Fa-fa-fa-far-fa-fa-fa-fa-far-far be it from me to not only name a blog after a classic 80’s track, but also start with timeless lyrics from another, but hey, it’s done now, and besides its been going around my head now for a couple of weeks so hopefully by writing it down it will leave me in peace – I wonder what it will be replaced with? Time will tell no doubt.

Incidentally, before we consider if friends are electric, I would just like to pause on Psycho Killer and Talking Heads for a moment to share a cautionary tale that I hope you will learn from.

Many years ago, I was giving a lift to a recently recruited rugby player to a long away game and I had some classic Talking Heads on my in car entertainment centre (when did it stop being a stereo by the way – please don’t tell me though, its just for fun) when my new ‘team-mate’ asked me if I liked sand in the vaseline. Now, in my humble opinion, the pause between this question and the next line “you know, the double album” was just ever-so-slightly too long. So please, if you are going to ask or say something that has the chance of being taken out of context for any number of reasons, then please do adjust your conversational timing accordingly, or just avoid the topic entirely. There are of course rare exceptions to this scenario which, are excusable – for example, when an unexpected word (or words) creep in uninvited through the intervention of alcohol, sleep deprivation, or poor concentration. To illustrate, I offer an example;

I was in a rather important meeting with some rather important people from a big company who we’d given lots of money to so that they would make some things better for the company that I worked for – unfortunately they had not been doing such a good job of this so we had this meeting so that I could look serious and tell them how we were rather unhappy and that things would need to change or we would get more unhappy and things would quickly escalate (or deteriorate, depending on whether you were standing on your head or not) into something very bad indeed. Needless to say lots of serious conversations and frowning occurred and I started to get really rather uppity  at their continual inability to make any pertinent points. I’d had enough. I made myself look more serious than I had done thus far and interrupted loudly stating “But that’s IRRELEVANT!” – there was silence then puzzled looks, then the gentleman sat next to me (he was on ‘my side’) started to laugh. Transpires that what I’d actually said was “But that’s AN ELEPHANT!”.

To this day I know not where that came from – It would however be most pleasing to think that at that exact moment in time,  in a Zoo somewhere a small child had asked a keeper what the big, long-nosed grey animal was only to be told that it wasn’t very important.

So – are friends electric? I used to love electronic bands when I was younger – Gary Numan and his Army of Tubeways, Visage, Ultravox, Kraftwerk – loved it. So much better than all that guitar stuff. I’ve always liked to like different – in fact I’d go out of my way to avoid popular things, even if I secretly was rather fond of them. I was anti-sheep. I never really listened to the lyrics though; even now its not what attracts me to a song or a piece of music (especially the latter, because generally its the lack of lyrics that differentiates a piece of music from a song) so much so that I assumed that ‘are friends electric?’ really meant our friends, and the electric bit plus the question mark well, was just being different (i.e. cool). That said, I do on occasion still listen to this type of music – takes me back to less complicated times which makes me smile, but withstood eyes, as I reflect on just how much time has passed that can no longer be edited, and how quickly it passed.  What I found was that listening to that timeless Gary Numan track again made me think about what he really meant by asking ARE friends electric?

Firstly – what are friends? This is a bit like asking what are cars – there are so many different types its difficult to know where to start. Old ones, new ones, sporty/flash ones, reliable ones, less reliable ones but great fun nonethless. Then we have the new types of friends, those that we connect with ‘online’.  On joining Facebook recently I was swamped with ‘friend requests’ . This initially this felt rather nice, I was popular and had the audit trail to prove it, it quickly turned into an irritation – not least because I was now having to make a very visible and clear decision as to whether I wanted to be their friend or not. What if I ignored some but accepted others and what if those that I’d accepted were talking to those that I didn’t and it came up in conversation, what then? And what about those on the constant list of ‘recommended friends’ which of those should I invite, and which ones didn’t invite me? Most surprising though were the requests from people that I didn’t know AT ALL?

Then there are the more traditional friends, the ones you can touch and feel (this is not an instruction by the way, I’m not accepting any responsibility for changing the dynamics in any existing friendships by going down that particular route, no sir-ee, not here) and there are  many questions in respect of these ‘physical’ friends;

• Do people you consider friends consider you the same type of friend?
• When does someone you meet for the first time become a friend?
• What are the criteria for friend status – is it time related, number of times met, had to have been to theirs to eat or drink least twice?
• Is there an acceptance and approval process – so you can’t call them a friend unless they have ‘approved’ you?
• What if they hear that you are calling them a friend but they see you as a pre-friend, an acquaintance or just a friend of a friend. I once introduced someone as a ‘friend of my wife’ and the lady immediately pointed out that she was a friend of mine as well. What on earth was I supposed to say to that ! I felt like I was on a dessert island (made of treacle sponge pudding of course) in a sea of boiling creme Anglaise with not even a modest palm tree to protect me from the burning sun of embarrassment.

Next we have the various categories of friend, there are many, but I few that I am aware of

• work friends – that you don’t see outside of work other than at Christmas or other gatherings where I’m never too sure if people see it as an obligation rather than a voluntary, pleasurable experience (especially if as is all too common these days your ‘job’ is a bit like putting on ill fitting and unfashionable clothes, you put up with it, but it feels a bit awkward and you wouldn’t be seen dead in them outside of the office)
• school friends – that you’ve known for about 300 years but don’t really keep in contact with. You’d get on fine of course, but trying to find time when you have the thing and then theres the wotsy and god its the dubery-flippety for the next few months of course!
• friends of your partner- great if all get on with each other, but not always that easy, and there is an inescapable element of obligation here – a bit like family is some respects
• Old friends you haven’t seen for x years – I wonder how many fall into this category where x just keeps increasing and for same reasons as school friends its easier to let things drift – which is fine, they are probably really busy anyway and wouldn’t want you to bother them just to catch up and see how they had been getting on over the last 5/10/15 years as they built their own lives, a family and experience the many things you’d only dreamt about all those years ago when you were close
• and finally, the good friends, or  friend – this category is unique as I think as long as you have at least one of these, the others are less important – just be careful not to break this one though, eggs, basket – say no more

So where does this lead me? Well its all pretty complicated for many of us and I think that as a new found embracer of the social media phenomenon, I have identified a gap in the market place. Ladies and gentleman, I give you…..FriendAdvisor

Just imagine all the functionality of TripAdvisor applied to Facebook. You could use it to review, select & meet up with suitable, highly rated friends that are in your area – and they can be people you don’t even know yet! You could even select based on what kind of mood you are in or what topic you would like to discuss at a dinner party. By showing what high quality friends you have will only increase your own popularity and you will soon be travelling the country and wider, meeting other highly rated friends and being the envy of those who you previously considered to be your friends.

But wait.

There is a flaw.

We are human. We don’t all subscribe to rating everything. Anything rated by people is only an indication of what people who rate things think of that thing (or in this case friend). I don’t think I want friends who rate their friends on a ranking system for reliability, sense of humour, keep-in-touch-ability, ‘joy’ and other such things.

I think on balance I prefer the haphazard, random, organic way in which things work just now. Hopefully those existing friend connections will stay strong enough to mean there is no need for FriendAdvisor.

Maybe this is where Mr. Numan went wrong and why his electric friend broke down.

 

I lost my Grandma many years ago. She was an amazing woman and I was very fond of her – I could often have conversations with her that I never could have with my parents or even my friends and she was always so ‘current’, with knowledge and views on a wide range of topics. We had gone out on that day for a walk around the local village, which was very close to the sea –  a lovely quaint old costal village, quite an old feel to it, but just starting to get infiltrated by younger generations (I remember the surf shop had recently opened its doors to young and not so young hip surfing types down, from the big city). It was a hot day so we took her sun brolly and meandered through the small housing estate down to the sea for the standard walk along the beach path before turning inwards and up through the main village street. She talked about how she missed our chats (I’d not been down for a year or more, and worse still, had not written) and as normal I said that it was bad, and that I would try much harder – a letter once I’d got home. That would do it. We turned inland and headed for home. I was thirsty by now so we stopped at the newsagents and I left Grandma on the old wooden bench outside (she was comfortable there as its where her friend picked her up to go shopping on Tuesday mornings) whilst I popped inside for a chilled beverage. I was in the shop for no more than 2 minutes. I stepped back outside and to my horror she had gone – the bench was empty. I’d lost my Grandma.

How would I explain this? Not to my Grandad and my parents as I was sure that I’d find her eventually, but to passers by and shopkeepers that I was going to have to ask in the next few minutes before I’d have to widen the search perimeter in the directions that I chose not to look in first;

“Excuse me, I seem to have misplaced my grandmother, I left her on the bench outside and now she’s gone”

The first person  I asked must have assumed that I’d lost her ashes as he sent me off in the direction of a poor young lady who’d just bought a rather nice blue vase. It was only after speaking to the ‘highly observant’ lady from the hairdressers over the road that I realised what had happened. Her friend (let’s call her Mrs Pavlov) had driven past, seen my Grandma sitting on the bench, assumed it was shopping day so driven her to the supermarket where she had a whale of a time stocking up on the same things she’d bought the day before.

Needless to say, my grandma passed away some years after that event which may or may not have actually happened.

I still miss her.

I still miss receiving letters from her and most of all – I miss being able to write letters to her. There was something about the act of taking a piece of writing paper with its stylish watermark on and thinking carefully about words to write to my elderly relative who had once been so close, but over time I’d grown apart from as my pace of life continued to accelerate as hers steadied, slowed and then faltered. In her later years I noticed that there was a small delay as she returned to her lively alert self, from the initial gaunt, rather vacant look on first seeing her after a gap. As time wore on and my visits grew more infrequent, the delays for this transformation took longer, and the change was less significant until finally she was admitted to a home and I stopped seeing her altogether. She died not long after being in the home – although for me, my Grandma had left some time before then.

I’ve wondered since what a difference it might have made had I continued to write and visit and I wonder now how many elderly people with amazing lives behind them and wonderful stories, just sit, and wait.

And wait.

Until eventually.

Their spirit leaves them

Leaving their physical self to slowly fade away in a home.

“Dear Grandma,

I hope you are keeping well and I hope Grandad is back to his old self – I do miss him so. I’m sorry its been such a long time since I last wrote, I’ve just been so busy………“

Spoons of course! What else would one use (not solely, but mainly) to dig a way out of the city in order to escort the highly illegal alien from their home. For the uneducated or just unlucky I am of course referring to Monsters Inc. I’m not entirely sure why, but ever since I heard Mike Wazowski  (the one eyed green pea) utter the immortal line “I think I have plan here – using mainly spoons we dig a tunnel under the city and release it into the wild” it has stayed with me as one of the finest movie lines of all time. In my opinion its right up there with Rutger Hauer’s “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe….” dialogue from the glorious Bladerunner.

I think what I like about it is the fact that it’s only mainly spoons – we don’t find out what other item (or indeed items) might be used to supplement the sturdy dessert shifting tool. Perhaps, on assumption of it being in close proximity to the spoon, it might be a pastry fork which would surely be useful to get through any tougher items on account of the prongs and the slight blade like design on one of the prongs (someone please tell me there are left and right bladed pastry forks and even double sided ones out there, because things like that also make me smile) or maybe the dessert or breakfast bowl itself would be a better companion for the spoon? Once the spoon has done the hard work, the bowl just swoops in moves great swathes of material away and takes credit for having the biggest impact despite only being the partly member of the partly and mainly parts of the digging team.

Anyway, all is in vain and Mike’s elaborate plan collapses like a poorly conceived Victoria sponge with the utterance by Sully (the big blue fluffy one) of the single word “Spoons”.

So, the moral appears to be that  a partially developed escape plan involving a single item of stainless steel cutlery is doomed from the outset. Thankfully though, with this experience in mind I’ve never had any tunnel excavation plans suffer the same fate!