How many real friends do you have? I am talking about the type of friend who you might not see for 5 years, but, as soon as you meet, you pick up right where you left off. This is the friend, who, if you were to turn up on their doorstep late at night, suitcase in hand, tears streaming down your face, would invite you in, put the kettle on, and not ask questions or look slyly at their partner/watch/TV.
Chances are, you won't have many. In fact, people can count themselves lucky if they have any friends like this. Friends come and go: "we used to go mountain-biking together", "he was a good laugh", "we went to the football together", that sort of thing.
I reckon I have 3 friends of this "calibre" - I'm a lucky guy. The problem is that because I live in France, seeing them once every few years is a reality. In the spirit of "New Year, New Resolutions", I decided to call one of them over the holiday period. He's as phone-shy as me, so it wasn't our best medium. However, I gathered that he hasn't had a great year. Some of the details I will omit (even though he will never read this) ,but some of them, viewed from the outside (i.e. by you), are quite amusing and ironic.
My friends wife is great; off-the-wall and extremely funny, although often it is unintentional. She has a sister. Her sister is nothing like her and they have always found it difficult to get on. Her sister is extremely career-oriented and became a highly paid management consultant. It was at work that she met her husband, another highly paid management consultant. Unfortunately for both of them, getting to the top invariably entails sacrifices. In their case it was the ability to relate to other human beings on a personal level.
However, once they had a child, her husband changed and realised that maybe there is more to life than downsizing other people's businesses (or whatever it is that management consultants do). Given that they were rolling in money, at the age of 35, he decided to retire to look after their child. From then on, weekdays were spent playing golf, punctuated by, no doubt, inconvenient school runs. However, it seems that after a couple of years of this, the school runs became more and more interesting to him: so much so that last year he left his wife for one of the mothers that he met every day at the school gates. He's now gone back to work as a highly-paid management consultant and his new partner has taken over childcare duties during the week. Ironic don't you think? I do.
Anyway, my friend's wife's sister (still with me?), as I said, sacrificed the ability to express herself. This has left her incapable of coping and she has, over the course of the year phoned my friend's wife for at least 3 hours a day. This is OK - everyone needs a shoulder to cry on. However, 3 hours a day for a year can get tiring for the person who has to listen, especially when is is a single-subject monologue. My wife has now started phoning her on a regular basis in order to let my friend's wife let off steam, something she appreciates - the chance to talk to another female about her problems and not somebody else's. Ironic also, don't you think? I do.
A second, and completely unrelated event happened during the year as well. After 45 years of marriage, my friend's mother met up with an old boyfriend, left my friend's father and went to live in Canada. Devastating I would imagine. He seemed quite phlegmatic about it, so I ventured the question, "Did they meet on Friend's Reunited?". "Senile Old-Age Pensioners Reunited, more like." he replied.
All-in-all, it was what the Queen would call and "Annus Horribilus" (which doesn't translate from the Latin as "an ugly backside". At least, I don't think so).
To finish, writing this, I struggled with the question, "If these are such great friends, how come you could never envisage telling them that you have a blog?". Maybe, like my friend's wife's sister, I am unable to connect to people on a personal level and can only express myself anonymously? If this is the case, like my friend's wife's sister, it would have been nice if it went hand-in-hand with a successful career. Ironic don't you think? I do.
