Friends

Jacques Delille once famously said that “fate chooses your relations, you choose your friends”. But I don’t know if that is always true. I went to a school of just 500 pupils, where in my first week, I was placed in a tutor group of 20, with whom I would attend all lessons and spend the majority of the day with, and where I was handed over to three girls who were to look after me (I was the new kid). Then after a couple of years I was placed in a house of 50 girls, in a tutor/year group of 10, which was, over the years, whittled down to seven. Those people I was first placed with, and those girls, with whom I essentially lived for 5 years of my life, became my friends. Not because we necessarily had much in common (we were all very different people), but because when you spend the majority of six days a week in the company of the same people, bonds are inevitably formed. I did not choose them, nor did they choose me, and I have no way of knowing if, had we been in a different situation, they would have done. Now, I know that my school might be a bit of an extreme example, but I think at any school it’s similar: when you’re thrust together with people, they are the ones you get to know, and they are inevitably the ones we come to class as “friends”.

But once you leave school, everything changes. You are no longer compelled to stay with the same people you first meet. At university, though you may be placed in a flat with six strangers, you are not in any way obliged to spend time with them if you do not wish to. Once you leave school, to either go into the real world, or, in my case, go to uni, you start to realise that you can choose your friends. Like-minded people with the same interests, or the same views. 

I’m not, for one second, suggesting that those friends we make at school are not real friends, nor am I suggesting that they don’t stay friends. Those three girls I was thrust upon during my first week at school will, I am sure of it, remain my friends for life. As will the others who, no matter how long we spend apart, will make it seem like I saw them only yesterday. But the friends I have made since leaving the bubble that was my boarding school, are friends that I got to know much quicker, and grew to love just as much as those I have known for years. And they are friends that I am sure I will keep for a lifetime. Because we weren’t just thrown together and told to like it or lump it. We came together by some form of gravitational force (or maybe it was just the inevitable attraction of music), and decided that these people would, at the end of the day, do more good than harm. 

Whether they be those who let me sleep in their lounge when I feel lonely, or he who will drive me to Sainsbury’s at midnight when I have no food, or the housemate who will go out in the rain to buy enough ice cream to feed a small army, or those who frequently invite me round for tea, just because, or he who valiantly tries to cook to a deadline in moments of stressful need (and often fails), or those who always try to help him, or she who will sit and listen to me being all neurotic, or she who will travel and surprise everyone with a visit, or he who will happily dress up as anything and everything (even if a little destruction is left in his wake), or the entire group of people who taught me that 4 o’clock is a perfectly reasonable bedtime and that staying up all night is completely fine as long as you have your instruments for the rehearsal the next day, or indeed the one who makes every single thing worth it. These people are the people I will keep with me forever, and are the people I have chosen, regardless of whether they have chosen me back or not. 

Some friends come and go, but others are there forever, and it is my view that the ones we choose for ourselves are the true keepers.