A YEAR OR TWO before the pandemic, I was learning a piece of publishing software called InDesign and I had just managed to create three embossed lozenges that looked like shiny, hallmarked ingots on the page. It sort of made sense to colour them platinum, gold and silver and, for completion, I added a fourth, bronze.
The effect was rather pleasing. I found that each lozenge could contain text that looked as if it had been engraved into metal like some sort of memorial or award, and without really thinking about it, I etched the names of my closest friends on the platinum lozenge. It wasn’t a huge list, but it cheered me up to put my best buddies together in this way. Good guys, every one.
In the gold lozenge, I produced a longer list of ‘excellent’ friends, people I loved and could rely on - most of whom I’d known for a while. Then, in the silver lozenge I wrote a still longer list of people I would just call ‘good friends’. The final bronze lozenge contained a very long list of acquaintances who could be considered friends in the right circumstances - people I might cross an airport lounge to talk to, that sort of thing.
It may sound like some form of social engineering, but really it wasn’t - if anything it was a kind of doodling, and I deleted the file shortly afterwards.
Anyway, the point is that, for professional reasons, the acquaintances list was long. In the days before social media and the internet, pre-digital hacks like me (and Jeremy Clarkson, to pick a name out of a crash helmet) depended for our daily victories on the quality and breadth of our networks, painstakingly built over time with warm smiles, bad jokes and often plenty of beer and wine.
How times change. The pandemic first made casual meetings difficult, and then lockdown made them impossible. We were told to stay at home, and those of us who did (which, I guess, was most of us) found ourselves with empty diaries often for the first time in decades.
We Zoomed here and there, of course, but online chats are a poor substitute for face-to-face meetings. (We may not realise it, but we are all innately aware of body language, breathing rate, pupil dilation, skin colour and voice tone - it’s the hidden data in human communication, and it doesn’t really exist on video calls.) Meeting people online is like the difference between the heart-pumping experience of actually climbing a mountain, and that of sitting on a sofa watching a film about a mountain being climbed.
Very soon the weak ties began to break. Without any real reason to stay in communication, and without the energy provided by regular (if not always essential) meetings, some of the relationships in the bronze lozenge simply faded and disappeared.
And, strangely, quite a lot of the relationships in the silver category evaporated too. Had these people really been friends? Or were they people I had met through business, and simply got on with? What, I found myself thinking, is a friend anyway?
I was musing on all of this when I discovered that the same sort of thing had been happening to other people I know.
Some, like me, had watched as - without the irrigation of social interaction - the edges of their networks had withered like unwatered grape vines. Others, I discovered, had edited their friendships with sad, but calculated, deliberation. At least two had axed friends of decades after the laboratory provided by lockdown gave them the chance to put those friendships under the microscope - and they didn’t like what they saw there.
For years, they explained, they had been putting up with aspects of their friends’ personalities that, in the grey light of lockdown, they decided they actively disliked Characteristics that had previously been dismissed with an airy, ‘oh, that’s just the way he is’, were suddenly thrown into stark relief, and they were - it was decided - sufficient reason for a final, if sometimes sad, farewell.
I haven’t quite done that yet, although I did have to ‘archive’ a series of online conversations with a friend of decades who, always argumentative, had become tiresomely, and sometimes rudely pugnacious. Not every discussion needs to lead to a fight. We have retired to our respective corners, although for the moment we remain in the same ring.
Happily, I have also made some excellent new friends in the town where I live - a couple of guys my age who quickly felt as if they had been friends for decades. That has been an unexpected benefit of the pandemic, and a real joy. When we are out together, which is often, it’s like being in an episode of Last of the Summer Wine or Gordon, Gino and Fred.
So, what now? I am retired (more or less), and it is normal for one’s network to shrink as one gets older (which is why it is important to hold true friends close). But should I attempt to reestablish some of those weaker ties? Should I invite that salesman, that finance director, that photographer for a drink, even though our interests probably now differ significantly?
For me, it’s hard to say no, I’ll not do that. I have always believed that you can’t be ‘lucky’ sitting in a room by yourself, and that your luck is always made by other people, in a rich mix of synchronicity and serendipity. And anyway, damn it, there are people out there whose company I enjoy, and whom I miss - and networks are hard to quit after half a century of effort.
So, yes, I will begin to reestablish contact even if - in business terms - I no longer have a reason to do so.
We’ll see how my approaches are received: I can no longer offer contacts the oxygen of publicity they once sought, and I don’t really want to become a ghost in the machine. On the other hand, there may be something to be learned from these reintroductions: I think I’ll treat it as a research project. Stay tuned.
On reading this, a few friends have asked which category I put them in, which if nothing else is a tribute to the competitive nature of our species. We all want to win. The truth is that it really doesn’t matter, and that were I to do the exercise again today, which I won’t, the results would almost certainly be different (at least beyond the platinum ingot). Relationships ebb and flow; networks are fluid. You meet a friend, you love that friend, they shoot to the top of the list. Six weeks later, you meet another friend … and so on. The ingot system is not to be taken too seriously - although it’s a kind of therapeutic exercise, if you feel like trying it.