Friendship

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. Mark Twain

 

The death of a friend hits like an iceberg. It brings life into focus, reminds you of lost chances and the importance of friendship. It is family and friendship that gives meaning to life along with its mystery. Why do they appear when they do? Why did I bump into a strange Yorkshire man motor biking through Morocco all those years ago? I remember we discussed the weather. Too bloody hot. And he urged me to visit Yorkshire for a spot of pot-holing before roaring off into the desert. I took him up, and he took me on the Lyke Wake Walk which nearly killed me, followed by potholing which gave me nightmares. And yet somehow we remained friends. Our last few visits to Yorkshire were especially poignant because he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer. We drank in the knowledge that this could be the last pint we shared. And one day it was.

Henry was another friend, a gifted musician, craftsman, animator, artist, and father. When I met him, he was in search of anyone who could scratch a tune—first as another musician for a Welsh dancing group called Gwerin Yr Gwent, and later for his own band that became Devil’s Elbow. 

Those years were amongst the happiest of my life, he and his wife, Lol, firing the band with enthusiasm and joy. He carried the show on stage; he carried all of us, and it nicely derailed my teaching career: why strive to climb the badly paid greasy pole when a ceilidh a week more than made up a small increase in pay—and with the bonus of beer? The band eventually folded, and though remaining friends, we saw each other less often. 

Four weeks ago, he died, and past and present fused, the years in-between suddenly meaningless as memories flooded back; and with them the realisation of what had been and what had been lost; the realisation that I’d lost my chance to invite them to Monmouth for a long weekend and a meal.

A week after his death, another friend died. We’re dying off faster than rock stars. Peter, I had known from university days when we had been studying for our Masters in the stacks of Swansea University. It had been pure chance, nothing else, that saw us in adjacent cubicles, our desks piled high in books. After a hiatus where we briefly (ten years) lost touch, chance brought us together again via an article in the Times Educational Supplement. The friendship remained as strong as ever, our respective children playing together, as though they, too, had always been friends. 

It brings to mind the mystery of friendship, what it is, and why some last longer than others. I have friends from university days and before, friends with wildly different political views, which matters not a jot. What matters is a enjoying their presence and the ease of picking up threads as if a five or ten year break has been a mere blink.

And yet with some people, it’s impossible, like flogging a dead horse. You can be polite but never be friends, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It is as it is. A person’s nature can repel as well as attract.  

But as for friendship, it’s not a question of size, weight, political views, bone-structure, or the contortion of the face in a smile. Some talk of ‘chemistry’ which is a slippery metaphor. I prefer ‘spirit’ sometimes seen in the eyes, but an equally slippery concept, hard to grasp until sensed. 

Though we had little in common other than teaching, I ended up making a good and generous friend in a chain-smoking, beer-swilling misogynist rugby fanatic, neither of us knowing quite how or why.

It's why I think the much maligned ‘Facebook friend’ or cyber-friends in general can be the real thing: without the confusion of a physical presence, spirits converse via keyboards – the equivalent of a high-tech Ouija board. Generosity, empathy, and good deeds don’t require proximity, and friendship doesn’t end in death.

Death though is a gamechanger: when you have more friends dead than alive, and face being alone but for the grave-digger. Friends, keeping and making them should be a life-time’s joy.

As stated early on, it’s family and friendship that gives meaning to life and as for its mystery, sometimes it’s best not to question but gratefully accept and strive to be an equally good friend—above all strive to avoid the worst kind of regret when a friend or a family member dies: Why didn’t I say . .? Why didn’t I ask . . .? Why didn’t I do this, that, or the other? 

Addendum. And just to tone things down a notch:

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money Mark Twain