THE DARK AGES by Kate Muir
It is reassuring when someone writes a book which confirms some of your own secret thoughts and vices. So when I got my hands on a early copy of Friendship: An Expose by Joseph Epstein, which is not yet out in Britain, I retired to Regent's Park to wallow in its wickedness.
Epstein, an American academic and dilettante, explains quite honestly that friendship just takes up too much time; friends require too much obligation and reciprocity; and some are so needy or loquacious that the returns are horribly limited. Epstein estimates that he has 75 friends, after pruning, and some that he'll never see again. One imagines that he will have fewer friends now he has written this book.
Epsteins describes himself as a "gregarious melancholic, a highly sociable misanthrope". His ego is not small. He considers himself to be a "trophy friend", one that lesser persons aspire to dine with. Celebrities tend to have trophy friends, because it makes them feel safer. Hence, for instance, the Hurley-Beckham-Elton John nexus.
Trophy friends are as disposable as back copes of heat, but can long-lasting friendships be deep without being obsessive? Epstein takes on the taboo subject of our social foibles and failings: "A friend, like a teacher or a clergyman, need not always feel that he or she is falling short of an impossible ideal."
The problem that we have old-fashioned notions of loyalty, yet the traditional parameters of friendship have been exploited by e-mail, text messaging and dirt-cheap flights. "Technology has brought friendships into bloom that might never have been planted 30 years ago," says Epstein. it is perfectly possible to count a hundred good friends in your address book, whereas a hundred years ago you might have had five.
Too many people assume that friendships are like flowers, needing regular watering, when in fact they can lie happily dormant. I find this with friends from America or France, who lead roughly parallel lives to my own. After a quick kid count, we can pick up exactly where we left off.
There are still those who have impossible high expectations of their friends, and once failure and guilt sets in, so does the emotional rot. "The standard of what constitutes a genuine friend has, I believe, been altered," says Epstein. Now, I think, one's friends need not be perfect in all situations, and vice-versa. Friends need not meet the standards expected of a live-in partner. For instance, I have a comrade who wears his father's old shirts, grime-rimmed at the neck. He is very formal and slightly whiffy in hot weather. Yet so long as you maintain a 2ft gap and a two-cocktail minimum, he is one of the most entertaining people out.
Friendships will tick along nicely - until someone shacks up with the wrong partner. You cannot believe they are this blind and stupid, and they can smell your repressed animosity. So old friends are reduced to lunchtime assignations, and then nothing. This happens to even the fanciest people: the writes V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux were friends for 30 years, and then had a break-up "precipitated by a new and hostile wife". Theroux wrote a raw, mean and very funny book about Naipaul afterwards.
I do not think friendship should be a moveable feast. Proper friends should last, like a good pair of Manolos. Epstein says the friends he keeps have a moral stance that he values above intellect - "kindness, generosity, amused self-deprecation". But it is true that the recruitment of new friends is limited by the shortness of time, both daily and in the carpe diem sense, which I like to incorrectly translate as seize the carp.
Once you've had friends for 40 years, you know what you like. A few months ago, two Americans moved into our part of town, and I could tell within minutes that their irony level was just right. Now if they come round, such terrible drunkeness ensues that I find myself waving a raw leg of lamb around at 10pm when we're meant to be having dinner. The new friendship is socially but not always gastronomically successful.
All is fair in love and friendship, and sometimes you, too, get the heave. If you have committed a crime, this is acceptable, but if it's someone for whom you feel deep affection, and there is no explanation forthcoming, it niggles painfully for years. Or as Beth Kephart write in Into the Tangle of Friendship: "I didn't realise that you can't make old friends, that you can only lose them, and in losing them you walk around with a void inside that you can never adequately explain."


I can't say how much I agree with this article and happy to have friends with the same sort of relationship. The ease of picking up the phone and have a guilt-free conversation despite being out of touch for months. It is true that being in touch makes it easier to stay clued in on what's happening, however like the article suggests, surely it's not a necessary criterion for a long-lasting friendship. =D

summertime

Been feeling a bit moody recently. A few deaths going on about. Not anyone I know personally. A wife of a guy who comes to the pub. A lecturer at Churchill. It scares me quite a bit when I think that I've not actually missed someone. That I've not attended a funeral of someone I knew. I wonder what I'll feel. I cry when I think of someone who's lost someone else. What will it be like when I'm one of them? Pretty depressing stuff huh.

Anyway, we're moving! Yippee. Out of Great Shelford and into Cherry Hinton. Gone are the cold winter months and freezing showers. We'll get the keys to the bigger and better located flat in early August. Pete's got a couple of fishtanks (one's 5 feet long!!!) off ebay. [note to myself: he must ask letting agency if it's okay keeping fish.] We had a really nice evening a few days ago, to celebrate us getting the new flat. Had steak and a nice bottle of champagne. Just us talking about us. Unconciously growing in this relationship. Considering what a mess I was before, I cannot believe how lucky I am. =)