A couple of weeks ago, I walked into The Old Church in Stoke Newington, with thirty other men, and we sang at people. In the middle of our shoutiest number, a long-carrying chant called Elesa, I experienced a second, condensed adsolecence - but that's another story. The story today is about other people.
Us at The Union Chapel because it’s a better photo, sorry
As a child, making friends for most people is pretty easy. We are a socialising machine (just like we are a language-learning machine, a creative play machine, a mischief machine. It's the waves kicked up by our passage). But there are real lifestyle factors at work, too. You're thrown into a room with 35 children your age, in a building with a hundred more. You see them every day, for learning, mucking about, and eating, and if you're lucky they live close by, within an accommodating parent's drive.
University, if you go, is all of these factors, plus alcohol plus a sense that the prime time of your life is running out, minus the parental supervision.
What happens after that varies a lot. But I can tell you what happened for me, and most people I know. The moment of leaving University is the moment when common purpose evaporates and everyone becomes obsessed with carving out exactly the right life path for them. Ideally, as quickly as possible. I flung myself away from people and places I knew almost as though I hated them, which wasn't true. I just wanted to find the next thing to love, and not be seen to dither. (A decade later and I'm finally undoing this.)
In search of the perfect job, you end up in a new city. In my case it was London, which I'd grown up close enough to for a visit every year, but far enough from that it seemed tantalising. And, in moving for a job, suddenly you're somewhere where a job is the only thing you have. It has been the source of your new location, your commute, your box-room. It must also be the source of your friends.
Coworkers that play together stay together. Advertising agencies are a weird blend of Hogwarts; a weird, mystical academic institution where magic seems possible; and the Olympic Village, a temporary carnival where everyone is on their way somewhere else. To get you to give them everything, they try to give you everything, and that includes friends. Every Thursday night is debauched. Every Friday is hungover. But out of the chaos I made some of my best friends, whose attachments lasted into the real world: weekends, weddings, flat-sharing.
How many of your adult friends have you made over a shared job? I'd bet that it's half of them or more. And that's only natural because we go there every day, we collide, we bond.
This leaves freelancing in a tricky place, of course. When people leave the constraints of full-time employment, they also leave the ties that bind them to others. I took a desk at Second Home to have a place to go, but also have a little community to feel part of. Even when I wanted to work uninterrupted by others, I didn't want to be alone!
But I was already in community. One that wasn't dependent on work.
Joining Chaps Choir, about a year ago, is one of the best decisions I've made in my adult life. We're on Summer break now, which gives pause to reflect on what's been so good about it. In truth, I can't sing THAT well and I don't like singing THAT much. What I do like is making something physical happen, as part of a group. Noise, shock, laughter. Occasionally, tears. A friend who joined at the same time as me summed our repertoire up as: "the silly and the serious, the boisterous and the tender." He could have been talking about the people.
And it's the group I actually like, too. Jobs place us with people are all obsessed with the same things as us, and they feed that obsession. But Chaps is musicians, yes, and marketeers, but also teachers, and IT developers and performers and retired people who've found their passion at last, or just want a laugh on Thursday night. We've shared nonsense, advice, a burlesque stage; we've toured the north - when we stopped in the crags of Ilkley, one of us revealed he was coming home for the first time in years, and showed us where to get the best ham rolls in the town.
My point with all this is not that you should join a choir. But, as Kurt Vonnegut said, "Join more clubs". A stable life is a life with many feet: many sources of friends, many places you belong, many interests and factors that make up who you are. It's easy to dismiss 'activities' as a relic of after-school fun - but it's easy to dismiss education that way, too.
Hello,
From the between-time. Looking behind my shoulder, I’ve just closed out two big projects. Looking ahead, I have pretty big news on two creative writing projects, but I’m not allowed to talk about either of them yet. And a series of promising meetings. There’s good work coming in a couple of months, but at the moment I’m looking for interesting projects for August. My last clients loved the Eureka process, and said they got more from it than they were bargaining for. Could you, or someone you know, be next? Have a look at what I offer.
If not, well, the Chaps Choir Live Album is now streaming on Spotify. It’s really good (and on a personal note, it was amazing to finally hear what the audience hears, instead of just your part.)
That’s it from me this week. Join us again in a couple of weeks, when the piñata finally opens. Look after yourselves in the meantime.
~James