I'm writing this on Friday evening, because I know there won't be time to write anything much on Saturday. We are going to a party tonight (casting myself forward mentally to Saturday morning when, if I remember, I shall press Publish before going to work). The party is in Great Missenden, which for those of you not familiar with the geography of southern England is in Buckingshire. It is fairly close to where the Systems Administrator grew up, and quite a long drive from North Essex, and I'll have to leave work early for us to get there at a reasonable time, even though it is a grown up party that doesn't even start until eight. One of the Systems Administrator's old school friends has hit a milestone birthday, and we have been invited.
We haven't seen these old friends for a long time. The SA last saw them several years ago, when they had another party, which I missed because the grey tabby needed to go to the vet and had vanished and I stayed at home to round her up if she reappeared. That was the time she fell into a bucket that had been used for creosote, back in the days of real creosote, and had filled up with a mixture of rainwater and the last dregs of creosote, which after she fell in it we discovered was highly toxic to cats. If we'd know that we wouldn't have had creosote on the premises. You can't buy it now, or at least, not legally. The SA went and I remained at home and managed to catch the cat, and the SA had a nice time, but didn't stay in touch. On that basis I'm not quite sure why we're going this time.
It's a funny question, why we stay in touch with people, or drift out of touch. Geographical proximity helps cement friendships, despite e-mail and texts, not to mention Skype, meaning that in theory we can stay in touch with anybody anywhere. And we had telephones and the post before that. It isn't like it was for the families of emigrants to the New World, who could expect to hear nothing from their loved ones for months at a time. And one can go and stay with one's friends (so handy if they live in an attractive part of the world) and we do sometimes. But it isn't the same as having friends nearby, that you can invite regularly for supper, or meet for coffee, or go out together for the day. Or visit them when they're ill, or call on them to help when you've got your truck stuck in mud.
Shared interests and values definitely help keep friendships going. Even if you've known somebody for thirty years, if you get to the point where, when you see them, you seem to have nothing in common to talk about, there isn't much incentive to go on making the effort to go on seeing them. Habit and sentiment can only keep you going for so long.
That's assuming you ever reached the point of a genuine person to person friendship in the first place. Joint membership of a group that's created by virtue of an organisation, such as an employer, or school, or university course, can feel like a friendship, while you're carried along by the shared experiences that membership of the group confers. Take away the group, lose your job, leave school, graduate, and the shared bond may disappear with a speed that surprises you.
Mark Vernon has written an extremely good book on the subject, though Montaigne was there first. I don't know why the SA drifted apart from this group of people. I quite liked them, much of the time, though not the time that the birthday boy's brother left a broken down white van in our garden while we were away on holiday, that stayed there for rather a long time after we got back. He had bought it at the nearby car auction and it began to play up shortly afterwards, so he told the people looking after the house that we wouldn't mind his leaving it there. We did, actually. Maybe tomorrow we'll all discover we like the new middle aged people into which our former thirty-something selves have morphed, and the old friendships will be rekindled. Maybe we'll find there was a reason why we drifted out of touch, apart from a one-way flow in Christmas cards (they send us one). I'm agnostic on the subject, and quite happy to see how it goes. I suspect it will be rather a dreadful moment when the alarm goes off at 6.15 on Sunday morning, though, and I have to get up and go to work. It is a long drive from Great Missenden to North Essex.
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