On friendship
This coming weekend a good friend and I celebrate our 20-year friendiversary. It’s made me reflect on the friends I have and the kind of friend I am.
I’m a terrible friend. Awful. One of the worst. It’s not because I don’t care, I do. I care deeply. I’m just shocking at making an effort or staying in touch and I don’t mean that as I’ve grown older and developed a life I’ve lost touch with people. I’ve always been this way. I’m not really sure why this is, I’m not introverted but even as a child it wasn’t me to ask if so-and-so could come out to play. I was shyer as a child, for sure, but effort with friends has never been in my toolkit - just ask my family with whom I’m equally terrible at staying in touch.
My lack of effort has cost me friends too, at least I think that was the reason – I never made the effort to find out.
When I do see my friends, I’m not the easiest either. I’m demanding and opinionated. Many of my largest friendship group like real ale. I’m not even sure what it is. Are there lots of fake ales out there, masquerading as ale? When does an ale become a beer and vice versa? Is there a committee of bearded men in Lord of the Rings t-shirts declaring when a beer achieves real ale status? All I know is I don’t like it. I’m not talking about mass market Greene King fare, that even I can quaff if the occasion demands. I mean the really dank stuff that smells like something between a Parisian street-toilet and heavily used dishwater and, worse still, the places that typically specialise in serving it have an aroma closer to the former and feel like they haven’t seen enough of the latter. Yet many of my friends enjoy it and want to go to places that sell it. So you would think I, out of the goodness of my heart, would tag along stoically and simply please myself with the fact I’m fortunate to be in their company as they sup a pint of imaginatively named delights (I never really remember any of the names but my guess is it’s usually something like skull-crusher or headbanger, if it’s at the strong end, or amber dusk if it’s something more sophisticated). But I’m not stoic. I moan like hell. Then I order a gin and tonic, of course they’ve only Beefeater so I moan about that too and the fact it came in a tumbler, and move on to wine, after demanding to see a wine list, and being pointed at a chalkboard that says house red and house white. At some point during the evening, I usually get my way, and we move on to a bar that sells good wine and mixes a decent negroni (if it’s that terrible watery premixed stuff that’s now fashionable in low effort establishments, cue another tantrum). This is possibly the best example of when I’m hardest to be around. But my friends are better people than me and they persevere. Fortunately, they also like wine and decent cocktails too.
At some point during the evening, I usually get my way, and we move on to a bar that sells good wine and mixes a decent negroni.
The other example of when I’m at my worst is when it gets political. Now, my friends are very respectful and get that I can at once be a functioning member of the human race and a Tory. But enter friends of friends or, even more difficult, new boyfriends or girlfriends. These newcomers don’t know my good points, they’re unaware of how fun I am to be around as I moan about the places we drink and the drinks we’re drinking. As a result, they indulge more readily in a game of poke the Tory. I behave for all of five minutes before biting and giving them the greatest hits - taxation, Europe, Israel, the NHS. Full Tory fire and brimstone. Sometimes, in fact quite often, it’s not my nuanced view but I serve it up – it’s what they wanted, after all. If these new friends or significant others hang around, then the next months of my life are dominated by making up for this and convincing them that us Tories are people too. There’s only been one where I’ve failed and although it didn’t cost me the friendship, things haven’t been the same since. There’s a reticence there on my part and a scepticism on his.
My lack of effort has cost me friends too, at least I think that was the reason – I never made the effort to find out, but two of my closest friends of twenty plus years ago disappeared and removed me as friend on Facebook (the final step in friend cancellation for the pre-Tik Tokers). It was either my lack of effort or the fact that in 2005 I became much more politically active and that pulled the plug. I still think about them a lot, and miss them to this day, but sometimes, perhaps, friendships just end.
Those friends that I haven’t lost on the battlefield of life never cease to amaze me. We all look up to our friends. We think that, somehow, they have it totally together while we in our thirties, or now forties, are still figuring out how to be an adult. Like each of us, they will have their hidden darkness, but it doesn’t show. To me each of them is a superhero, with their own distinct power. There are those you turn to when you’re down, those you theorise and fix the world with, those who always know the right thing to do, those who are funnier than any stand-up comic you’ve ever seen, those who you haven’t seen in years yet you can pick up right where you left off, and…in my case…those who, despite your very best efforts to read every blog known to man, somehow manage to always be better than you at fantasy football.
Perhaps due to the lack of a true father figure growing up, I’ve always had some wiser older friends too – people that cross the mentor-friend barrier and guide you. I’ve had three in that mould, all of whom are no longer with us. Or, should I say, dead. Another friend reprimands me for beating about the bush around death – I’ve a tendency to say, ‘passed away’ or, worse, ‘lost’, as though they’ve taken a wrong turn on the way to the shops. It makes it easier to think that but she’s right to chastise me. There was Pete Bailey, who I’ve written about previously and who guided me out of academic mediocrity, and then Mark. Mark was only a few years older but when we met in my late teens, it felt like an eternity. He too enjoyed the sophisticated things, that Pete had introduced me to, like fine wine and proper coffee. Thanks to him, I was probably the only 18-year-old with a Gaggia Classic on their bedside table. He was also a bounder and a cad. His was an example more of what not to do, absinthe for example, but I looked up to him still. When he had got his own life on track, remarkably so in fact, he was killed in a car accident while on holiday in Australia. He died saving his son and partner – turning to take the impact from a huge out of control truck on his side of the vehicle. As a haemophiliac, he didn’t stand a chance. After the atheist hedonistic years of Mark being my older guiding light, I by chance became friends with a retired priest, Ron Casebow. We came upon each other in Waitrose, he remembered me from years ago in the Bury St Edmunds branch of Ottakar’s bookshop – I’d helped him locate his wife, whom he’d misplaced but was easily locatable due to her impressive purple hat (one of many impressive hats). He invited me for tea, I signed the visitors’ book at their house in Palgrave and for eighteen years, until his death in 2023, he was a stubborn voice of reason in my life. None of the three were perfect, far from it, but they all helped shape and influence me. They taught me that older is often wiser. It’s a lesson I try to remember and I now try to be that voice of reason for people who have also ‘lost’ their father. A now close friend, nearly two decades my junior, lives 3,424 miles away in Ismailia, Egypt. We’ve never met in person and came to know each other gaming online during the first covid lockdown. His father died when he was young and we speak each week, either on WhatsApp video or Messenger. Despite the cultural differences – which are stark – we get along famously. That I count someone I’ve never met in person amongst my closest friends is not just a miracle of technology but also part of the far grander miracle of the human condition. We are, beneath all the noise, the same.
Pass through Cumbria this weekend and you may see me sat at a restaurant table alone, speaking to an empty chair – it could very well turn out he’s a figment of my imagination.
Returning to the particular friend with whom I’m celebrating this weekend, he shall remain nameless. I’m striving not to name anyone still alive in this piece, though they can probably pick themselves out. Even if I did name him, you wouldn’t find him anywhere, he’s a secretive and private fellow. No digital footprint. Google him and he doesn’t exist. It’s a remarkable feat in an era when someone can’t make a coffee at work without the entire internet congratulating them on LinkedIn. The fact that he doesn’t appear to exist is probably quite apt because, like other of my friends, someone quite so kind has little right to. Pass through Cumbria this weekend and you may see me sat at a restaurant table alone, speaking to an empty chair – it could very well turn out he’s a figment of my imagination. The few photos I’ve been permitted to take over the years reassure me this is not the case but, you know, the mind can do strange things.
We first met twenty years ago this weekend. Things got off to a cracking start when he politely informed me that I drove a hairdresser’s car and most of my life choices to date were poor. He was right on both counts. The end of 2004 was not a great time for me, much of 2005 wasn’t brilliant either. Boy meets girl, heartache, anguish – you know the deal. If there’s a year of my life that still haunts me, it’s that one. Exactly what I needed was courteously delivered ridicule and someone who didn’t indulge me for a second. For the twenty years that have followed, the advice has been remarkably consistent – ‘don’t date her, she isn’t interested - don’t try to date her, perhaps don’t marry this one, that’s a waste of money, stop feeling sorry for yourself, football is stupid, anything smaller than a V8 isn’t actually a car engine it belongs on a flymo, and, oh, conservatives aren’t really conservative anymore, by the way – let’s go out for dinner’. It’s usually exactly what I need to hear, even if I don’t want to hear it. He and his family took me under their wing and I’ve not looked back. There are several ‘sliding-doors’ moments in my life that I reflect on and think they set me on a better path, or at least kept me from a worse one, and embracing this friendship was definitely one of them.
Like all of my friends, his life is moving on - marriage and the patter of tiny feet will inevitably follow. Sometimes, in this moment, we all have a pang of jealousy – a fear that our friends’ happiness will take them further from us. But, as much as my inner bitterness may want to, I can’t begrudge it. What we see in our friends, others will see too and we all deserve happiness. That I understand this is, perhaps, what stops me being a failure as a friend. Though I’m terrible at staying in contact, if I could make their lives easier or happier – I would do it in an instant. They just might need to call me to ask.
It's not just my friends who are superheroes. We are all, each of us, endowed with our own superpower - we all just have something slightly different in our toolkit. We may be our group’s best listener or the one that pulls everyone together when people like me are making no effort at all. What mine is, and why my friends associate with me, I’ve no idea. It could be that knowing would break the magic. I can throw a damn good party, and, thanks to Pete and Mark’s influence, the wine and coffee is always on point and, thanks to Ron’s, I’m pretty good at leading the repentance that follows too. It’s been several years since my last shindig, covid and all that. Perhaps it’s time to dust off the best wine glasses, throw another bash and raise a glass to all my friends – dead and alive. I just need to remember to make the effort and get around to it.