The Christmas card list.

I think about friends a lot, being so far away from many of them and making new ones here, but I think the whole subject of friends will require several posts.

My friend Karen recently posted a blog about how friends get lost along the way and this gave rise to some discussion. When I thought about it, I wasn't really aware of friends disappearing, just perhaps sometimes I'm a little careless about where I put them. I realised that I hadn't been in touch with Julian since I moved here, but then I remembered that he had sent me a Christmas card, so we were ok, all was fine between us, I wasn't off his Christmas card list.

We are way more manic in Britain than people are here about the sending of Christmas cards. And if we have sent someone a Christmas card, or received one from them, then they are still out there somewhere, just a train journey away from a visit.

As a teacher you receive even more cards than normal people. You get cards from kids you teach, ones in your tutor group, and towards the end of term, as illness due to stress mounts and more and more classes are covered by supply teachers, you start to receive subject specific cards. Really, the only department who have any business making Christmas cards is Modern Foreign Languages.

We were supposed to teach cultural awareness, it was actually part of our remit to teach about differences in the main European festivals. There were a couple of members of my department who wouldn't do that for religious reasons, one was a Witness and they don't celebrate Christmas, another was the equivalent of an evangelical atheist, a committed and proactive proponent of the no-word of God. Sort of like Nietzche or 'Neechee' as I've heard him called on a couple of American TV programmes recently, but without the excuse of third stage syphilis on which to blame the dementia.

The life of a teacher was also complicated by having to constantly do battle with the falling apart of friendship groups and pairs. On trips, endless hours were spent dealing with this, in lessons, endless disruptions caused by it.
In tutor, well, in the tutor group it could usually be avoided by scoping out which girls were good at fixing things. In mine this was Zoey and Abbi. Their own friends weren't actually in my tutor group but always seemed to be there, Charlotte, Chloe and Josh. Chloe had the singing voice of a grown-up, recording artist grade, professional singer, and she was a delightful and quirky girl. She and friend Charlotte were also in one of my German classes and would insist on being called some different set of names every lesson. Freya and Margaret, Mildred and Etta, whatever came into their minds.
Their friend Josh, was the best ever, EVER Angel Gabriel in the year group's nativity play. He was divine - in every sense - in a pink bobbed wig, off the shoulder toga and bovver boots. When we went to Germany he bought a plastic teenage doll with ridiculously red hair and named her Bree van der Kamp. He got fed up with Bree van der Kamp quite quickly and she had to sit on my desk with her plastic legs akimbo and wearing no knickers until I left at which point I think I returned her to Josh.
These kids occasionally fell out, but they were brighter than most and capable of mediating their own problems.

I can see that some of those friendships will last a lifetime, some will only last to the end of school, some will come apart when they go to university. Out of each stage of our lives, if we're lucky, we'll keep some friends, lose others, some friendships will lie dormant until something re-awakens them, similar life experiences maybe or moving. The important thing is to be constantly tending the Christmas card list. Don't get me wrong, you don't need to actually send cards to everyone on the list, or receive them, but for the ones you don't see or speak to during the year, well the card's the indicator. Gotta be on the list.