A brief encounter, a long friendship

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot, but he'll remember with advantages what feats he did that day.

My wife tells me that I've reached an age where I should start writing my memoirs. Or at least my memories: my life so far is, in many ways, made up of a series of pieces. So what better way to account for it than in blog posts?

The day in question was in September in 1964. My parents, my brother in I were on our way back from a memorable holiday in a country that no longer exists: Yugoslavia. Two events in particular stick in my memory.

Plitvička Jezera: an extraordinary place

One occurred at an idyllic spot, called Plitvička Jezera, a glorious mountain lake. I took a rowing boat out on it alone although I was only eleven - perhaps because I was only eleven - and once well away from the shore, I dived in over the side and then swam back to the boat. It was bracing and exciting: bracing because the water was far colder than I'd ever dip more than a toe in today, exciting because there was always a chance that a current would whip the boat away from me and I'd be left confronting an interesting challenge.

My mother knew nothing about my little joy ride and I count on you not to tell her now. After all, nothing happened. I got safely back and if she hasn't worried about the event for 54 years, what's the point of her worrying about it now?

The other event that left a particular trace in my memory stronger than many others involved my brother Nicky, after whom my younger son is called. In a coastal town called Sveti Stefan he managed to get separated from the rest of the family and, after having searched for him fruitlessly for nearly an hour, we went to a café on the other side of the causeway that links the island to the mainland and waited for him to reappear on it.

Sveti Stefan and the causeway that saw the confrontation
between my brother and my mother

Since there was no other way off the island, he inevitably did come into sight, an hour or so later. The image forever ingrained in my memory is of my mother stalking down to the bridge to greet him. She was looking highly business like, about as business like as I've ever seen her and, while I couldn't hear her words to him when they met, I think few were of a kind generally associated with the notion of endearment.

The odd thing is that my son, the one called after him, also managed to get spectacularly lost on more than one occasion in his childhood. So whenever I hear people using the Shakespeare line, "what's in a name?", I'm inclined to reply, "if it's Nicky, then a tendency to get disastrously lost as a child".

At the time, my family lived in Rome. On the way home, we stopped in Perugia. I imagine my mother took us to see the Raphael frescos, but I have to say that, wonderful as they no doubt are, I have practically no recollection of them. At 11 - my brother wasn't quite eight - my fascination for the great elements of our cultural heritage wasn't quite as powerful as I believe my mother imagined.

What does stand out was the arrival in our camping site of an Austin mini-van with a hand-made wooden box lashed to the top, and crammed with people: two adults in front, two children and a six-month old in a carry-cot behind. What made it even more remarkable that they'd travelled in such a confined space, was the realisation that both adults were unusually tall.

A 1960s Austin Mini van of the kind our friends showed up in at Perugia
Though theirs had British plates and a wooden box on top

"Good Lord," said my mother, "how did they all get into that?"

"They're Brits," said my father, who'd spotted their registration plates, "and they look hot, bothered and dusty."

So as one put the kettle on to boil, the other wandered over to suggest they might like a cup of tea. That's the offer no Englishman can resist, especially in their state.

This was the beginning of a friendship that has endured over half a century. Over that cup of tea, my parents issued and they accepted an invitation to come and see us in Rome. A week later they showed up and we got to know them better: Hazel and Michael, the parents, Richard, Charles and William the children - the last the six-month old in his carry cot.

Later, when my brother and I joined a boarding school in England, Hazel and Michael agreed to be our legal guardians, adults resident in Britain who agreed to take charge of children with parents abroad in case they were orphaned.

We were close through many years. While I was a student in London, I saw them regularly, and I was a student there for ten years. As often as not, Michael and I would have long debates on political, social or philosophical matters which at my age I found fascinating though ultimately frustrating - he was good at dodging my arguments, shifting his ground or slightly deforming my words and throwing them back at me - and I'm sure everyone around us, not least long-suffering Hazel, found them immensely dull. However, once children came along and in particular after work took us into Continental Europe, we drifted apart to some extent. We never lost contact entirely but it became infrequent to the point of sparseness.

But then we returned to England. Not long after, we got back in touch with Hazel - I rang her to wish her a happy birthday, and easy one to remember since it had also been my father's. It was then we learned that Michael was dying. It's a relief I feel to this day that we were back and in touch soon enough to see him one last time. It was a moment of warmth and also of poignancy: he could say little and had trouble staying awake but it was easy to see he was as happy as I was that our paths had crossed again.

Since then we've seen each other several times. It's amusing that the baby in the carry cot is now a man in his fifties. Well, not that amusing: it reminds that for me too over half a century has gone by.

Still, we're back in touch with some close, warm friends. And it's invaluable to have such friends. Proving that a random encounter in an Italian campsite can have wonderful consequences.

As it demonstrates a truth that will come as no surprise to an Englishman: the offer of a cup of tea can be extraordinarily potent.

Never give up on distant friends

There was a time when people were born, grew up, lived and died in the same place. I remember Rabbi Hugo Gryn telling the story of a Jew who’d been born in Austria-Hungary, gone to school in the Ukraine and university in Poland, been persecuted in Germany, and lived out the rest of his life in the Soviet Union. ‘He moved around a lot,’ a journalist commented. ‘No – spent his whole life in the same village,’ came the reply.

Well, these days few of us stay still that long. We go from place to place doing either the same thing or, at best, the next: from one level of education to the next, one job to the next or one spouse to the next. The latter, by the way, is often curious to watch: it generally bears out Oscar Wilde’s view that a second marriage demonstrates the triumph of optimism over experience (for the record, my wife is an optimist, while I’m perfectly satisfied with the experience). Down the years, I’ve moved through a series of homes in wearying succession. My grandmother once told me I’d completely filled the pages for one letter in her address book.

Generally, those who do move around this way don’t usually do it by choice. We live like corks among the waves, buffeted first from one side and then from the other. One aspect of this existence which seems particularly sad is the way we make friends, grow close to them, and then have to part again. Recently, though, I’ve decided that it’s far less sad than I thought.

In the first place, there’s a pleasure that doesn’t fade in remembering times spent with friends. A statement on the lines of ‘Do you remember when we got stuck in the snow with Alice and George?’ usually leads to something much more enjoyable than the original experience itself. There are also incidents which were pleasurable both at the time and in recollection. While we were living in Germany, we were introduced for the first time to the celebration of the Chinese New Year – twice with a Chinese friend who will no doubt head back to China in time, and on three other occasions with friends who turned up at our place to prepare a meal for us, and who are now back in Singapore.

But there aren’t just pleasures of memory. Because ultimately friendship is about contact with someone, today, not just in the past. And that matters not just because it’s a pleasure, but because it’s an expression of what matters most in life: a link to others.

Friendship gives links that last. I say links deliberately, because bonds are something else: they bind, they tie us. That can be a source of just as much happiness – if you’re lucky, bonds with your family are invaluable, if you’re unlucky they’re murder (if Sartre was right and hell is other people, surely it’s at its most hellish with bitter relatives). So the friend you haven’t heard from for years remains a friend for all that: we saw a friend some months ago for the first time in seventeen years, and only a few months before her death. The real tragedy would have been to have missed the chance to see her again, and we’re both delighted to be in touch again with her widower.

We were able to see her again because the Internet brought us back together. It’s fashionable to knock contact via the Internet, but to me it’s a tremendous tool to maintain old relationships. We’ll exchange messages with a friend several times in a couple of weeks, and then perhaps won’t hear from them again for several months, but it’s wonderful to know that the exchange can happen again. It can even maintain a new kind of friendship: I had a message the other day from a friend, now in Shanghai, whom I’ve never met; Danielle corresponds regularly with a friend in Minnesota she’s never met.

Then one day someone will write and say ‘I can come and see you on such and such a day’, or you can say ‘I’ll be with you in two weeks.’ Soon you see a smile coming towards you at an airport or a station and a burst of recognition, not just of the person, but of the joy you had in being with them.

And the most amazing thing? With a good friend, at least, it’s as though you’d never been apart. You pick up the conversation as though it had been interrupted only minutes before. I’d like to say that it’s as pleasurable as slipping into a jacket that you love for its familiarity, except that’s only half of the feeling, because familiarity is comforting but not uplifting. The other half is the feeling you get when you hear a burst of music that you’d loved as a child, and you sense again the well-being it gave you then. Well-being isn’t so common that we should ignore any chance to experience it.

So keep in touch with your friends, however distant they may be. You never know when paths can cross again. And you must know as well as I do what a magical moment it is when they do.

The best of friends

Being made redundant is, I’ll admit, a pretty depressing experience (particularly when it happens for the third time – why, I may soon have to start wondering whether I’ve been doing something wrong in my career, a thought that had never previously occurred to me). However, there are benefits too.

First of all, there’s the time for reflection offered by what I hope will turn out to be a brief period of unemployment. Then there’s the redundancy itself which can be quite a learning experience.

In my case this has led to my giving some thought to the nature of friendship.

My reflections were helped by listening to a discussion on the theme in an old episode of In Our Time. The participants started their review way back in classical antiquity.

Now I should say that I don’t always go along with the unquestioning admiration of all things Greek. For instance, Plato’s Lysis which I learned is devoted to the subject of friendship, rules out the attraction of opposites as a possible basis. This is because it would imply the good being attracted to the bad. This strikes me as a painfully formalistic and limited view of good: two people of opposite temperament can still both be good – there are many ways to be good. My way of being good may be the best way, but I’m tolerant and broad-minded enough to admit that yours may not be entirely without merit.

What really interested me was when they got onto the subject of Aristotle. He, it seems, distinguished three categories of friendship on the basis of utility, enjoyment or excellence. The problem with the first two is that as soon as the utility or enjoyment ends, so does the friendship – only the third endures.

Now this I can go along with. Utility friendship is clearly the kind of thing that exists in general between colleagues. At the lowest end of the scale, it’s forced – you oblige yourself to get on with people you’d probably go out of your way to avoid, left to your own devices. I confess I’m not good at that kind of artificial friendliness as people read my real feelings much too easily. I like to think that I have no patience with fools, but lots of people link to think that: after all, it’s a neatly disguised boast wrapped in contempt for others. Clearly, I think numerous people around me are fools, while thinking that I’m not a fool myself. Ironically, I’m probably at my most foolish when I get impatient with others who disagree me with me (and class themselves by that token with the fools).

Then there are the colleagues with whom one can have a real friendship. These are people one admires or who do outstanding work or with whom it’s just fun to work. Sadly, however, once we part company there’s little basis for the friendship to continue. It’s a pity, but I suspect before long all I’ll have of these utility friends is some pleasant memories and a sense of pride over some of our of things we achieved together.

This is the same as what happens with friends of enjoyment. Drinking friends or friends with whom one plays football are great until one realises that hangovers really aren’t much fun and running up and down the same pitch several dozen times is no way to spend an hour or two. When you go off to do something a bit more rational – which means more or less anything – you tend to lose touch with the old friends, some of them getting very old, who are still trying to cling on to the image of their youth and its pastimes.

Then there are the friends of excellence. These are the ones to whom you’re bound by an affection that’s mutual and unconditional: they’re your friends not because they’re cleverer or more skilful or more amusing than others but because they are who they are. No-one summarised that better than Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French writer. After his friend the poet Etienne de la Boétie died, he wrote if people pressed him to say why he loved la Boétie, he could find no better of way of replying than to say ‘because he was Etienne de la Boétie and I was Michel de Montaigne’.

Now that’s the kind of friendship that’s worth having. And I’m glad that I leave my former company with a few friendships of that strength and they won’t be broken by a mere inconvenience like redundancy.