Yahoo News Maintaining friendships is hard work – but at 60, I’ve never been more grateful for mine
When you’re confronted on your 60th birthday by 10 mature adults of both sexes, all wearing blonde bob wigs and sporting various forms of leopard print, you know you’ve got friends. It was a crazy homage; a cluster of doppelgangers conceived by two long-term playmates to rescue my recent milestone birthday.
“You’ve got to have friends,” sang Bette Midler, and never is it truer than when you hit maturity with a thud, as I did a week ago. I’d done my best to sabotage any efforts to highlight my entry into a further decade, but my core group of pals were not to be dissuaded. So, on my husband’s secret invitation (using a covert WhatsApp group entitled Mariella 60), they gathered to push me through that portal. And so I entered my seventh decade as disgracefully as I have so many others, dancing around the kitchen table with this M60 swat team, elevated beyond my woes by the high spirits of those I love most.
I’m still not sure where the leopard-print theme emerged from as I have only one dress and one pair of shoes in “animal print”, but clearly I’m giving off Bet Lynch vibes these days. The doppelganger line-up was conceived by Amy and Anna, among my newest friends; a mere 20 and 30 years of hard labour respectively. When you get to my age, that’s a start-up relationship, having hopefully also accrued lifers of four or five decades.
Such enduring friendships require graft and forgiveness, particularly when one of the parties is as challenging as me. In youth, when so many of our relationships are formed, we take for granted that the world is full of people we connect with easily. But, as we get older, we realise that meeting someone with whom we share chemistry and compassion is not the easiest thing to stumble on or maintain. Working through the difficulties, drifting away and returning are all part of a pattern that, in later life, reaps huge rewards.
I could write this whole piece about my best friend Natalie, whom I met on a sailing weekend that was swiftly abandoned when a storm set in between Lymington and the Channel Islands. I thought she was dreadful, an Old Shirburnian who spent the unpleasant few hours that we were on the heaving ocean proclaiming loudly that she wanted a helicopter to rescue her.
Yet, thanks to popping a brain-altering Greek slimming pill for fun, by the time we’d returned to the still waters of the Solent estuary, we were lying in the galley with a copy of the News of the World, crying with laughter at an article about Fergie and Andrew. We’ve been umbilically linked ever since. Natalie’s seen me through the aftermath of one divorce and 20 years of dysfunctional singleton living.
I’ll always remember her and her husband waiting for me like concerned parents at a Swiss train station when I returned, traumatised, from an ill-fated fling, despite the fact they were holidaying with their newborn. Natalie is my safe haven, my rock, who, despite the fact she lives in Florence, has barely missed a birthday celebration in 40 years. Is it any wonder that when she turned up to my surprise 60th, I burst into tears, much to the amusement of all?
But how can I forget Penny, who I bonded with in the Sky TV make-up room 35 years ago, or Dyala, with whom I unwittingly shared a boyfriend in the 1980s (until we uncovered his duplicity and ditched him for our friendship), or Gina, my partner-in-crime since we met on her first date with another friend, the film director Nick Broomfield - another relationship that ended while ours took off. My emotional safe haven and playmate through the Nineties and Noughties, she forced me to go on my first date with my now-husband, married one of my best male friends and is still my salvation when it comes to tricky emotional terrain.
Then there is my Somerset neighbour, birthday twin and favourite trekking companion Catherine McCullin … and the seven girls of the local Redux Running team, set up a decade ago and still struggling on. And there are others, of course, far-flung but not forgotten, with whom, on irregular reunions, I instantly feel familiar.
All of us focus our energies on romantic relationships, but friends are more likely to stay the course, to be there for you when those romances crumble, kids cause anxiety, or workplace problems bring you down. So I’m often surprised by how frequently we fail to accord them their full value. As the years pile up and life’s knottier problems accrue, friends are our bedrock.
Another favoured anthem to platonic pals, Carole King’s You’ve Got A Friend, never fails to reduce me to tears. My friend Amy seemed similarly affected when we joined a group sing-along at a health retreat. The moment when we both blubbered away while I bellowed the words was particularly poignant, until she broke the news to me afterwards that she was actually crying at how tuneless my voice was.
Telling you such uncomfortable truths but sticking around regardless of your foibles and inadequacies is the mark of true friendship. I’m lucky to have more than my fair share.
