thribble

I've been thinking today about friendship, for reasons that may become apparant. I have a few groups of friends, and I deal with them all differently. My friends from school and college, from uni, from work and the others!

My friends from college I stay in touch with. Mainly the girls, but a couple of the boys aswell. I'm very bad at keeping in touch with them though. They mainly live in the north-east, and they are (generally) not on email. Although when I see them it's as if we've never been apart, something of my friendship with them has been lost by moving south. I regret this, but it's partially my fault - I've never particularly liked the phone as a medium of communication, partially because you can't see whether the other person really wants to talk to you. But I rest safe in the knowledge that they're there - and when my birthday trip home coincides with Yarm Fair, they will be there even more so (as long as I don't have dinner with them in the former funeral home now Italian restaurant!)

My university friends again I'm not good with - I'm good at email, but somewhere along the line the distance that was put between us by our jobs has removed something from our friendship. I wish it wasn't true, but it is, and again, it's down to my hatred of the phone.

I've never been a big fan of socialising with people from work, so when I leave one job I tend to leave my colleagues behind too. There are a few exceptions, but they can always be relied upon to be somewhere else at the weekend, as can I, so we rarely get to meet up.

My husband's friends I am now priviledged to count as mine, and mostly this makes me very happy. Sometimes I want to swear at them, but that's usually because they're Scottish and deserve it. But they aren't really mine, they're borrowed.

And then there are the two people I've talked to most recently. J and M. I met J 18 months ago at a conference, we hit it off, and are still friends now. Because we have no history it's easier to talk to her about my problems, and I think the same applies. She's great fun to be around, and easy to talk to on the phone. But she's in Newcastle...

I met M in Miami, and we talked for hours over bottles of wine. I called her today and the only thing that stopped us doing the same (without the bottles of wine) was that I was calling from work and didn't want the phone bill to be too obvious! However, she's in Miami...

I'm not sure what the point of this post is anymore. There was one when I started... I guess I just wished, for most of this afternoon, that I was in Miami. The rain could have had something to do with it...