Mid-Month Musings: MAY

 What are friends for?

I have been thinking about the nature of 'friendship' recently. 

Several decades ago, a friend of mine, hitting his fiftieth birthday, told me that the older you get, the more important your friends become. At the time, I dismissed the idea, figuring that friends were equally important however old you were, and not just for lending you money or looking after your cat while you're on holiday. But getting older certainly makes you understand what friendship means. 

I think most people's 'best friends' are their life partners, and P is certainly my best friend. But a 'significant other' isn't quite the same as a 'friend', is it? Our friends are those people in our lives who aren't members of our family or sexual partners, but whom we like, even love, and enjoy spending time with. There are gradations of friendship, from acquaintances to lifelong bosom buddies. They can be older or younger than you, any gender, any race or culture, people you only meet up with in person once a decade, or people you see most days; they might live far away or next door; you might have known them since childhood or only met them recently. 

There are endless reasons to cultivate proper friendships, from having someone who will join you in poking fun at complete strangers, to having someone who'll always know whether you want the truth or a lie when you ask 'Does my bum look big in this?'.

Below are two recent personal experiences of friendship in action:

Socialising

We spent the Sunday afternoon before the May Day bank holiday this year at the Towers, the Master's majestic residence. 'The Towers' isn't it's actual name, and isn't even the full pretend-name we give to it, but I don't want to give away any clues to the actual address, as the Master doesn't have time for streams of visitors demanding tours. To reach the Towers from the Manor [our own stately pile], we have to drive to a different part of God's Own County - from South Yorkshire to West Yorkshire, no small thing for a Yorkshire person - and the fact that we are prepared to make this immense journey into enemy territory illustrates the warm regard with which we the Master himself.

The Master cunningly disguised as a Greek chef

We had been invited to the Towers to partake in a Greek Feast. P and I, and the Master, have been holding these feasts roughly twice a year for several years now, alternating between the Towers and the Manor, and so far we've had feasts loosely based on Indian, Thai, Spanish and Moroccan food. This time, the Master had cooked a delicious stiffado, which led to a torrent of lame puns, plus several other courses, side dishes, entrees and apperitifs, washed down with torrents of alcohol. The only time I ever drink more than a glass of wine is when we visit the Towers, which is the only reason I'm relieved we only do it twice a year. 

Well-basted with Prosecco, spiced rum [which I added to the Prosecco], Retsina and Metaxa, we had a superlative afternoon, wandering through the Tower's recently-raised sunken garden, admiring the Master's massive peonies and his little ha-ha, reclining in the delightful living room full of precious objets d'arte, and even being allowed inside the Master's private study, affectionately named The Cricketers, where he keeps his Old Masters. I'd been dieting for a week, so was pleased to be able to consume a slice of home-made pavlova as my weekly treat:

So, thank you to the Master for such a pleasant afternoon.  This is certainly one of the things that make friendships so important in life.

Crisis-management

Earlier this year, P was away so I went out for a meal with my old school friends, B and T. We went back to ours afterwards for dessert. T, who falls asleep at the stroke of ten o'clock and rises like a lark at the crack of dawn, went home early, but B hung around chatting until about one o'clock. 

I have to confess that I was getting bozz-eyed with exhaustion well before she stood up and announced her imminent departure - not because I was bored, but simply because I was very tired. I actually love chatting to B into the early hours, and have many fond memories of doing so in the past, but I'm just not up to it these days, like I used to be. I'm hoping I'll get my mo-jo back if ever I manage to lose weight and get fit again. 

In retrospect, this exhaustion was why what followed took place...

I went into the kitchen to wrap up some dessert for B to take home for her husband, and when I returned to the living room, B asked me something and I discovered I couldn't talk. 

Yes, I know. This seems odd, particularly as I usually never shut up. 

I could begin sentences, but not finish them. B asked me a couple of questions and all I could say was 'I'm going to...' or 'I will...' before trailing off into silence, unable to get my brain to work out where the sentence was going. 

As you might imagine, this word-salad - or The Case Of The Vanishing Words - was frightening for me and very disturbing for B. 

'Are you ok?' she asked me, and I felt as if I had no way of responding. I just stared at her blankly, as if she'd asked me to solve Fermat's Last Theorem.

B is a recently retired nurse, so she stayed remarkably calm, sat me down and tried to stop me panicking. It crossed my mind that I might be having a TIA [Transient Ischaemic Attack - also often called a 'mini-stroke'], and when I looked at B's expression I could see that was thinking the same thing, which freaked me out even more! 

In retrospect, I don't think it was a TIA. I think my brain had just fallen partially asleep and the language centres were only partially conscious. This might sound like nonsense, but I have a history of sleep-related disorders like sleep-walking, nightmares, night terrors, dreaming that I'm awake when I'm actually asleep, insomnia and nodding off suddenly at random moments such as when I'm in the car. Last year, P and I spent a few days in Cheshire, and every time we got in the car to go anywhere, I immediately fell asleep - I can't remember anything about the actual travelling we did during the short break. Fortunately, I wasn't driving... 

I have pre-diabetes and fibromyalgia, both of which can cause fatigue and disordered sleep. And I have experienced this inability to talk before, though only with P - I think it just gives him a breather.

Anyway, B insisted on staying overnight. She even insisted on sharing my bed [which sounds much more racy than it was!]. Unfortunately, not expecting an overnight visitor, I had only cleaned the ground floor of our house, so it was just as well that she slept in my bed as the other two beds had no bedclothes on them. Also, though we have lots of spare, clean pillows for guests, I was too addled to remember that P uses a foam pillow that is supposedly good for your neck but feels to me like an instrument of torture - poor B ended up having to use that. 

I was still feeling weird, as evidenced by the fact that B asked if I had a t-shirt she could sleep in and I immediately went up to the top floor, then stood in the attic bedroom wondering what the hell I was doing. Was this our T-shirt department? After a while, I remembered that we don't keep any clothes up there, and returned to my bedroom where I spent some time with the wardrobe doors open, staring at my clothes and wondering what a T-shirt was. I'm not sure what item of clothing I ended up offering B as night-attire - it could have been a feather boa, a baker-boy hat or a pair of roller-skates for all I know.

In bed, I tried to make myself feel 'normal' by doing my usual pre-sleep routine of looking at my Kindle for a minute or so, which B rightly thought was a silly idea though in reality I didn't read any of it, just stared briefly at the screen and then put it down. She tried to calm me down by getting me to do 'square breathing' *, but I couldn't follow the instructions. However, I really wanted to get it right as I felt it was the least I could do, as B was being so kind and her evening out had not turned out as she might have hoped. I can't remember the actual details, but I vaguely recall her saying something like 'Breathe in for a count of three...' and me doing this, then I must have missed a bit because I next heard her say something like '...now breathe in for a count of five....'.  I kept thinking: How long does she think I can hold my breath? Does she think I'm a dolphin?

I must have fallen asleep only seconds after lying down, despite the fact that I haven't shared a bed or even a bedroom with an adult other than P for decades, and normally I'd have felt embarrassed and self-conscious. Poor B, on the other hand, spent most of the night awake. She suffers from insomnia anyway, and was wearing a random item of clothing and sleeping on a weird pillow. I had brand new toothbrushes in my bathroom cupboard but I was too far gone to offer her one so she hadn't been able to brush her teeth. 

And unfortunately I am a champion snorer.  

I know that I snore very loudly because members of my family who have been sleeping in the attic bedroom have commented grumpily on how my snoring kept them awake. Ironically, the only family member who has never complained about it is P, who either sleeps very soundly himself, is too long-suffering to complain or is actually deaf. The following morning, B told me that she thought I might have sleep apnoeia as not only did I snore loudly but I also stopped breathing for extended periods every so often. So she'd been kept away by a sound like a buzz-saw through a megaphone every time I turned onto my back, plus long stretches of my apparently failing to breathe. It must have been one of the best night's out she'd ever had!

The point of this anecdote is to illustrate what true friendship means. It is not only wanting to chat with your mate till the early hours, but also being prepared to volunteer, unprompted, to stay the night when your friend loses the power of speech, even though it means lying awake with your head resting on a seriously uncomfortable orthopedic pillow, wearing an unspecified but almost certainly inappropriate item of clothing, and listening to your friend snoring so loudly it can be heard in the next street, while occasionally stopping breathing altogether. Then waking up and going home without breakfast, while your friend continues sleeping in bed.

The only time I can remember someone other than P or my mum going above and beyond to help me like this was when another friend, D, with whom I shared a house between leaving university and starting teacher-training, looked after me when I had a very nasty tummy bug. She, like B, went well above and beyond the call of duty.

SO, THANKS TO B [AND D] FOR BEING TRUE FRIENDS.

[And, B, I know I've apologised before and will no doubt do so again, but I'm really sorry about abandoning you, forty years ago, at that awful pub in Sheffield when your car broke down on the way to the theatre...]

 

* Box breathing, also known as square breathing, is a breathing technique that can relieve stress and reset the mind and body after a stressful situation. The technique works by slowing down the breath and distracting the mind by drawing the focus to a 4-4-4-4 pattern of inhale, hold, exhale, hold.

https://www.verywellhealth.com/box-breathing-8423967

What's the best thing a friend has ever done for you, or the worst thing you've ever done to them?