The reason why friends get more important as you age is that your family becomes more impossible. Come on, I can’t be the only person to notice that? When a whole bunch of people with similar personalities all get set in their ways at around the same time, it’s a recipe for: WE ARE NOT HAVING CHRISTMAS AT YOUR HOUSE ONE MORE F**KING TIME BECAUSE IF I THOUGHT MY MOTHER-IN-LAW WAS BAD THEN YOURS IS THE ANTI-CHRIST AND YOUR WIFE CAN’T COOK FOR SH*T SO WE ARE GOING TO CARL’S JR AND HERE’S THE LIFETIME SUPPLY OF TOILET-ROLL HOLDERS YOU’VE GIVEN US EVERY SINGLE F**KING YEAR. WHAT? OUR NAKED FOUR-PLY ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU? WELL, THOSE DUMB DUNNY-ROLL DRESSES BLOW CHUNKS SO HAPPY CHRISTMAS YOUR ARSE I PRAY GOD IT’S OUR LAST (TO QUOTE THE POGUES).
Actually, my family still gets on very well, but then we rather cleverly all live in separate pockets of the country, so when we get together it’s a novelty which doesn’t wear off until we have all left again. We might be addicted to salt and emptying wine bottles, but we’re quite clever otherwise. So were my parents in having the forethought to give me two sisters. Brothers are big and strong and lovely and much appreciated and all, but sisters are something else. Given how fabulous mine are, I could probably squeak by without a single friend in the world.
However, many brothers and sisters are not so lucky, and my observation is that around their late forties and early fifties, a lot of siblings fall out with each other. This tends to coincide with their grumpy old parents getting grumpier and older, and before you know it either everyone is yelling at each other or no one is speaking at all.
When you’ve known someone since you were born, you carry so much baggage about them wherever you go that a small tiff about a skanky toilet-roll holder can suddenly explode into the venting of a lifetime of bitterness and resentment, starting with the day they buried your teddy when you were three, and finishing with the frying pan you’re about to bring down on their head.
With friends, however, you’ve usually had the chance to mature a bit before you meet them, and to mature more as your friendship grows. Also, your mother isn’t there to tell you to shut up and get outside you little stinkpots.
I met my best friend, Gwennie, when I was 12. She’d just moved to Wellington from the UK, and I had just moved there from Auckland, but when you’re 12 it doesn’t really matter where you’ve come from as wherever you are sucks, although we didn’t know about sucking in those days. We probably thought it was stink.
Anyway, we were at school together only briefly — long enough to send one nun into early retirement, but that can take minutes — before Gwennie moved to Palmerston North. However, we wrote letters to each other. How adorable! And we caught up in the school holidays.
When she came down to study fashion design at Wellington Polytech in 1980, and I left school to work on The Dominion as the layout girl (not as exciting as it sounds), we got a flat together in Tasman Street in Mt Cook with another school friend. The rent was $27 a week, between us, which left enormous amounts for buying chippies and flagons of Ben Morven Riesling.
She broke our hearts by abandoning us for the bright lights of Sydney the next year, and she has been there ever since, but this hasn’t stopped us being the closest of friends. In fact, it has probably helped — our livers, anyway.
Gwennie is my go-to person (other than the sisters) when good things happen and when bad things happen. I’ll tell her about a book deal or a triumph often before I tell anyone else, and I’ll tell her pretty quickly about a tragedy, too.
She was one of a small darling handful who jumped on a plane and came to my side the moment I got the measles, making me feta and spinach omelettes, and counselling me about keeping my chin up and boxing on and at least it wasn’t an arm or a leg and on the plus side I could buy as many pairs of pyjamas as I wanted and no one (especially of a Ginger persuasion) could complain.
Actually, her real name is Ronnie, but we usually call each other Nan, or I call her Gwennie and she calls me La-La. These are the names of our aged alter-egos. We invented them one weekend when I went to Sydney for some girlfriend time with her, and we stayed at a hotel on the harbour.
We were drinking champagne in the dining room when I looked over and noticed a pair of elderly ladies sitting directly across from us, also drinking champagne. One was tall with short grey curly hair and quite a lot of tweed going on. The other was smaller and funkier. We looked at them, looked back at each other, and looked at them again. They were laughing their heads off and ordering a second bowl of fries.
‘That’s us,’ I said.
‘In 30 years’ time,’ Gwennie said.
They were there again at breakfast the next morning, perfectly turned-out and having a mimosa, as were we.
We decided I was the tweedy one and my name was Ursula, but my best friend Gwendolyn (Gwennie for short) called me La-La, although no one else was allowed to, because La-La can be a bit uptight.
We also decided that, although the real us had kept our husbands at home while we had our get-together, Gwennie and La-La’s other halves were both sitting outside waiting in separate cars, where they had been for the past 24 hours, reading the paper and listening to the races.
Some time after this, Gwennie and I founded an international drinking group called the Royal Bloind Society — no disrespect to actual blind people intended. There’s nothing grown-up or clever about being bloind (drunk, that is), but it’s not a grown-up or clever organisation.
The Royal Bloind Society, or RBS as it is known, was founded during a mutual friend’s fiftieth birthday party in Kenya. (You see, I told you all good things come to those who are 50.) Anyway, during this event a red-headed member of someone else’s party, nothing to do with us, over-imbibed then took a tumble out near the pool.
‘Ginga down!’ cried my godson, Tom, who belongs to Gwennie. ‘Ginga down!’
I was so proud. He was only 15 at the time.
The RBS is about the most successful group to which I have ever belonged. There were seven of us at its core when it was formed, and we have moved around the globe and grown in numbers since.
There are now chapters in London, Sydney, Auckland, Nelson, New York, Lake Naivasha and Milan, plus there have been sub-chapter rendezvous in Paris, Bali, Tuscany (twice), Venice, Surfer’s Paradise and Coffs Harbour, and there’s a big one pending in Cambodia.
If you happen to be in the area when we are having a meeting, you are drafted in on a temporary basis until we can see if you have the chops to be considered for permanent membership.
All this generally takes is an appetite for rosé and the ability to say ‘yes’ to whatever opportunities present themselves. We don’t play drinking games or do yardies, or anything vulgar like that; we just meet in places where nice food and large amounts of wine are wildly encouraged.
And for a made-up group, it really has become quite a motivator in arranging get-togethers, which for me is the source of much happiness.
I’ve shed a few friends over the years — most women have by the age of 50. We don’t have time for the whingers and whiners and takers and graspers and the crashing bores we might once upon a time have promised to catch up with when we bumped into them, secretly hoping like hell they’d be swallowed by a tornado to save us the horror.
I once read in a magazine while waiting for the doctor (What? My time’s not as valuable as yours? Even a raddled crone in the back streets of Bangkok, etc, etc, etc) that said if you had a friend who was causing you more angst than anything else, they were a ‘frenemy’ and you had to get rid of them.
This angst/anything else balance is a pretty good benchmark.
Sometimes these people are toxic and you need to flush them away for life, but sometimes it’s only that the timing is wrong, and you need a breather. That’s OK. They probably need one from you, too. You still love each other — you’re just on a break! Don’t beat yourself up. If it’s a true friendship, you’ll drift back together again when the time is right.
A true friend, for my money,
is someone who only has your best interests at heart. They are happy for you, sad for you, generous with time and emotion, and, most of all, kind. I have very high standards on this front, so I’ve often been disappointed, but then I have high standards for myself as well.
I’d like to lower them, actually, because I get flushed on occasion myself (I blame La-La’s uptightness), but I fear that if the nuns who taught me were still alive (please God, they did actually die) they would warn me against the slippery slope of letting go of your moral compass, in case it leads to consorting with the bogans in Hawkstone Street or other prison escapees and child murderers.
So, in the meantime, I am not someone with a million friends, but I cherish the ones I have.
If you can count on just one hand the people whom you could call in the middle of the night in an emergency without worrying about waking them up, then I reckon you are doing fine. This means two can ignore the call, one can be out, another one can have taken a sleeping pill, and there should still be one available to help you.
I can make it to six, but only by cheating.
I have Gwennie, I have my sister Anna, I have someone who doesn’t know he’s on my list so I’ll wait until it happens to tell him about it, I have someone who would probably be less surprised, because I can often be found staying at her house, I have someone I met in the 1980s at a restaurant where we ended up juggling lemons and singing Frank Sinatra songs on the bar-top, and I have another someone who has been a voice of kindness and reason in my life for the past couple of decades.
I’ve known Anna since she was born, Gwennie since I was 12, the person who’d be surprised since I was 18, the lemon-juggler since I was in my late twenties, the voice of reason since I was in my early thirties, and the person I sponge off all the time for a decade or so. Good friends, like everything else, take time.
But I am never happier than when I am surrounded by them, bloind or otherwise. Again, apologies to all actual blind people — this would not be my first book produced in Braille, as it happens — but I’m not talking about you.
Also, I am not politically correct.
It’s a group that forms to talk about those things — you know the ones; they’re made of paper and have words written on them
Making friends is hard enough at kindergarten, let alone 40-something years later when bribing people with Play-Doh does not cut the mustard.
If you’re like me and have high standards and a Bitchy Resting Face, you can even end up with a friend-deficit. I was heading this way when I found myself in Queenstown one day, quite a few years ago, sitting in a café minding my own business, and the café proprietress moseyed on up to me and said her book club was reading one of my books and would I care to pop along to their next meeting the following Tuesday?
Would I!
I was not in a book club myself, owing to nobody ever having asked me, and I was gagging to infiltrate one somehow or other. Here was the opportunity being served to me on a white china plate with scrambled eggs, no bun — I couldn’t say ‘yes’ quickly enough.
What’s more, I refused to leave that book club meeting until they had agreed that I could join, although to do so meant moving to Queenstown. I realise this may seem a bit extreme, but part of the whole post-measles period involved not putting off things that I had always wanted to do, and moving to Queenstown was one of them.
I loved it down there with all my heart, which is hardly surprising, as I was born in Clyde which is a winding 40-minute drive away.
However, when it turned out that I probably wasn’t going to die a grisly death and might have the normal amount of time to fit in everything that I wanted to do, it transpired that there aren’t as many jobs in Queenstown as one would hope, especially in the film industry, so after four years we hightailed it, sadly on my part, back to Auckland.
Did that mean I relinquished my hold on that group of Central Otago bibliophiles? No, it did not.
Actually, like many book clubs, the book hardly gets a look-in. Sometimes if it’s a real corker there might be a spirited half-hour chat. Anyone who is in a book club will know that it’s not easy to get a group of women to all talk about the same thing at the same time for very long, so half an hour is actually pretty good going.
What I love most about my book club, though, has nothing to do with reading material. When you’re older and married with kids, say, your family kind of becomes your club, which is all very well, but you can’t bitch about them with them. You need fresh blood from the outside world for that, which is where your book club comes in.
Ours doesn’t spend much time bitching, I hasten to add, although I haven’t made a meeting in quite a while so things might have changed. But I doubt it, because really it’s more of a support group, as I know a lot of book clubs are. We celebrate each other’s milestones, we commiserate when tragedy strikes, we swap clothes and recipes and triumphs and disappointments. We share things we might not share with our husbands or parents or children — it’s basically high school without the hormones; although we share quite a lot of tips on menopause, so I guess the hormones are there, they’re just worn-out.
My book club has helped me through some tough times, and I count some of my best friends among its members. One in particular said something when I first got the measles that rings in my ears still. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘it’s got to be OK. We’re going to grow old together!’ It was so the right thing to say on a particularly terrible day. And that’s what friends are for.
I missed my book club desperately when we moved back north. In fact, for the first couple of years I think I went to more meetings than some of the members who live in Queenstown. Still, it’s an expensive commute, and while definitely worth it, what I really needed was a group of friends a bit closer to home to help fill the gap. And so I joined a gang.
It’s called The Gang. Although at one particular Indian restaurant in Auckland it is known as Not The Curry Club.
Anyway, The Gang was formed during the opening ceremony of the 2011 Rugby World Cup. By chance the Ginger and I ended up sitting next to a chap I had done a bit of work with, and his partner, whom I vaguely knew. As the game commenced, we quaffed back tiny bottles of chardonnay and got talking. Somewhere along the line I confessed that I was missing my book club and was in need of a gang, and when I was reminded that we all had a great mutual friend in common it was decided we would form one.
The Gang is very good at getting together for bite-sized snacks and cocktails, movies, the theatre, or anything that any one member suggests and anyone else agrees to and someone goes on to organise. Most of us have met in Phuket for a Gang holiday, and all of us once got together for a Big Chill weekend, where we holed up at our place for two nights, full of chippies and wine and dancing and the Mexican Train Game. Just like the book club, we’re not living in each other’s pockets. There are rarely lunches in between, or a million phone calls; just a few catch-up emails and the Gang events.
Sometimes when I tell people I’m in a gang they look at me as though I’m 12. But 12 was a good year. And being connected to any group of people who prove over and over again to be generous, kind, warm, energetic, funny and available is a great source of happiness. Perhaps the greatest source of all.
Isn’t it funny: there are a lot of other words for ‘lonely’ but hardly any antonyms. ‘Unlonely’ is not trying hard enough, and the other one that crops up — LOVED — doesn’t quite do it, although it certainly explains why loneliness hurts so much.
We all need to feel loved. That’s where happiness comes from.
Dear Sarah-Kate
Thank you so much for submitting your novel The Uncourteous Commonality of Sugar Wallace’s Honey.
Sugar is very sweet and I love it in my coffee, although actually I usually stick to Sweet’N Low as it’s less sickly.
I’m not sure that in this climate readers want to be encouraged, or given hope, or care about bees, or honey, or good manners, or think that there is m
ore to life than shopping and anal sex.
Should your next book feature more of the latter, please feel free to submit it for consideration.
KR
Charlemagne Possy-Ruskins
IF YOU ARE WRITING ‘KR’ INSTEAD OF ‘KIND REGARDS’, THEN YOUR REGARDS AREN’T KIND. THEY’RE NOT EVEN REGARDS.
CALLING ‘BITTER’ PARTY OF ONE
It’s hard to imagine that bearing a grudge could help you move closer towards eternal happiness, but it does. If you’re good at it. And I’m good at it.
Indeed my friend Miranda believes that I am so good at it that it’s utterly selfish not to share such superlative skills. She’s dreadful at bearing grudges; hard to offend in the first place, and too busy to keep accurate notes on who has done the offending and how.
To pull off any decent grudge you need a very thin skin and a memory like an elephant, and I have both.
Actually, Miranda once suggested I set up a little business on the side, bearing grudges on behalf of the people who can’t be bothered doing it themselves. It wasn’t a bad idea and could be quite a money-spinner, but I feared it would be too much fun and would distract me from my work of writing novels featuring people quite a bit nicer than I am. Either that, or I’d pretty quickly become a hit woman.
Some of the time I live next door to a dear friend Clare de Lore and her husband, one of New Zealand’s great politicians, Sir Don McKinnon, who helped broker peace in Bougainville. (Yes, I do read the papers. Sometimes. Although reading Mister Pip was better.) Don was an MP for a long time, and when a mutual friend of ours became a fresh one, I asked Don what his secret had been for coping with all the horribleness in politics. ‘Forgive but don’t forget,’ he said.
This is kind of the nicer version of bearing a grudge. And I’ll try it one day.
In the meantime, there is a small handful of people whom I can never forgive for their past unkindnesses. In fact, at this stage in the proceedings I am probably more likely to forget. However, the good news is that these snakes in the grass do not embitter my soul. They’re merely people I can do without. So if I see them coming, I simply go the other way. That might seem a soft sort of grudge to you, but I bear harder ones. Boy, do I!
Screw You Dolores Page 7