Andy Richardson: I spy with my little eye, a long-lost pal

'Sorry I've been out of touch,' my friend wrote. I laughed. The last time I heard from him, Tony Blair was Prime Minister, Malcolm Glazer was buying Manchester United and I still had a full head of hair. England even had a team capable of winning The Ashes – and that year we did. Good lad, Freddie. Fancy another game this summer: the bowling's looking a bit thin?

My friend said he'd been off the planet, though I've learned never to take anything he says too seriously. While he's perfectly capable of having visited Saturn, Mars or Uranus, I think he was using a metaphor. I might be wrong. And maybe when we hook up he'll tell me about his trip to Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us other than our sun. He might show me pictures of little green men and hold his fingers out for a nanoo-nanoo handshake, like Robin Williams in Mork and Mindy. I'll laugh, if he does.

My friend is a remarkable man. Before securing a high-flying job in some hush-hush Government department or other, he was vetted by a team of high-ranking security officials. They came to interview me – which was odd, because I didn't want the job. Apparently, they needed to do background checks, to see what sort of a bloke he was.

"Is he a drinker?" they asked.

I thought back to the time that my friend and I had gone to his local. He'd ordered two glasses of cola and a packet of crisps. The landlord had told him to get lost and find a youth club. On another occasion we were in a pub and he told me a joke that was so bad I bit hard on the pint glass from which I was drinking. I broke my tooth and had to buy a £250 falsie, to avoid looking like Shane MacGowan.

"Not really," I answered.

"Does he drink when he's alone?" the Government security guy said. It was one of the most ironic and absurd responses I've heard.

"I wouldn't know. I'm not there when he's alone. You'd have to ask him that one."

My friend got the job, though I'm not sure my interview helped.

We'd known each other since he was born and were as thick as thieves.

During our 20s, we'd regularly swap stories about what we'd done at work. "I've just been flying with a rock star in a private jet," I'd say. "That's nothing, I was one click away from buying an oil field the other day." He'd be telling the truth. His hush-hush job gave him remarkable access to all sorts of things, including the oil wells that he very nearly bought. It's a good job he didn't have a shaky hand when he was on that job, his mortgage would never have covered the repayments.

I'm glad he's back in touch. He found me through the pages of this very newspaper, having seen my smiley face beaming out at him one Saturday morning. He thought it was somebody else. "I don't remember you smiling that much," he said. He's right. Normally, I look like Jack Dee. The photographer who took the picture told me a Paul Merton joke before clicking the lens. Boom Boom. Ahahahaha. Click.

So your fabulous Weekend supplement has rekindled our friendship. And I'm grateful for that. I just hope he doesn't tell me any more rubbish jokes. I can't afford another falsie.