Form versus function

I am in Australia visiting family and friends for the first time in fifteen months.

I've lived in the UK for over six years now and the trips home get harder not easier.  Life moves on and because there are always new nieces and nephews to meet as well as old friends to catch up with, time becomes absurdly, depressingly precious.  Anyone who's lived away from their home for any length of time can testify to the horrible push-me-pull-you feeling that overwhelms the visitor the minute he gets off the plane.

I have about three weeks on the ground in Australia and my time is divided between family and friends on a 2:1 ratio; with my parents in beautiful Far North Queensland (I'm writing this from Mission Beach), with my sisters and their families on the farm where we grew up in country New South Wales and then with seemingly innumerable old mates in Sydney.

It's seeing the mates that creates the stress.  As time is so short at every turn I'm confronted with a simple choice: -

Do I opt for the form of the relaxed rhythms and banter of the old friendship but by so doing risk not getting a real sense of my friend's life or do I sacrifice some of the familiarity that made us friends in the first place on the functional altar of information expediently exchanged?

One feels too superficial yet the other can be brutally businesslike.  Damned if I do, damned if I don't.

Yet like many of the problems in my life, there are far worse ones to have than how to get on when seeing old friends.  I'm reminded of my favourite Christopher Hitchens quotation: -

"A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends."