Where has the last week gone? Apologies for my silence. I claim school holidays and the Fifth Amendment.
Friendship. Ten letters that make up perhaps one of the most important words in the English language. I suppose water qualifies as quite important too and food is reasonably essential, but without friends most of us are barren. The true friendless loner is a rare animal and generally either somebody to be hugely pitied or someone to be concerned about and quite possibly frightened of.
Without plumbing the depths of philosophy and psychiatry, hopefully that brief paragraph won’t create too many opponents to the basic principle that we all need friends. The question then is how do we find them and perhaps more importantly having found them, how do we keep them. A correspondent reminded me the other day of the fact that friendship is very definitely a two way street and something that requires effort and interest from both sides. Even the oldest friendships can wither and die on the vine if not tended and watered on a fairly regular basis. I sometimes wonder whether modern communications have made this easier or harder? Our Victorian forebears had to rely either on the postal service or a visiting card and afternoon tea with crust-free cucumber sandwiches and a delicious slice of home-made sponge. I don’t know about you, but I love afternoon tea! The Telegram sped things up somewhat but was by definition limited. It was the landline telephone that transformed the ease with which we could check up on compatriots and indeed many housebound folk in particular would spend ages on Alexander Graham Bell’s invention, never mind the teenage daughters who could somehow find something new and interesting to say for interminable hours. (As a historical note there are apparently at least three others who can claim to be the original inventor of the telephone, notably an Italian, Antonio Meucci, who does appear to have invented a working phone before Bell but couldn’t afford to patent it and died penniless. As they say in South Africa, “shame”).
But it was the arrival of the mobile phone and then the internet that have totally transformed the way that we interact and stay in touch. I remember working for a small division of BT in 1986 that required me to carry something the size of a household brick to stay in touch as I travelled around Britain. It was basically designed for the car but could be carried around, provided you had been doing sufficient reps in the gym. It was staggering, though, how quickly that morphed into a small, pocket-sized handset with a national cellular network that permitted instant verbal communication 24/7…..unless you were in the Scottish Highlands…..or on Dartmoor….or my peaceful little village in Wiltshire, all of five miles from the bustling metropolis of Bath. Anyway I digress. Before we knew it, it was possible to write via email, sms, What’s App, Twitter and interminable other methods that would appear instantly in your “friend’s” inbox and elicit an equally instant response, assuming said friend could be bothered to reply. I love the fact that I can ring up and talk to a friend anytime I like. Talking, (i.e. using one’s voice) is a time -honoured means of passing on one’s thoughts in a way that is easily understood by the recipient. Generally, when doing it face to face there is little room for confusion, although even then we sometimes get things hopelessly wrong. On the phone, I suppose there is greater room for misinterpretation, although personally it’s a medium I love and I reckon you normally get a pretty good idea from someone’s tone as to whether they’re with you or heartily pissed off and about to slam the phone down, metaphorically speaking. But when you remove the audio bit and rely on the written word, all those subtle nuances that have been an essential part of human life for thousands of years are suddenly missing. Now we have to try and interpret what the sender really means. Are they being cryptic, or cynical, or funny, sarcastic, ironic or genuine. Is that snide comment an attempt at harmless humour or really intended to puncture our delicate hide. Emojis and XXX can help but even they can mislead. Isn’t it extraordinary how the person with whom one is totally at home in person and perhaps even in love with, can almost become a stranger on the other side of a screen? It would be intriguing to know how many friendships and romances, have stumbled on the cobblestones of misunderstood rhetoric. I know from personal experience that these supposedly innocuous and even loving scribblings can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences. It’s so hard to transmit an emotion in writing and it can be so easily misinterpreted. I fear this is often exaggerated by the instantaneous nature of modern communication. Generally, I like to write at length, if I’m going to write at all, but too often the recipient doesn’t have the time, or privacy, or perhaps even the inclination, to write anything meaningful in response. To be fair, it’s so easy to become infatuated with the phone that one pings off a steady stream of trivia, when one should be concentrating on the housework, or completing the VAT return, or playing cards with the children, or…….you get the point. I’d love to make a resolution to abandon email, sms, What’s App etc and revert to just phoning people or indeed putting quill to parchment in the old-fashioned way. A colleague of mine, the golf commentator Ken Brown, has done this very successfully for many years and whilst it can be annoying at times, I think it’s also hugely admirable.
There is so much in the press these days about the evils of social media and particularly in education circles it’s very apparent that it can be extremely malevolent and a thoroughly undesirable aspect of a teenager’s life. I suppose its impossible to turn the clock back but I noticed the other day that even the inventor of the internet was postulating as to whether he had uncaged a monster that was now too big to be harnessed and controlled.
Hopefully, beloved reader, you will have understood my words and mood and not strike me off your Christmas card list…..assuming you still send cards.
2DtC
ADayInTheStrifeOf 