Friends and Nietzsche

I think it was Mark E Smith who grunted that 'My friends don't add up to one hand.' But what are friends? I checked my phone recently to remind myself that I used to have a lot of friends. Or I seemed to. Many of them were colleagues, too, or maybe colleagues in the main, so they were banned from talking to me when I was suspended. Others... well, I told them about the circumstances I found myself in and some of them melted into the background. One friend pretended to be busy on her phone and walked briskly past in The Botanical Gardens. Another promised a cycle ride and a pint the following week, but since then has been far too busy. But then I didn't push any of them, or pirsue the friendships. I'm too self-contained for that. Let them melt away. There's a lot to be said for a blank sheet, starting again. At family meals we discuss where in the country we'd like to live. Whether or not Nietzsche is a good guide can be argued elsewhere, but I can identify with his sense of everyone around him getting smaller, even their houses shrinking, causing him to stoop as he enters. 'Loneliness is one thing,' he wrote, 'solitude is another.'

'One should not stir up the bog. One should live in the mountains.' On which precept, we consider the Cheviots, or the Scottish Borders, perhaps the best coast in England at Newbiggin. Not have a mortgage, with money to spare. Moving away from Sheffield, at the very least - a fine city, but one in which many friends, schools, the police, social care and others have left their 'evil vapours' wherever they tread.

We'll find new friends where our souls will be 'tickled by sharp breezes as with sparkling wine.' Of course, Nietzsche did die insane.