I was musing on this because today we are due to travel to Harlow in Essex for a college reunion 50 years on.
Isn't it strange how you gravitate towards certain people. And it's not always people you have something in common with?
I always say that friendships find their own level and I'll explain what I mean by that. When you start college, when you start University, when you start a job, when you go on holiday or on many other occasions you might wander into a group of people.
Initially you will talk to the first person you come across, but that won't necessarily be the person you become friends with. On my first day at college I remember the first person I came across who was on the same course. I chatted away with him but then hardly spoke to him over the next nine months. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with him - just I gravitated towards other people and set up friendships with others and he gravitated elsewhere.
So there are people I remember vividly from college and others I struggle to recall. I'm sure its the same with me. Some will remember me and others will say Peter who?
It happens on coach tours/holidays as well. The person(s) you initially talk to won't necessarily be the people you spend time with in the evenings - the people you share a drink with at the bar. It's really a case of things finding their own level.
Next Saturday it's a school reunion and that's exactly the same. At school there were groups of friends and I was in one group and could just have easily have been in a different one if it hadn't been for friendships finding their own levels.
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I am an avid visitor to charity shops where I immediately seek out the book sections. Churches also seem to have book sections nowadays as a way of raising a small amount of additional funds.
I have mentioned the Norwegian writer Knausgaard before and his huge six volume My Struggle. Technically it's a novel but in reality it's an autobiography. But this is no normal autobiography. The six volumes run to over 3,500 pages. And it's all about one man and the minutiae of his life. But that to me makes it very interesting.
Take Volume Two which I'm re-reading. I have just read about 40 pages about a children's party he took his two daughters to. That might sound mind-bogglingly boring but it isn't because its something many of us can relate to. I find myself relating to so many of the situations. The problem is Mr Knausgaard reckons he made a pact with the Devil before starting the work. That's because within the structure of the mundane comes falling outs, family problems, divorces and much more. So in other words cataclysmic events within the mundanity of life. Knausgaard has been divorced twice and seems in many ways to be a loner - somebody who would much rather shut himself away and write than be in a social environment - much like I am doing now.
Over 3,500 pages of day to day existence. As I've said it sounds boring but it is so brilliantly written that it isn't. It's almost as if he's writing at such a slow pace but the books seem to hurtle along and that's because he invites people into his situations. I was with him at that children's party.