Who needs enemies?

I have a friend. Actually, that’s a terrible way to start a blog, because it implies that my having a friend is somehow a remarkable occurrence, as if I’m such a loser, I deserve to spend my evenings in an onanistic frenzy, surrounded by microwaveable meal-for-one trays and empty bourbon bottles. What I really mean is I have a specific friend, although that’s hardly better, because it suggests either (a) some of my friends are unspecific, or (b) I chose this particular friend to be my friend for specific reasons.

No, when I say I have a friend, I mean I have a number of friends, but one of them deserves particular mention, because he in turn has thousands of friends on Facebook. Except if we’re being honest, he doesn’t, because even the good lord Jesus didn’t have that many proper friends – good, wholesome mates who’d go hill-walking with him, and indulge his long-winded orations. Jesus had eleven perfectly decent friends who remembered his birthday and probably told him he was a diamond geezer, but "friend" number twelve was quite happy to rat him out for thirty silver coins, which certainly isn’t my definition of friendship.

And in a rather roundabout way, that brings me to the point of today’s sermon. How do you define friendship? Facebook claims it’s anyone who is interested to know what you ate for breakfast, or how much you hate your job, or what’s currently making you LOL. You can be Facebook friends with a company that desperately wants your cash, or friends with a buxom teenager in Paolo Alto who’d love you to watch her webcam video. But I would argue that friendship is rather more profound and valuable than that, and I think Facebook’s arbitrary usage of the word “friend” has somewhat sullied the minds of its one billion users.

As is so often the case, Twitter is ahead of Facebook on this one. For the uninitiated, Twitter allows you to follow people, or be followed yourself. And not in a stalky-rapey way, either, but by following their comments and posts. Going back to the Jesus analogy, “follower” seems a far more sensible title for someone in Tanzania who stumbled across your online profile entirely by accident, but liked your post from six months ago about Top Gear, as opposed to describing them as a “friend”. In fact, do these online profiles even correlate to a real human being somewhere? Around 40 per cent of the 500 million Twitter accounts out there have never been used to send a single tweet, which begs the question what those 200 million people were doing when they signed up. If indeed they did.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I consider the tag of “friend” fit only for someone who would be there for me in a crisis. Someone I could phone up at 2am during a fit of depression and know they’d come over to play KerPlunk with me until the sun rose along with my spirits. In that respect, I consider myself a rich man indeed. Apart from my family, and my fiancé, and my fiancé’s family, I have one friend who would rush over in his slippers, another who would be here as fast as the taxi company permitted, and a third who might rightly wonder why I’d phoned him rather than any of the preceding people in this paragraph. Nevertheless, I don’t doubt he’d be willing to roll marbles with me through the small hours, so he passes my highly questionable “friend” test.

There are plenty of other people in my contacts list who might also qualify under these criteria, but since they could potentially fail the KerPlunk test, I prefer to think of them as mates, or acquaintances. Then again, perhaps the word acquaintance is too casual or devalued for people I’ve socialised with fairly regularly for the last ten years, or been on holiday with, or formerly been close to but recently lost touch with. Am I too sparing with my use of the word “friend”? Are other people too liberal? What’s a brother to think? And how do you become someone’s metaphorical, as opposed to biological, brother?

The day that never comes

Today is Pancake Day. I don’t know why I capitalised that statement, but starting a blog with the words “Today is pancake day” didn’t look right, either. Nonetheless, let us swiftly progress from this rather shaky debate about capitalisation onto the safer turf of topics you might actually want to read about, by considering the implications of this most annual of events.

So it’s Pancake Day (I’m sticking with the capitalisation - deal with it). So what? Well, did you know that today is also Red Hand Day, when countries around the world petition their governments to abolish child soldiers? I bet you didn’t know that this is Darwin Day, when we are encouraged by academics to celebrate the achievements of Charles Darwin. In America, today is National Freedom to Marry Day – an unofficial celebration of same-sex marriages, which seems quite topical in the circumstances. Tomorrow is World Radio Day, this whole week is National Science and Engineering week, oh, and let’s not forget that Thursday is Valentine’s Day, looming over the oppressed masses of singletons and couples alike, and guilting us into spending money that could otherwise go towards something far more useful, like reducing our debts.

The remorseless over-saturation of national this days and world that days has become really quite tiresome. I am a vegetarian, and proud of it, but do I celebrate National Vegetarian Week? No, I don’t. Nor do I commemorate World Vegetarian Day, or Hug a Vegetarian Day (I’m not making this up), and don’t get me started on Veggie Month. Then we have that elite group of masochists known as vegans, who get their own day, week, month, and probably a commemorative clock as well. We might as well canonise the whole bloody lot of them.

You could argue that some causes require a national day of celebration/mourning/awareness/campaigning to heighten their profile, and if it’s a genuine campaign, I would grudgingly concur. I can just about tolerate Movember, despite the tackiness of it all, because it is trying to raise awareness of something genuinely awful, by encouraging men to be less blasé about their health. But National Beard Week? Really? One glorious website has taken such banalities to new heights, declaring February to be the home of – among others - National Pistachio Day, Create a Vacuum Day, National Battery Day (that’ll be a charged occasion) and even International Dog Biscuit Appreciation Day. I would gladly take my hat off to the genius who came up with such concepts, but I’m not wearing a hat. Maybe I should buy one tomorrow? Or should I wait for National Hat Day? Would it be disrespectful to buy a hat on any other day, or is the hat industry so seasonally dependent on sales on National Hat Day that non-NHD sales are always welcome?

Of course, you don’t have to dig too deeply to discover the cold, clammy hand of a marketing person behind most of these orchestrated promotional campaigns. Setting aside charity-led days, most of these occasions are a tacky attempt to flog us crap we otherwise wouldn’t want. Bonfire Night has always been a vexatious occasion (blowing things up to celebrate a criminal who tried to blow things up), but now it’s been eclipsed by Halloween. Not because Halloween is a more noble occasion, or worthier of our celebrations, but because it’s easier to sell a wider variety of more easily manufactured garbage. Especially to children, and persuading children that they must have something is every marketing man’s wet dream (not in a Savile way, I hasten to add). Ultimately, it all comes down to how much money companies can squeeze out of us, and that explains the relentless paintball bombardment of sponsored days, weeks and months. Until Thursday, the shops will be crammed with Valentine’s Day tat, but on Friday morning, they’ll be furiously clearing the shelves in preparation for Mother’s Day marketing.

Which brings me to my Dragons Den-style bright idea. Why don’t we have a National Nothing Day? A day when nothing is celebrated, no-one is commemorated, nothing is championed and nobody is enticed to buy anything whatsoever. No overpriced tat in supermarkets, no pointless and extortionate cards, no need to pretend to care about something we don’t – it could be a day to remember for everyone who is as sick of all the other themed days as I am. Except I fear this particular day will never come.

Living is a problem because everything dies

It’s commonly accepted that, once we reach adulthood, our bodies cease to grow and instead begin to decay. There is no way to circumvent this most final of destinations, and I’m fairly sanguine about the fact that the low road has no exits. What distresses me more is the ever-accelerating rate at which I’m approaching terminal velocity, to judge by my body’s swelling orchestra of noisy protest at daily life.

Why is this? Why is my frail and feeble frame increasingly plagued with aches, strains and mysterious afflictions? I consider myself to be reasonably healthy in most regards – I eat plenty of vegetables, and I don’t even have an STD – and yet my body appears to have become a repository for things that aren't quite functioning properly. As I write these very words, for instance, my right shoulder has developed a curious cramp, I’m fighting off a faint backache and my left knee hasn’t been right since I woke up a few days ago and discovered that I could hardly put my weight on it, for absolutely no apparent reason whatsoever. Maybe pixies visited me in the night and fucked up my cartilage. A fortnight ago, in the cinema, I tried to take my coat off without standing up, and managed to pull something I didn’t even know I have. I can’t drink coffee on an empty stomach without appalling intestinal spasms, colds regularly turn into chest infections, and I’m increasingly struggling to read in low light. I honestly do wonder what’s going to break/strain/fail/begin to hurt next.

It’s not just me, either. My fiancé claims she can’t remember a week without some sort of mysterious pain or physical affliction, of which her recent hospitalisation was at least a refreshingly unconventional variant. My friends, too, report increasing numbers of body fails, from sciatica and bowel issues to a growing tendency towards sighing as they sit down. I do it as well. It must be catching. Shackleton wing back chairs will surely be gracing our living rooms before this decade is out, and if you don’t know what a Shackleton wing back chair is, (a) I envy you, and (b) ask an old person who has long since lost the ability to spring vertically out of a La-Z-Boy when the doorbell rings.

I often ponder how nature has managed to do such a crap job with me and my fellow homo sapiens. We spent millions of years evolving from plankton to bipeds, and yet we go wrong with terrifying regularity. My own long-term ailments range from the mundane to the exotic - specifcally, a rare muscular disorder, which was eventually traced to Cypriot dairy produce. They didn’t mention that in the holiday brochure. However, my own complaints pale into insignificance compared to more life-threatening conditions like organ failure, or cystic fibrosis, or MS. A well-known journalist buried her husband a fortnight ago, after he’d bravely recovered from a stroke and then cancer – in the end, a simple virus finished him off.

Such a personal tragedy rather underlines my point. Thousands of people die each year from influenza, yet more from the common cold, and others shuffle off this mortal coil from seemingly innocuous trips and falls. Can’t nature do better than this? Why can’t we all live to 200 years of age, clogging up the planet and laughing contemptuously at bacteria and germs? Nature – you’re shite. Hang your head in shame. And try harder from now on.