Hello old friend

Picture this. The Albert Hall. Red velvet curtains draped across the back of the stage. Lights go down and the music starts. And the guitar starts to play. Thunderous applause. Clapton singing Hello old friend as he walks on stage. Can my life get any better?!

Hello old friend,

It’s really good to see you once again.

So this could go two ways. Do I do rock and roll and great guitar, or friends and what they mean in life? Music is easy. Who doesn’t like it? Although, having said that I did meet someone once who admitted to never listening to music. She didn’t own a radio or any type of player. Said it distracted her from whatever she was doing. And I mean never. How is that possible?

Friends are more difficult. An elderly man I knew once said that if you can count your true friends on one hand at one time, you are lucky. Does that sound odd to you? I did it and think he has a point. We’re not talking your 349 facebook friends or the people who sit next to at work or join you in the pub on a Friday night. I mean the real friends who know you backwards. People you can tell anything and they don’t judge you. People who you can phone at any time and they really will come if you call.

… ain’t no mountain high enough,

Ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t no river wide enough;

To keep me from you;

Baby if you need me call me no matter where you are,

No matter how far;

Just call my name; I’ll be there in a hurry;

On that you can depend and never worry.

One doesn’t make that many of those in a lifetime. School friends come and go. Besties at play school, everyone at primary, in-crowds at high school, more solid friendships at university. Perhaps. And then you move away or move on and sometimes your friends go but come back again. Years later you bump into someone and they say “Aren’t you so-and-so? I’d recognise that laugh anywhere” and if you’re lucky, you have another friend.

But don’t think this is going to happen at a school reunion! If you’re a woman, you are likely to worry for ages beforehand about how you look and what people you haven’t see for 20 or 30 years are going to think. Have you aged well? Are you successful? How? Where? Most importantly, have you put on weight? Because, let’s be honest, that’s what you’re going to do. This is not going to be about re-connecting with old friends because if they really were real friends, why on earth would you have lost contact in the first place?

Good friends are rare and I don’t think when we are young, that we realise just how important they are. I have tried very hard to instil in my daughter the value of her friends. I have been married twice and one of the worst things after the divorce was losing a circle of friends. As a couple you are part of a group and when you split, the group often decides which of the couple they will continue to mix with. Weird hey? You’d think they would continue to invite both parties separately and let them fight it out between them but it doesn’t happen.

If, as the wife for example, you have allowed yourself to be sucked into your husband’s circle, seeing less and less of your own friends, you will find that you are left with very few come the time you find yourself on the outside of what was once the in-group. So, some advice for free, keep your friends – and your independence. Remember how important they are. Try to always have at least one best friend, even if you can’t make five.

Sing along with Queen. Be happy you’ve got a good friend – who of course may also be your lover …

You’re the best friend

That I ever had

I’ve been with you such a long time

You’re my sunshine

And I want you to know

That my feelings are true

I really love you

You’re my best friend

Ooh, you make me live …

What a wonderful world

My father had an improbably sweet view of life on earth. Which is strange, thinking that he came from hardy farming and mining stock and lived through both World Wars and the then-Rhodesian bush war. He had a never-ending fund of stories about his life and my biggest regret is that I never wrote them down before he died.

Dad was born in 1905 onto a farm in Southern Rhodesia. That was what he did. He farmed. Bush, cattle and buck. His interests. In that order. Water, dip, mielies, whirlwinds, dust, gun dogs, gold mines, grass and acacia trees. The list of what evokes him and his stories is endless. By the time I really knew him, he had settled into a farming life in town and went almost daily out into the sometimes harsh and often beautiful Rhodesian bush to tend to his cattle and do what farmers do all day!

He only stopped farming in the Seventies when it became too dangerous to go alone onto the farm because of the armed struggle raging throughout the country. The farm was sold and he passed away soon after.

But Dad was a sentimentalist, a softy at heart. He cried when he was touched and loved romance. Louis Armstrong’s gravelly deep throated singing suited him just fine. He’d sing along with him

I see trees of green, red roses too

I see them bloom for me and you

And I think to myself what a wonderful world.

And you knew he really did love us, his family, and the countryside around him.

I often wonder how many of our memories from childhood are real and how much is built up like lego blocks from things we hear. Things that then become your memories. Are they things that really happened to you or did they happen to someone else? If you think your parents felt one way, did they really? Are you just projecting your ideas and opinions onto them and believe they must have felt the same way?

I read a moving newspaper commentary recently by a columnist who was honest enough to talk about having strong opinions. As he said, something happens, often something atrocious in another part of the world, and within hours of it happening, comment is already out there. So how does what you hear or read affect you? Does your opinion change depending on what you read? Should it?

If you feel sympathy for the victims of an attack, is it bad that you haven’t felt as strongly about victims somewhere else? And if you don’t express your opinion? Is it worse to not say something or to say something that seems inappropriate to some people?

He ends saying that all you can really do is to talk about your own feelings, your own opinions, however unsure you may be or whether you think you have said everything there is to be said. Not many people do that.

My Baby Takes the Morning Train

From a British 1940’s Communist Party poster that hangs in my kitchen

I bet when this was written it wasn’t intended to turn into someone’s feminist anthem! Probably the opposite but really, have you heard the words?

My baby takes the morning train

He works from nine ’til five and then

He takes another home again

To find me waiting for him

I love it. I belt the words out and a smile comes to my face. Is she really just waiting at home for him every day? Is that her lot in life? That’s it? And yet, look how happy it makes her.

I grew up in a world where just this happened. My mother and her friends did not work, in the traditional sense of the word. They managed their houses and in my mother’s case, the farm, and all that that involved. I do too but I also work and have done so for 40 years. I am sure however that my house looks nothing like my mother’s. I’ve always said that the most positive thing I can say about wearing spectacles is that when you don’t wear them, it’s amazing how much faster housework goes!

But I don’t think that made my mother any the less busy or valuable, especially to my father. What it did do however, was reinforce the ‘women’s place is in the home’ viewpoint. It was a conversation we never had: it hadn’t been discussed in my youth and when she died, I was too young to have gone anywhere beyond the home to learn other points of view. I feel however that she would be the first to tell women today that they should be with their children and they should support their husband, but also that the role women play in the home and the relationship is important. She would have deplored bad treatment of women in any form and expected men to be courteous and responsible in their roles. But perhaps this emphasis on ‘roles’ is the crux of the matter.

Feminism is one of those hot potato subjects. My prospective sister-in-law once told me as I was about to meet my staunchly right-wing Afrikaans father-in-law “Just remember three things: don’t talk politics, don’t talk religion and whatever you do, don’t talk English”! She could well have added “don’t talk about women” because certainly, it was a subject just as fraught with divisive politics. But I do wonder why people still today look askance if you say you are a feminist.

To me, feminism is about power – and choice. Or the other way around? Having choice gives me the power to control my life. I want to have the power to choose my job, to earn as much as the next man for the work I do, to be educated how and where I want to be, and to be treated well as I do it all. This is what equality is all about – the same treatment, the same opportunities and rights, be it in politics or economics, or the social or personal sphere. Why is that considered subversive or divisive? Why does one even need to debate it?

Although perhaps my view of feminism is too moderate. Perhaps I have missed nuances or even basic premises that are all important. I will probably get told so if that’s the case – but then, that in itself is a power and choice worth having. The freedom to debate and to be considered worthy of the debate.