Fickle friends 14 8 3 (13) 25 1 22

The first of this month marked the 6th anniversary of the end of a friendship which endured most of my life from the age of 15 forward though for 5 years before that we had only the most tenuous of contact...

And the friend in question I believed for most of my life to have been my closest and dearest friend if not my dearest confidante, which begs us to look a little closer at such friendships to discover why they went so sadly awry on the one hand whilst discovering possibly at the same time what has happened to one that one can no longer sustain friendships..?

So he was not an isolated example is what you are saying..?

Well, no he wasn't! Though I would qualify that by saying that as we get older we all become more peculiar and less tolerant of other people's failings or peculiarities and realise as we age that the laws of diminishing returns come into play more than ever before...

Now I'm not sure I understand what you mean...

Well let me explain myself...

Like the guy I referred to was always 10 ½ years older than me so when we met he had just turned 26 and prided himself in preferring the company of younger people. I on the other hand you might say had a preference at the time for older people especially in my fellow males possibly for one thing always on the look-out for role models and father figures since I had lost my own father 10 years before that...another anniversary coming up in these first days of August.

Later in life these things change...

And when one is young one either lives one’s life with a view to the future as I always did or lived for the moment as this ex-friend did... So I found myself a wife in my twenties and we had children whereas this friend didn't settle down until maybe his late forties or fifties and chose a partner with twice the age gap between me and my partner...

So for much of his life he was unable to commit and when at last he did it was without building a proper family life with children and when his partner died he was totally devastated. And if that wasn’t enough hardship for anyone to endure his life-long friend me was no longer living in the same country…

Well now I have introduced this subject and it looks fairly well cut and dried but but of course there is much more to such matters that will fit one side of an A4 sheet of paper, so it means we’ll need to come back to this subject another time…

Pics of the last classic rock climb we did together: top pic sorting out who goes first, middle pic after leading first pitch my climbing partner comes up to my belay, third pic I arrive to summit my partner in blue sitting...


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