I have a very good friend down in Kent. He is my oldest friend in all the world and we have known each other since secondary school - or high school if you prefer. I’ll call him J, because that’s what I call him. J kind of rescued me in a way. He didn’t really know it but he gave me a sense of being that I had lost through my experiences at school. I enjoyed school, I enjoyed the learning part. I loved learning and for a while this was enough. But as hair grew and hormones began brewing their nasty little concoctions, things seemed to get more and more complicated.
And exciting.
And scary.
And bizarre.
Let’s come back to J.
Before I went to secondary school (high school - whatever), at the tender age of 10 or 11, I did share some beautiful times with a girl I developed a close friendship with over the course of a year. I would say that she was probably the first person I ever fell in love with, but I did not know this at the time. We were just good friends. What I loved about her was that she talked so deeply with me, to this day the most attractive thing I find in any woman (or man for that matter) is their capacity for ‘real’ conversation. But not just that, they must be able to talk deeply without pretension. I have no interested in proving how clever I am, or knowledgeable in a particular subject, it is the connection that I am interested in.
This particular girl I adored. Even at that young age, I felt grown up, mature, responsible and protective. I loved the way I felt when we were chatting or making up ridiculous ideas about the world. It was an innocent time. When we started secondary school our friendship seemed to deteriorate. I was never sure why, I think perhaps she grew up and wanted different things, things that a doe eyed lad like me could not provide. She was growing up, and I was stuck.
This did hurt me, it is one of those moments in one’s younger years that remains a painful memory. But, like I say, the evil brews being stirred by the dark marriage of testosterone and estrogen at the time, were enough to send us all into a maelstrom of teenage angst. However, I am older and wiser these days and I choose to recall the moments of joy and happiness. The rest can rot like compost for the mind to spread around like so much fertiliser for new memories to spring forth.
After this heart break I felt quite alone at school. My romantic explorations were short lived and unspectacular. The solution to this was to invest my time in boys, or rather a boy, when it came to sexual adventure. Apparently this is more common than I was aware of at the time, but still as taboo (this was in the late 1980’s when racial violence and gender phobic behaviour was still a thing - oh no hang on a minute…) I won’t bore you with the details, but the upshot was that I was bullied and ridiculed extensively for two tortuous years. The boy who had been my lover was quite openly gay and very comfortable with it, in fact he came out of the whole thing seemingly quite empowered by it all.
He contacted me some years later with apologies for causing me so much strife. He was living in Bristol or Brighton, or somewhere beginning with B with a a large number of artisan food shops. At first it was exciting to hear from him again. I was living with my family: my girlfriend and two small children. However, after a few exchanges I started getting emails telling me how he wanted to pick up where we had left off. This I found insensitive and somewhat of an insult to my family. The whole thing turned into a car crash. I don’t think we were ever really friends. We were convenient for one another and little more than that.
It was after the torment of 2 years of ridicule and hilarious ‘queer’ jokes, that I met J. I was in the art room which had become my refuge at lunch time. I was drawing some twisted Heironymous Bosch like image that was an expression of the emotional car crash that I had become - or at least perceived myself as. “That’s cool,” said this lad in a leather biker jacket. We were fourteen but J seemed older. He seemed very easy with himself and because he had only just started at St Simon Stock, he had no preconception of me. I was me and he was him. J was probably my first best friend. He also got ridiculed by others, but his South London demeanor was like a suit of armour against the twats of the school.
We were like brothers. We laughed. We liked the same music, we liked art, we wore different clothes and watched different films. We rode motorbikes and went out drinking with his uncles. Without J my teenage years would have been extremely lonely. Instead I have a whole rolodex of memories that fill me with happiness, and joy, but mostly hysterical laughter.
I didn’t see J for about twenty years. We got back in touch via some social media platform and I arranged to visit when I was down seeing my mum. This was not long before she died, I had been gunning up and down the A1 on an almost weekly basis seeing as much of her as I could. On the occasion that I went to see J I was nervous. It was like going on a first date. After the event we confided in each other that we had both felt like this. On the one hand one wants that warmth of familiarity and nostalgia, but on the other hand we were men in our forties and there had been a great deal of stormy waters under the bridge.
However, after literally a few minutes we were munching chicken curry and drinking beer laughing and enjoying each others company as if we had only seen each other the day before. It was reassuring that a friendship could be so long dormant and then be revived so effortlessly. Like one of those arctic insects that only emerge when the conditions are just so, then in the space of a few days, or even hours they have lived an entire lifetime before being put back on ice.
One of the best things that came from this meeting was that J got to come to my wedding, which was a three day affair in the Lake District with so many friends. I remember it fondly, even though the marriage did not work out and I see so few of those people these days, it was nonetheless, testament to what friends and family can be when conditions are right. It will not be perfect all the time. It is an unrealistic expectation to think a friend will be everything you want them to be at all times. That is a huge burden to place on anyone. Does this mean they are not a friend? No. It means they are human.
Relationships are the most complex phenomena we can learn in our lives. Getting relationships right is the highest of all the social arts - and it is an art, informed by science, but still an art. Getting relationships right is a large amount of give and take, humility, confidence, balance, not knowing, remembering, learning, in fact being proficient at relationships, I think requires just about every aspect of human faculty there is. It is a lifelong thing. Make no assumptions and always be prepared to be wrong, then see if you can meet in the middle. Be bold, be brave, just don’t be a dick; and if a friend is a dick with you, or anyone else, for god’s sake tell them. This is one of the things friendship is for - to keep us all in check when we are running our mouths or fucking up or going to far or just being human beings having a shit time.
Finally, I would like to give a thought to all those friends who I will never meet. They are still friends, still ‘my people.’ There are people in my life who have hung around and never really been a friend, but they are tolerated because really they are just lost. As for enemies, keep them few and know them well, sometimes they can teach you the most. So what is friendship? It is a journey, a story, just like anything else. Keep being an explorer, be bold, be brave and be the first to give something - not out of expectation, but because you want to, and if you don’t want to, then there may well be a reason, so check that our first. Hold on to every memory, every laugh, every sadness, - it all counts. A relationship is not a Hollywood, soft focus meadow of pink flowers. Sometimes it is battle ground, but what it should be above all else is real.
Ciao for now.