PASSING SHIPS

Friendship is one of those great big portmanteau words that means very different things to different people. The Oxford Concise defines “friend” as “One joined to another in intimacy and mutual benevolence independently of sexual or family love”. This is certainly a hopeful aspiration; however, in real life presumed “friends” often turn out to be something very different.

The Victorians and Edwardians were great on friendship. Lifelong vows of mutual attachment were sworn, and the relationship celebrated with aphorisms both pithy and poetic in those sweet little leather-bound miniature books which were favourite gifts of the period. I still possess some which belonged to my spinster aunt who – at least when she was young – was of a somewhat sentimental turn of mind. She collected some of her friends’ penned and drawn declarations of devotion in such a book which, with retrospective knowledge of how some of those who inscribed it actually behaved, is in part pathetic.

For there’s the rub. Too many a slip twixt cup and lip in the friendship game, I fear. My parents had several lifelong friends, some dating from their childhood and school days, who were my genuinely affectionate honorary ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’, whom I count myself fortunate to have known. The assumption in those days was that friendship, if sincere, was for life and such friends could be counted upon – and were. It was an aspect of civilised life which has largely vanished.

At my advanced age I have naturally lost too many friends through death. But I have also lost some who are still living so far as I know, whose friendship I valued more than they evidently did mine – because despite all their protestations of solidarity there came a time when they vanished, often abruptly and with no explanation. I regret such people, because I cared about them, but I now realise they weren’t the ones to rely on in a tight corner. My old friend Charlotte Wolff wrote: "it is sad that the people who glitter and bewitch us with their magnetism are, more often than not, the least reliable”, and I have found this to be true. It is the very ones who earnestly assured me that whenever I needed them they would always be there without fail who have disappeared in the twinkling of an eye.

Friendship, it seems to me, is like a train journey to an unknown destination. One never knows when somebody destined to become significant to you will come aboard, nor at which stopping-place they will get off. They probably don’t know themselves. I do my best to give people the benefit of the doubt as to sincerity, but trust is a two-edged sword – if you never trust anyone you will be lonely and miserable, and if you trust someone mistakenly you will [if you allow yourself] be even more miserable, at least for a time.

John Donne famously said “No Man is an Island”. Sometimes, though, each one of us feels we are our own Robinson Crusoe, alone on a solitary island without a friendly sail, or a Man Friday, in sight. Fortunately this state of affairs is usually only temporary. If we wish to avoid it entirely, though, we should always pay heed to what people do, and be wary of what they say. Salute the passing ships, and be prepared for them to sail away over the horizon.

A BRAVE FRIEND

I've been saddened to hear of the death of an old family friend who was a quite exceptional person. His parents and mine were close friends when they were newly married, and it was an enduring friendship. Mike, who was a few years younger than me, was born with a deformity named Ectopia Visicae, which means that part of the bowel is outside the body. As a baby he had an operation to alleviate this which entailed removing the bladder and transplanting the ureters into the colon. Despite this terrible handicap, with resultant kidney problems which caused one to be removed when he was in his thirties, Mike led an active and often outdoor life and eventually married Sheila, a splendid person who has been totally supportive of him throughout their lives together. They both had busy teaching careers, adopted a son, and renovated a holiday home in France, where they spent much of their summers.

For the past dozen or so years Mike had periodic colonoscopies to check that nothing untoward was happening, because where the ureters entered the colon polyps had formed which could become cancerous. Alas, his latest biopsy showed this had occurred, and so instead of their usual newsy Christmas letter Mike wrote to say that he would be spending Christmas in hospital for a big operation, but the prognosis was good and although shell-shocked, he believed that "I will be OK as I am an awkward bugger".

But this wasn't to be, and although the major operation was initially successful septicaemia set in and Mike has died, brave to the end. At my age, I hear far too often of the deaths of old friends. Mike and Sheila were a lovely couple of the too-rare kind who get their chief satisfaction in life from caring for and being of service to others - from creating, not from destroying. Now that he has gone, I know that Sheila will keep forging ahead with the comfort of knowing what a lot of friends they have.

As the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet John Donne famously wrote:

"No man is an Iland, entire of it self: every man is a piece of Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind;

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Sleep peacefully, Mike.