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?
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