Reason #2 - the meaning of friendship

Today, as I cooked up yet another HelloFresh meal for two, for one, I decided to write about the greatest of all blessings and ultimate reason to rejoice - friendship.

I assume that my dear readers will have already fallen into two distinct camps; the first thinking how very sweet and wholesome that I am (and this is).  The rest of you, my actual friends, will be bristling with resentment at having to read this bilge just in case I have written about you. I can hear you tutting from 4.73 miles away. Sucks to be you eh?

Friends are absolutely essential. Now that I cannot reach out to embrace mine I cling to them with an unbecoming desperation, through email, text, FaceTime, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Zoom, Microsoft bloody Teams and even the cursed space that is Houseparty. I have rather more friends than I deserve but, as with an expansive shoe collection, the variety ensures that there is always the comfort of the old, the delight of the new, and very occasionally the rather worn purple silk Prada sling-back that is surprisingly supportive and turns out well for a special occasion. But I digress.

I briefly thought about including family in this analysis, but I like to pay for my therapy; any other arrangement feels altogether too risky and I refuse to send you each £150 for the privilege of having you read this. Anyway, my friends picked me, or consented to be picked, which makes their choices, and mine, more readily susceptible to scrutiny.

With so much diversity among my own friends, I felt that what I needed was a way to sum up friendship, something to capture its many facets and infinite variety. I seek something closer to the ousia of friendship, than to the Platonic Form of the friend. Absent a better idea, I started doing some actual reading in preparation for this post, partly because I owe my readership the very best, and largely because I wanted to look clever by referring to Aristole.  Speaking of the old Stagirite (she types, casually), I used to be quite taken with his description of friendship as "one soul in two bodies". Quite taken that is, until I gave it a single solitary second's worth of consideration and found it to be utter bunkum. If the whole divided soul thing were the case, I'd be a bloody horcrux, and quite an unstable one at that.  

Onwards I have pressed, in search of a modern frame of reference.  As I scrubbed my skirting boards this morning I thought I might be having a breakthrough (not a breakdown no, though I can see how you could get to that conclusion). I remembered that in 1563 a man called Etienne de La Boétie broke Michel de Montaigne's heart. This terrible feat La Boétie rather thoughtlessly accomplished by dying. Selfish bastard. This prompted Montaigne to pen one of his many essays, in honour of his lost friend; the imaginatively titled 'On Friendship'.  Of La Boétie he said “If a man should importune me to give a reason why I lov’d him; I find it could no otherwise be exprest, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.”

Well bloody hell.  If my most beloved friend were to die (PLEASE DON'T. Not even for japes) I am sure I couldn’t bring myself to ever mention his name, let alone write so quotable an essay about my love for him that people would embroider my words onto samplers and flog them on Etsy hundreds of years later. Some people really are insufferable.

Of course in recent years everyone has presumed that Michel and Etienne were caught up in a love that dared not speak its name. No, not necrophilia, that’s the love that cannot speak its name (well, in the case of one party, at least) Montaigne definitely had trouble letting go, but I have no reason to believe that the grieving process got that dark. Rather I mean, that people seem determined that M&E were a couple whilst Etienne still had the strength to chew his garlic, so to speak. In a world that increasingly sees masculinity as incompatible with a tender affection between men; I suppose it is hardly surprising that everyone needs to bring sex into it. And I suppose they may well have been shagging, though I cannot for the life of me see that it matters very much. But sex complicates everything and I am in the business of keeping things simple (literally only in this blog, but still), so I have reluctantly decided that Montaigne might not do after all for an exemplar.

Running out of places to turn, I briefly considered resorting to descriptions of my own friends to illustrate what solidarity of feeling can truly mean to and in a person. Sadly, most of them are too modest to enjoy being lionised in print and almost all of the rest might not like what they read (since I am not a simpleton I have not chosen to adopt the modern habit of actually liking all of my friends). As for the remainder, I have no interest in suffering by comparison in my own publication.

Surely though, there must be a solution in fiction? Better authors than I must surely have painted their pictures of perfect amity. Except that the problem with protagonists is that they think it is all about themselves. Even our favourite characters routinely forsake their duty to their loved ones, in pursuit of their own interests. Elizabeth Bennet cannot bring herself to be civil about her best friend's choice of husband. Sherlock Holmes' devotion to Dr Watson is rock solid, unless an adventure or a syringe of a seven-per-cent solution presents itself. And poor Mr Bunbury the beloved (though admittedly fictional) friend of Oscar Wilde's delightful hero, Algernon Moncrieff, after years of being the beneficiary of so much loving devotion, is finally killed off by his friend, merely because it was discovered that he could no longer live. Aunt Augusta was right to be surprised by such a sudden failure of hope on Bunbury's part.

The situation appeared desperate and then, it hit me. There is a man, who exemplifies all that is splendid and true in companionship. One of the most underappreciated characters ever written, whose lack of great and glorious deeds is irrelevant when one remembers his unstinting commitment to the art of friendship. This is a man who would forsake a beloved moustache, endure a coshing and risk the wrath of an aunt more fearsome than Lady Bracknell. A man prepared to suffer, should it prove necessary, even the most terrible fate of all – matrimony – for his friends. I speak, of course, of Bertram Wooster Esq.

It always slightly vexed me that the otherwise brilliant Fry & Laurie adaptation of the Jeeves and Wooster novels made Bertie Wooster a bit too stupid. It detracted from Wooster's many and deliberate acts of chivalry. Wooster's hilarious scrapes are not mere accidents, the consequences of thoughtless blundering from which he needs constant rescuing by his valet; they are almost always the results of liberate risks, voluntarily taken, in pursuit of the happiness of a friend. More than once Bertie has to flee the continent to avoid the fury of his Aunt Agatha (as an aunt of some 20 years' standing I assure you all, we can do rage like a gorgon having a bad hair day) but still he persists in doing his duty by his comrades. No other protagonist has so much character and flair, and yet devotes himself so unselfishly to the story of others.

So here is the moral, if one is needed. Heroes and romantic leads are all very well, but when the chips are down one simply cannot beat a Wooster.