had two children. Their daughter Lisa was twenty-four and married, and lived in the south of England with her husband. Their son Ian was at university and studying engineering, like his father Geoff, who worked as an engineer down the coast in Ashington.

Over the next hour, the others arrived. First were David and Gina. David was a Solicitor based in Newcastle. Originally from Birmingham, and of West-Indian heritage, he had moved up north when he joined a law firm next to Newcastle Crown Court and they had settled in the village. They have one daughter, Lisa, who had started university a few months earlier and had followed her father and had gained a place at Oxford to study law.

The oldest of the group, Ken and Jaq, Ken was forty-nine and Jaq had just turned fifty were possible the fittest. Ken owned a fitness gym in Newcastle and was extremely fit and healthy for his age, and could put most of the guys in the group to shame, with perhaps the exception of David, who was also very fit, and very tall. Ken and Jaq had one daughter, Emily, who was twenty-seven and had provided them with two grand-children.

The last of the group was Nick and Beverley. These were the quietest of the group, but certainly not boring. Nick was a software engineer, and Bev was a part-time physics lecturer at the University of Newcastle. They were the group ‘nerds’. They took their nickname well, it wasn’t meant to be derogatory in any way, it was just that they were both so much more intelligent than the rest of the group. With everyone present, the drinks began to flow and the group slowly split into its natural shape. The women all sat together and the guys slowly migrated into the pool room as the pub began to fill up.

It was the focus of the village and most residents showed up at least once a week to catch up on gossip and news. The guys enjoyed a few games of darts, and pool as their wives caught each other up on ‘who was seen with whom’ and shared news of their children and how they were all doing at university or work.

It wasn’t a huge pub, and the atmosphere was nice and cosy, helped immensely by the roaring log-fire that burned in the middle of the back wall of the main bar area. Everyone enjoyed a lovely evening, and after they’d had their fun on the pool table, the guys re-joined their wives and it turned into a typically fun mid-week night-out.

Before they all left they decided that due to the predicted bad weather front that was expected to blow in on Saturday, they would all meet up at Alex and Laura’s place for ‘drinks-evening.’