I Love Humanity. It's People I Struggle With.

I think most of us look in the mirror and consider ourselves relatively normal. Why wouldn't we? We've spent our entire lives getting used to the person staring back at us, so naturally we assume they're a fairly reasonable example of what a human being should look like.

There I am, 45 years old, looking back at myself with the quiet confidence of a man who still believes he could become a dot-com millionaire with one of his weird-arse business ideas. I'll get that promotion, write a bestselling book and eventually figure out what I'm supposed to be doing with my life.

And obviously, there's still a chance of playing Champions League football. I'm only 45, I've got a perfectly decent pair of boots and, if Liverpool ever find themselves desperately short of players, I could probably make myself available.

I sometimes wonder how many other people have equally ridiculous conversations with themselves. I suspect quite a few, although most probably have the sense to keep them private.

One thing I've noticed since I started writing is how much I genuinely love humanity, which is quite a strange admission for somebody who's spent most of his adult life telling people he's not really a people person.

The more I read and learn about the world, the more fascinated I become by what people are capable of. I love discovering stories about somebody who overcame seemingly impossible circumstances or had an idea everyone else thought was ridiculous and went on to change the world.

I'm particularly fascinated by great thinkers, artists, musicians and writers who seem capable of understanding things that haven't even occurred to the rest of us.

I love how somebody can sit down with a blank piece of paper, write a piece of music and, fifty years later, people who've never met them can still be moved to tears by it. Or how thousands of people can fill a football stadium and become completely emotionally invested in watching a handful of other people being exceptionally good at something.

I've seen grown men cry because a footballer was leaving their club. I've watched rooms full of hairy-arsed blokes, who look like they could pull a tree out of the ground, become genuinely emotional because somebody delivered a message that meant something to them.

Yet every now and then I'll see something online suggesting men are only loved unconditionally by their dogs or their children.

I think that's bollocks.

One of my favourite memories is going to see Paul McCartney live with my dad. We both loved his music, and the reason my own lad is called James is partly because of him. Paul McCartney's first name is actually James, something quite a few people don't realise.

There we were, two lads from Liverpool, completely immersed in watching another lad who'd grown up in the same part of the world. He was standing on stage performing songs he'd written decades earlier, while thousands of people who he'd never met hung on every note.

One of the songs we both loved was Blackbird, which, despite the title, isn't really about a bird at all. McCartney has explained how it was inspired by the American civil rights movement, particularly the struggles of Black women.

I'd learned to play it on the guitar, and I remember my dad getting so excited that he filmed me playing it and sent the video to his mates.

I don't think he ever showed quite that much enthusiasm for anything else I did on the guitar.

It still makes me smile to think about it. A song written by somebody we'd never met had become part of a memory between me and my dad, and now, whenever I hear it, I remember him sitting there filming me.

That's what I find remarkable about people. We can create something without ever knowing where it might end up or what it might mean to somebody else.

We form attachments to music, places, football clubs and people we've never met. We can spend years admiring somebody who doesn't know we exist, yet be completely indifferent to the person sitting three feet away from us.

And somehow, we all manage to experience the world in completely different ways while generally assuming our own perspective is the most sensible.

My dad had another saying when I was growing up.

"The problem with football is the other team want to win as well."

He'd usually say it after Liverpool had suffered a bad result, particularly when I was complaining that we should have beaten somebody.

It always made me laugh because it was such an obvious thing to say. Of course the other team wanted to win. Why else would they bother turning up?

But that was the beauty of how he looked at things. He could take something I was getting worked up about and, without making a great speech, remind me that there was another side to it.

I've thought about that saying quite a lot as I've got older.

We all have our own ambitions, opinions and ideas about how life should work, and we tend to make plans assuming that other people will behave in a way that makes those plans possible.

Unfortunately, they've got plans of their own.

I often work from the gym when I need a bit of quiet time. It's quite a posh gym, so when I say I sit in the club room, I don't mean a room with sawdust on the floor and a bloke selling protein shakes out of a bucket.

It's actually a lovely place to sit with my laptop, have a coffee and watch people going about their day.

There are people I see almost every morning. I recognise their faces, know roughly what time they'll appear and could probably tell you where they usually sit. Yet I couldn't tell you their names, what they do for a living or what matters most to them.

My lad would probably describe them as non-player characters, the people who exist in the background of a computer game while you're busy getting on with your own adventure.

The funny thing is, every single one of those people is the main character in their own story.

They've got families, friendships, worries, ambitions and memories that mean the world to them. Some will have achieved things they're enormously proud of, while others might be quietly dealing with something they wouldn't wish on anybody.

To me, they're just the bloke who always sits near the window or the woman who seems to spend an unreasonable amount of time talking on her phone.

To somebody else, they might be the most important person in the world.

And every now and then, one of those background characters wanders into your life and somehow becomes part of it.

I've never quite understood how friendship works.

You can spend hours around somebody and know that, while they're probably perfectly nice, you're never going to be particularly close. Then you'll meet somebody else and within a week you're behaving as though you've known each other since primary school.

There's no formal process or conversation about what happens next. You just reach a point where an unspoken agreement seems to have been made that you can take the piss out of each other, behave like complete idiots and, when something genuinely matters, be there.

I've been lucky enough to experience that feeling a few times, often with people I would never have imagined becoming friends with.

When I was about 21, I played for a football team where the togetherness was unlike anything I'd experienced before.

We weren't a particularly sophisticated group of lads, and we'd regularly argue over results or fall out during training, but there was something about that team that just worked. We enjoyed being around each other so much that we'd turn up ridiculously early for matches and training because nobody wanted to miss anything.

I sometimes wonder whether that's where my obsession with being early started.

One year, we arranged a pre-season friendly against a team in Dublin.

We travelled across from Liverpool on the SeaCat, and the atmosphere on board was something you'd normally associate with children on Christmas morning. Everyone was excited, although I suspect the prospect of spending the evening drinking in Dublin had rather more to do with it than the football.

The team we were playing were actually very good. They had a number of international players in their squad, so it wasn't going to be an easy afternoon.

For most of the match, we gave a decent account of ourselves. It was competitive, we'd worked hard and there wasn't much between the sides.

Then, with about fifteen minutes left, something happened to us collectively.

I think we'd all decided we'd done enough football for one day.

Our minds had already wandered into Temple Bar, and within the final five or ten minutes we'd conceded three goals. The opposition were still very much interested in winning the match, while we were mentally ordering our first pint.

We got changed with remarkable efficiency and headed straight into Dublin.

I can't remember every detail of that night, but I remember laughing so much my stomach hurt. At one point, we witnessed some enormous bloke knock another bloke out in the street. It had absolutely nothing to do with us, but for some reason we became convinced we were next and ended up running down the road as though we were being chased by a wild animal.

The following morning was like something out of The Hangover.

One of the lads was missing, although we eventually found him asleep in a bush outside the hotel. Three others had somehow ended up sharing the same bed, fully clothed, while another had woken up on the opposite side of Dublin and needed a taxi to get back.

I couldn't tell you the final score of that football match if my life depended on it, but I can still picture those lads and remember how much I enjoyed being around them.

Of course, being surrounded by people you genuinely enjoy spending time with isn't always without its risks.

Particularly when you're young, drunk and your friends have the collective maturity of a packet of crayons.

We had an unwritten rule when I was younger that if you fell asleep at somebody's house after a night out, your eyebrows were fair game.

Looking back, it was a pretty barbaric arrangement, but at the time it was treated as a perfectly reasonable consequence of failing to stay awake.

I remember waking up one morning with a horrific hangover and immediately reaching up to check my face. Both eyebrows were still there, thank fuck, although I lay there for a moment trying to work out where I was and what had happened the night before, quietly muttering that if anybody had touched them they were dead.

One of my mates had been considerably more cautious. Knowing the rules, he'd gone upstairs, crawled underneath a bunk bed and carefully arranged pillows in front of himself to avoid being discovered.

Unfortunately, he'd chosen to hide in the room next to the bathroom, which was also where the razors were kept.

Despite his elaborate security arrangements, the midnight eyebrow prowler eventually found him.

He woke up without eyebrows and was absolutely fucking furious.

Another lad discovered that his clothes and brand-new Rockport shoes had disappeared during the night. After searching the house, he eventually found them in the freezer, with his clothes frozen solid and two eggs cracked into his shoes for good measure.

He was understandably less amused than the rest of us.

Unable to get dressed, he wrapped himself in a towel and managed to persuade somebody to give him a lift home. For reasons that remain unclear, he was dropped off near the local shops, where he then had to run around trying to find somebody who would let him into one of the flats.

Someone working in the shops later phoned another mate to explain that the staff had gathered around the CCTV to watch a half-naked man in a towel running from door to door.

You'd think an experience like that might encourage somebody to reconsider their friendship circle, but apparently he was quite happy to continue taking his chances.

A few weeks later, we went out for New Year's Eve.

We'd booked into local bed and breakfasts, as we often did, and by the end of the night we'd inevitably become separated.

A few of us were walking back when we noticed a naked man jogging towards us.

There was no attempt to hide himself or look embarrassed. He was running along the road quite casually, as though he'd simply decided to get a few miles in before breakfast.

As he got closer, we realised it was the same lad who'd previously had his clothes and Rockports frozen.

He jogged straight past us like Will Ferrell in Old School, without a care in the world.

We found out the next morning that the group staying in his B&B had been making quite a bit of noise, and the landlord had knocked on the bedroom door to ask them to keep it down.

One of the lads had answered with "I Love Westlife" written across his forehead and, with an apparently straight face, politely explained that they'd all been asleep.

I would have loved to have seen the landlord's expression.

I still laugh thinking about those nights, not because we were doing anything particularly remarkable, but because of the people involved. We could turn an ordinary evening into something we'd still be talking about twenty-five years later.

I had another mate when I was younger who was one of my closest friends.

He still is my mate, although I haven't seen or spoken to him properly in years. We were very different in some ways, but we got on brilliantly, largely because we seemed to share the same completely ridiculous sense of humour.

He had a massive nose and I had ginger hair, which meant neither of us ever struggled to find something insulting to say to the other.

We could spend an entire night together exchanging one-liners without ever having what most people would consider a proper conversation. Other people would sometimes look at us as though we genuinely hated each other, but we'd wake up the following morning and agree we'd had a brilliant night.

At one point, he moved down south and asked if I'd look after his snake for a couple of weeks.

Being a good mate, I agreed.

Twenty years later, I still had the fucking snake.

Twenty years.

I spent two decades with an entire compartment in my freezer dedicated to dead mice, which I then had the absolute pleasure of defrosting whenever the snake needed feeding.

I hated every second of it.

Every time I opened that freezer drawer, I was reminded that I'd agreed to a favour that should have ended a fortnight after it started.

I've never agreed to look after anybody's pet since, and I don't intend to start now.

I saw him a few years ago at his stepdad's funeral, after we'd gone quite a long time without seeing each other.

"Alright, big nose."

"Fucking hell, you're going grey. Have you still got the snake?"

At that point, I did.

I still had the fucking snake.

And just like that, we were back where we'd left off.

We didn't need to spend half an hour awkwardly catching up or trying to work out whether we'd changed. We simply slipped back into the same ridiculous friendship we'd always had.

I've experienced something similar with people I've worked alongside.

There have been times when I've found myself part of a team where everyone just clicked. People had different personalities, different opinions and completely different ways of approaching things, but there was a shared understanding that made working together enjoyable.

We could disagree, challenge each other and occasionally drive each other mad, yet still look forward to spending time together.

I think that's a feeling most of us would love to have more often. Not necessarily being happy all the time, because nobody is, but feeling content with the people around you and knowing that you don't have to constantly explain yourself.

It's funny how much of our lives we spend searching for that feeling, and how easily we can overlook it when we've actually got it.

I had a call recently from someone who used to work for me. We still keep in touch, and I like that she feels comfortable enough to contact me when things aren't going particularly well.

She's having a difficult time at the moment, both at work and in life generally, and every now and then I'll receive a message that simply says something along the lines of, "They're all dickheads."

That's our version of the Bat-Signal.

I'll give her a call, she'll tell me what's going on and we'll usually spend some time trying to make sense of whatever has happened. Sometimes I'll agree with her, sometimes I'll challenge her, and occasionally I'll remind her that the world is full of knobheads and there's no requirement to become best mates with every single one of them.

I like that she trusts me enough to do that. There's something reassuring about knowing somebody can pick up the phone and say they're struggling without having to pretend everything is fine.

It isn't the sort of thing that makes headlines, but I think it's one of the nicest things people do for each other. We listen, we laugh, we offer a different perspective and sometimes we just let somebody get something off their chest.

I've written before about how friendships change as we grow older, how people drift apart and how difficult it can sometimes be to maintain the connections we once took for granted.

But I don't want this to be another story about losing touch with people.

I'd rather celebrate the ones who have made being alive such an enjoyable experience, including those who occasionally made me question whether I was associating with the right sort of people at all.

I've spent years describing myself as someone who isn't really a people person, although the more I think about that, the less convinced I am it's true.

I think I'm a people person when I'm around my people.

There are people I've spent time with who are perfectly decent human beings, but we simply have nothing in common. I remember one lad who would regularly ask me whether I thought he was boring.

Naturally, I'd reassure him that I didn't.

The unfortunate truth was that I found him boring as fuck.

He wasn't doing anything wrong, and I'm sure there were plenty of people who found him fascinating. We just had completely different interests, values and ways of looking at the world.

I suspect he probably found me equally exhausting, although he was polite enough not to say so.

And that's perfectly fine.

We're not all supposed to be best mates. You can respect somebody, appreciate that they're a decent person and still have absolutely no desire to spend your Saturday afternoon in their company.

Somewhere out there, that lad probably has a group of friends who think he's the funniest and most interesting person they've ever met.

Good for him.

He's found his people, just as I've found some of mine.

We're all wandering around trying to make something of our lives, often without the faintest idea what we're doing. Some people want successful careers, some want to raise happy children, some dream of changing the world and others would be perfectly content if everyone left them alone for half an hour.

We all have our own ambitions and our own understanding of what a good life looks like, and inevitably those things sometimes clash.

The bloke who gets on your nerves at work might be somebody else's favourite person. The person you barely notice at the gym might be the reason somebody else gets out of bed in the morning. The mate you haven't seen for years might still remember a completely ordinary afternoon you spent together as one of the happiest days of his life.

None of us gets to see the whole picture, and perhaps that's why we sometimes find other people so difficult to understand.

But it's also what makes meeting the right people so wonderful.

Every friendship is two completely different lives crossing paths, often by accident, and somehow finding enough common ground to become part of each other's story.

When I think about the people who've made the biggest difference to my life, very few of the memories involve anything particularly impressive.

I remember laughing on a ferry to Dublin, running away from a bloke who looked capable of lifting a car, and discovering that one of my teammates had spent the night asleep in a bush.

I remember frozen Rockports, missing eyebrows and a naked man jogging down the street on New Year's Eve.

I remember a mate with a massive nose who left me looking after a snake for twenty bloody years, and the ease with which we could pick up a friendship after years apart.

And I think about the people who still pick up the phone, who know they can call me when life becomes difficult and who remind me that being there for somebody doesn't always require having the answers.

They're all very different people, and that's precisely why I find humanity so interesting.

We spend so much time admiring extraordinary achievements that we can forget how much ordinary people contribute to our lives without ever knowing they've done anything special.

I still love the great thinkers, the artists, the musicians and the people who overcome enormous odds to achieve something remarkable. I'll probably always be fascinated by them.

But when I look back at my own life, the moments I treasure most haven't necessarily involved anybody doing anything extraordinary.

They've involved people being themselves.

Sometimes kind, sometimes ridiculous, occasionally irritating and, every now and then, completely fucking bonkers.

Which brings me back to the bloke I see in the mirror every morning.

He's still convinced he's dead normal. He still has his ridiculous ambitions, his weird business ideas and his increasingly unlikely hopes of playing Champions League football.

He also occasionally finds people exhausting and would quite happily spend an hour sitting on his own without speaking to anybody.

But when he looks back at the things that have made his life worth remembering, an awful lot of them involve other people.

I think there's something beautiful about being allowed to be yourself. We spend so much of our lives trying to behave like the person we think we're supposed to be, particularly at work, where I've watched people go from being in a foul mood to wearing an enormous smile the moment they walk into a meeting.

I've probably done it myself more times than I'd care to admit.

It's exhausting, and perhaps that's why being around people who genuinely accept us feels so good. You don't have to perform, impress anybody or spend the evening worrying about whether you've said the right thing.

You can just be yourself, even if that means being a slightly ridiculous version of yourself.

We spend so much time trying to become somebody that we sometimes forget how enjoyable life can be when we're simply being ourselves around the right people.

My dad was right about football. The other team do want to win as well, and we're all trying to find our own way through life.

But when I think back to that trip to Dublin, I honestly couldn't tell you the score.

I remember the lads.

And if I could go back and do it all again, I'd get straight back on that ferry, play the match and spend the evening laughing with them.

I'm bigger and harder now, but I'd still run away from that bloke. He was fucking massive.

Before you disappear...

If you enjoyed this, there’s plenty more where it came from. You can subscribe at the top of the page and get new stories straight to your inbox. No spam, just a little more Wildly Gentle.