Friends
Who is a friend? According to the dictionary, it is “a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations” [i] That’s a rather bland statement. There are friends and there are best friends: oops, no, that refers to dogs! Perhaps there are ‘real’ friends but that implies others are unreal, lying, or tricksters? Before I get into an even bigger muddle, let me set the scene: I began this blog by recollecting friends and friendships, and quickly my thoughts moved on from there to lost contacts, friends abandoned, a journey that led to an unexpected conclusion.
All this thinking started with a parcel arriving in the post! A few weeks ago, I received the ‘Register of Admissions’ to my college, a 1283-page directory. [ii] This week, I decided to look through, mainly to discover what had happened to the group of friends which formed at the very beginning of my undergraduate years. There were four of us, Peter, Andrew and David, along with me, (the second Peter), and one other who floated in an out of the group, Tom.
The first shock in the Register was to see that David had disappeared. I went back to an earlier edition, from 1998, and there he was. What had happened? As I remembered him, David was a somewhat unsettled soul; he studied economics, and went on to complete two more postgraduate degrees, first at the LSE and, after a time when I later learnt he had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown, at Brandeis University. Work was a series of jobs, some only for a couple of years or so. I had tried to see him in London after his year at LSE, but that was one of the times when he was ‘out of contact’. Then I lost touch completely until, some twenty years later, we re-established communications, and met for a couple of hours at a hotel on the edge of the Kuala Lumpur airport in Sepang, Malaysia. I was arriving in the country, and he was leaving. By then he was working for an organisation that leased academics’ homes when they were away on study leave or a short-term research appointment. It was a nice reunion, but slightly sad. It was obvious that David wasn’t entirely happy. He died a few years later.[iii]
That finding set me off. While I had lost almost all contact with Peter and Andrew, I knew about their careers, and the lives they had led. However, thinking about those two did make me think about friendships over time. We had been reasonably close during my undergraduate years. On graduation, Peter went to Edinburgh for postgraduate studies, and left just before I arrived there. Andrew left to continue his studies in Canada, and never returned. We were in totally different fields, and whatever ‘mutual affection’ we had developed in the three years together soon frittered away. We were busy sorting out our lives in different places, in every sense of the term.[iv] That was also true for Tom, who was always on the edge of our little group. He left for London to complete his studies to become a doctor. It was only when I read the Register I realised he had spent a couple of years in Australia before settling to practice in the USA.
I remained in Cambridge for another five years. As a teaching fellow and a college tutor, I had many students. Most never became close friends, although I did follow the careers of two reluctant social anthropologists who excelled in music, tracking the (choral) path they took after graduation. My upstairs neighbour was an older postgraduate student, an expert on King Herod (Herod Antipas to be more accurate). He returned to the USA, and his wife and I have reconnected all these years later, following my catching a reference to his obituary.
When I moved out to the country, another anthropologist became a great friend. Great friend? When I left for Edinburgh, Bernard stayed on in social anthropology, moving to Europe for a while before going back to Canada. Meanwhile I wandered into medical education, cognitive development and dream research!! We kept in fitful contact, and I was sorry that was all. He died nine years ago, and I decided to write to his wife: I still haven’t done so.
Once you start down this path of recollection, looking for friends from the past, it is hard to stop. Going back to primary school, my friend was Andrew. He lived in the next street: a model railway enthusiast, he and I would go trainspotting on the weekends, and later trudged off to sundry marshes and other crazy places for birdwatching (our other interest). When I left to go to grammar school, contact with Andrew ended. I’d love to know what happened to him, but I can find no trace. Nor indeed for the several young girls I liked at the time. Barbara, Rosalind, Rosemary, Celia and Alison: where are you now? And here’s a thought, slightly unsettling, but it was the women to whom I often became closer. Those fellow primary school students, the girlfriends of Andrew and Peter at university, and later Bernard’s girlfriend who shared our house in the country and later married him. I’d better come back to that theme later!
In the last year of grammar school, I had two close friends, Neil and John. Both were big, fit sporting types, and couldn’t have been more different from me, a weedy guy then, and still the same. It was geology that linked us together, off on field trips, hours in the geology room, immersed in a subject that was full of surprises and opportunities to learn the latest thinking, all under the eyes of KEW, our teacher. When I went to university, so did those two, but neither to pursue geology. Soon after, John and I linked back together, but Neil disappeared from view (to my surprise I heard from him a couple of years ago, as an older brother lives close by!).
In my last years in Cambridge I made a change that triggered the impact of another factor contributing friendships made and lost. We moved out into the country, first into a small village, out to the west, and then into rural isolation in a 17th Century cottage on the edge of the Gog Magog Hills. Living apart from others, friendships are less likely to develop! The same was true in Scotland, where we lived in a house with just twelve neighbours, all of whom shunned any contact with a Sassenach. Good choice, Sheldrake!!
However, if you want to get serious about losing friends and connections, move overseas! I did that with style when I took my wife and three children to Adelaide, the opposite side of the world! We quickly made some new friends, mainly doctors from the Medical School and their families. Partially absorbed into a medical community, but always an outsider since my interests were in dreaming and medical education, my wife rebuilt her links with children’s books authors and illustrators. However, her world was centred in Melbourne, not Adelaide, and after driving between the two cities for a few years, we moved to Melbourne, and lost that community of friends overnight. I have lost contact with everyone from those years.
By now, I had fallen into pursuing a second way to limit friendships. If living in relatively isolated places was one factor, working 60-90 hours a week was another way to restrict contacts and reduce the chances of making friends outside of the workplace. For several years, I lived at work, and colleagues replaced family and leisure friends. I led a selfish lifestyle, bad for my family, and equally limiting for me. Not smart!
I’ve scoured websites and contact organisations to find where some people from those years have gone. There’s Tony, and wow, he looks unchanged from thirty years ago: no, wait a minute, perhaps that photograph is from thirty years ago! And Joseph, same dark curly hair, but he does look older. Both are in Melbourne, and I should look them up. I wonder if I will? As for the others, where are Margaret, Fiona, Cheryl, Karin and Amanda? Amanda I do know: she is now working for one of Australia’s largest companies. And Cheryl wrote to me just the other day: she’s just retired! Not all contacts lost, but neither are these close friends.
Humans are social animals, and friends are part of the glue that links us to other people. When I was young, I lived in a community, largely determined by geography. In those days, Northolt was a small London suburb, famous for its airport, not a commercial one, but a landing place for many overseas dignitaries who were flown in their own, usually military aircraft. Our family home was in the older part of Northolt, and my world was centred around two streets. We were on Fort Road, and I knew most of the families and all of the children on that street. I would walk to school down the adjoining street, Court Farm Road, when Andrew lived. The library was at the bottom of his road. I didn’t know many of the people on Court Farm Road, but I knew that library and its holdings inside out. The street where I lived (that almost sounds like a song title!), the library, and the people in both places, together they all formed a community, a dense network of connections, a wider ‘family’ that constituted my ‘home’.
It fell apart when we moved to Ealing, a neighbouring, larger, and more up-market suburb. By then, I was at a grammar school, and the sense of belonging through contact with the people in the houses around me disappeared. Now my community was school, the students, the teachers, and, occasionally, the parents of some children in my class. I didn’t know it then, but now I can see it was a far more ephemeral community, lacking roots. Like so many other people, I lived in a world where neighbours scarcely registered, and I can’t remember if I knew even one family living in our street. Mum and dad probably did, but they were probably ‘bowling alone’. [v]
Now, if I look back over the last twenty years, a different dynamic has been driving friends and friendships. As an (older) adult, neighbours do matter, and they have been an important source of friendships and mutual support. Also, and for a long time, I have been taking part in discussion groups (one in Australia was called the Senior Roundtable; the newer one in Winston Salem is the Oval Table!). Both have followed the same format: each month we have a reading, which is used as a starting point for a discussion.[vi] The group in Australia ran for eleven years, I think. The new one is a baby, as we are only in our seventh year. Are we friends? Definitely. Certainly, we know each other as people “with whom one has a bond of mutual affection”.
When I look at the two discussion groups, I can see the participants have a wide circle of friends, but I tend to step back from getting too engaged. Perhaps I see these discussion groups as another form of workplace. I know when I run training programs and courses I consciously step away, to allow the members to gossip about me. It’s the downside of being a facilitator!
I think a key difference is between a friend, perhaps better described as an acquaintance, with whom one has some kind of mutual acceptance and affection. Then there is a true friend, a person who has got to know you well, who cares about you as much as you care about them. The expectations can be simple, support for a view, or a cogent argument why your view is mistaken. It can be far more consequential, a place to stay for a while, even a loan of money. The point about true friends is that mutual understanding and affection runs deep, although there is sometimes a mild frisson of concern: “have I stepped over the line, here?”.
Many friendships from my past are long gone. In most cases, if we were to meet again, it would be nice, but it is no longer a matter of concern that we haven’t spoken, contacted, even thought of each other for years. True friends persist, even if actual contact may be sporadic. It is easy to exaggerate, as there are some friends who have been there over the years. I am a hopeless correspondent, yet despite that, they won’t disappear. They know me well. Long term friends, like family, are different. Long-term friends remain so because, for whatever reason, they ‘stick’. As for family I guess you’re stuck with them!!
This long and winding journey through friendships formed and lost has been a slightly surprising one for me. Looking back, I can clearly see a number of things.
First up, I am not a man’s man. I have little interest in sport, only enough to be able to keep my end up in conversations in the classroom or training session. I don’t play any sports, and never have over the years. My interests are smaller, more personal, about people, what makes them tick, and, where I can help individuals better address their challenges, their transitions, and the things that matter to them. That doesn’t make me uncomfortable: it’s who I am.
Second, face to face I am rather exclusive. I want to be close to a true friend, and in return, I am there through whatever is happening, (I was once told this was a Scorpio trait, and my birthday falls under that sign!). True friends do require some kind of compatibility. That is easy to see in my standing back from ‘real men’, with tools hanging from their leather work belts, a can of beer nearby, and the football playing on the radio. True friends share a perspective on the world around them, even if they may not agree on political preferences, or even the books they read: some variation, but not too much, makes a lasting friendship rich and rewarding.
I promised I would return to the other issue, my tendency to talk to and form friendships with women rather than men. I could say it is part of not being a “man’s man”. However, I suspect it is more than that. Men are often more extrinsically focussed, whereas women often are more in touch with relationships, the issues in the immediate and close network of people around them. That’s often my thing, too: is that a way of admitting I am a gossip? No, men gossip as well. More I think that I am less interested in hearing about power and politics, jobs being sought, work opportunities foregone. No, not that either. Much simpler. Women are more likely to enjoy exploring the smaller, more intimate things in life, and men like to look at big issues. Whoa, that’s enough on dangerous sexist conclusions!
This much I have learnt: my recent searching is reassuring: it reveals I have more friends than I had thought. I know without communities, we are lost; but without friends, we are nothing.
[i] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/friend
[ii] T S Adkins and al, Register of Admissions to King’s College, Cambridge 1934-2000, Cambridge, 2018
[iii] I did ask why his entry had disappeared from the newer register – it was determined by the date he died.
[iv] I discovered that David’s obituary was written by Andrew, so those two had stayed in close contact.
[v] A reference to Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone, (Simon and Schuster, 2000) which charts the shift from close communities to people living more as strangers. His example of the decline of community was ten-pin bowling. In the past this was sustained by an interest in and support for local bowling teams; today these teams are in decline, and people who go bowling are seldom in a team, but just there with a few friends.
[vi] More recently, in the US, we have tried using a non-fiction book: the jury is still out on that approach.
