Isn’t it odd how sometimes, without anything at all happening, close friends can slowly drift out of your life without you ever really noticing? Rather, you notice, but it only strikes you once in a while that you’ve not spoken to someone in months whom you used to see daily. It’s done innocently, but a day turns to a week, a week turns to month. Months can turn to years I would imagine. There must be some people who used to be bosom buddies with one anther who now don’t even share Christmas cards, whilst absolutely nothing specific has happened to pull them apart.
One such example is my friend Leah. But this is the thing, I call her a close friend, and she undoubtedly is, but I’ve not seen her for months. MONTHS! She lives a ten minute drive away, her phone number is stored in my phone, mine in hers, we both drink in town, and we both know each other well enough to knock on either front door without calling ahead. And so why the lack of contact? Well it’s inexplicable but it’s not the first time it’s happened in my life. I’ll meet a mutual friend of somebody and they’ll say “So heard anything of so-and-so?� and I’ll have to say “No, nothing. Not spoken in months.� They’ll look concerned and say “Oh. Anything wrong? What happened?�
“Oh, no, don’t worry, nothing. Just we’ve not spoken. I must give him/her a call.�
I don’t do stand-offs. I’ve never, ever thought ‘Well if they’ve not bothered calling me, I’m not calling them.’ I’m petty but not that petty. I accepted the fact that people generally don’t call me long ago. It just happens that you don’t happen to speak for a few days, and as I say, that can last for months.
I think boys are more blaze about it, with their male friends, than girls. This is a compliment to girls, they value friendship – and more importantly the importance that friendship is kept alive – more than boys. Men value their mates, but if a bloke goes a few weeks without speaking to their best pal, that’s perfectly normal. I think a girl would concern herself that something was wrong if they’d not heard from their favourite gal-pal. And that’s to their credit; friends are hugely important and keeping that friendship alive should be a natural and easy responsibility to uphold.
That said, I’m as lax at calling my female friends as I am my male friends and they are jointly as lax with me. There are still differences though, now I think about it. My best male friend is described in this Blog as ‘K’, and my best female friend ‘A’. There is no secretive reason for this, their names are Keith and Alison, but I had this idea when Pathetic Lot started that it would look kinda New York, beat-nick and cool to only describe people I mention regularly by an initial. I think I saw in first in Kenneth William’s diaries and liked the idea. It’s a stupid notion though, and whilst I’ll probably continue to call them K and A here, it’s just through habit and for continuity, I might as well have used their full names from the start. Anyway, I speak to A every couple of days, but I can go for weeks without speaking to K. There’s a difference between male and female relationships and friendships in that way.
So, my friend Leah. I can’t think the last time we spoke. I can remember the last time I saw her, but I couldn’t tell you how many months ago it was. It’s a disgrace. So tonight I was sat in The Lion and gave her a call.
That’s the great thing about mobile phones, you can idly scroll though your on-screen address book and look at the names of people you really should contact. Why have their numbers in there in the first place if they’re never going to get used? As it happened, when I rang she was on a train coming into town and ten minutes later we were sat together at the bar. That’s how easy it is. There’s really no excuse.
She looked great, and was such good fun it made me doubly cross and frustrated I’d not called her a day, week or month before. How can these friends co-exist in the same city as you and yet never enter your lives? It probably cost me 10p to call her, but it was invaluable to see her.
And these things snow-ball. She told me an old Norwegian friend of mine, Bertel Berthleson, was in town for the night, so a couple of hours later I greeted him with a happy hug in Flanagan’s and we drunk the night away like old buddies. I’ve had Bertel’s number in my phone for years too. I’ve been to visit him and stay at his home in Norway. Every single day I’ve carried my phone, and that number, around with me in my pocket whist never pressing the two buttons it would take to connect. It’s insane.
We’re all lucky to have friends. Some people don’t and I can’t imagine how desperate that feels. I’m determined now not to take them for granted and curate my relationship with them all. After all, the only reason they became friends in the first place is because we got on and liked one another.
On the other hand, I think sometimes it’s good to cull people from your mobile phone address book. Not spoken to them in five years? Can’t think why you ever would because you never had anything in common in the first place? Delete it. And then there’s all those other names and numbers that don’t mean anything. The pizza shop close to where you used to live. Delete. That odd name that you have no recollection of, probably took when standing outside a bar at 2am because they said they could save you 20% on printing up some leaflets? Delete. Slim that address book down to friends you’d like to see regularly and important business numbers. If that only leaves ten numbers, so be it. So long as you use them regularly.
People collect numbers. They like to have 331 names in their mobile phone. I’ve just ruthlessly gone through mine and more than halved the original tally. Now when I look through it I feel reassured as there are nice and valued people there, lumped in with boring but regrettably necessary professional links. It’s made me feel so much better. Some numbers I thought might be useful, debated on keeping them, but decided to write in a notebook just in case and then deleted from my phone. I can’t tell you how relaxing it is.
And of course, Leah and Bertel are still there. Hopefully they will be for a long time.
Here endeth the lesson.
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