Elective Affinities 3

Here are a few more pages from that imaginary elective family album. It's a curious thing, the way the networks of friendship overlap. Take these four guys. They have one solid thing in common: the Oxford college they attended 1973-76. And yet it's hard to think of another thing all four of them have in common, other than the generic stuff that would link any group of men of the same age cohort. All are in stable relationships, true, although one is unmarried and, remarkably, three of them are still living with partners they met while at university. All have children, certainly, although two of them have had daughters only, while two have had both sons and daughters and, although all have endured the standard-issue trials of parenthood, only one has had to suffer the tragedy of the loss of a child. All, self-evidently, in their day, were charismatically handsome specimens, but only one still turns heads at age 63.

In fact, many, if not most of the overlaps are just two-fold: home town, class of origin, state or private secondary education, musical preferences, favoured sport, and so on. For example, two worked in the public sector, two went into "private" employment. Two studied English, two studied the sort of triple-initialled hybrid science-and/or-social-science pick'n'mix mashup you can do at Oxford. Two have family connections to the Scottish Borders, and two have family connections to the Middle East. Two have a better than average command of foreign languages; two have more than a passing acquaintance with grep, sed and awk.

But the more interesting intersections are three-fold. For example, three of them came from families that made several significant changes of location during childhood and adolescence. Although all hold left-of-centre views, only one has ever been an active member of a political party, but three have been active trade-unionists. One of these idiots has never "experimented" with, um, non-prescription psychotropic substances, though you'd probably guess the wrong one. Three are in relationships where the female partner's earnings are significantly larger. Three had the good fortune (or good sense) to pursue lines of employment that gave a steady income and culminated in a decent pension, whereas one has lived off his wits most of his life.

So it goes. It seems friendship is not so much a network as an interlocking pattern, rather like the intricate symmetries of a spirograph, or the 3-D visualisation of some complex mathematical equation. In the end, I suppose, the obvious point is that you don't have be like someone to like them, but having enough points of similarity may be what sustains a friendship over 40-plus years and transforms it into an elective kinship.

N.B. it's Easter so we're in Wales and have travelled back in time to somewhere around 1977, well before the advent of the internet and mobile phone. Any comments will get posted and possibly replied to when we return to 2017, towards the end of next week, if the time-tides permit.