The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  When my cancer came back, my friends Jo and Lorna took it in turns to come with me to my hospital appointments. Jo was with me when the diagnosis was confirmed. Lorna was with me when the surgeon told me that it looked as though the kind of cancer I had was one that didn’t have a good prognosis at all. Those were not the words the surgeon used, but they were the words I found on Google when I got home. When I went in for my big operation, Lorna sat with me in the waiting room, with coffee and cake and Vanity Fair. It was only recently that she told me that when she left me on the ward, she sat down on the floor of the corridor and howled.

  When I went back to the hospital for a check-up, two weeks after the operation, Jo went with me. I could still hardly stand or walk. I had taken my lipstick out of my handbag, because it hurt to lift anything at all. When I saw the registrar, I told him that my reconstruction had gone a bit pink. He looked at it, drew a line in felt tip around the pink patch and told me that they were putting me back on the ward. ‘We don’t,’ he said, ‘want you to lose it.’ I thought of the scar, like barbed wire, running the whole width of my hips, and the pain that kept me awake at night, and the feeling I had of being stretched on a rack and thought: not half as much as me.

  I had nothing but a handbag, a tissue and a set of keys with me. Jo went back to her flat and came back to the ward with pyjamas, knickers, a bag of posh toiletries, a hairbrush and a choice of Barbara Kingsolver or Lorrie Moore. She even brought a smoothie. She had gone to her flat and made me a smoothie. A friend is a person who makes you a smoothie in hell.

  In the days after I lost my job, I emailed my friends. They couldn’t believe my bosses had behaved in the way they had behaved, and particularly since I was still being treated for cancer. What they said about the editor, and the managing editor, and the young man who had taken over my boss’s job and decided to veto my contract for a column, was probably not kind, but it did make me feel a bit better. Friends are people who will rage when they think you have been wronged.

  My friend Helen invited me down to Devon. I sat at her kitchen table and cried. I didn’t weep and rage with all my friends, because weeping and raging can get boring. The other thing with weeping and raging is that it doesn’t solve the problem. It might give you a temporary release, but when there’s something broken in your life what you really want to do is try to fix it.

  It doesn’t help to talk. I know this goes against the received wisdom about distress or trauma, or whatever you want to call it, but I honestly think it doesn’t help all that much to talk. If talking solved problems, or perceived problems, then I would have found a lovely boyfriend twenty-five years ago. I have moaned and moaned and moaned and moaned to friends about being single. I could have written War and Peace in that time. I could have built up a business empire. I could have sailed round the world or walked on the moon. What have I achieved by all that moaning? Apart, I mean, from boring my friends? Nada. Niente. Zilch.

  If I’d stopped moaning I might even have noticed that I was actually having quite a nice time, and that some of the friends I was moaning to had not had their own problems wiped away, just because they had a man in their bed.

  I didn’t actually moan all that much about cancer, because I found there wasn’t all that much to say. Get the damn thing cut out. Blast yourself with X-rays. Take the pills and keep your fingers crossed. Now can we go to the theatre? Or the cinema? Or crack open a nice bottle of wine? How do you feel? How do I feel? How does everyone feel? You know what, who cares? How you’re feeling now is probably not how you’re going to be feeling tomorrow. As I get older, I get less interested in how we all feel and more interested in what we all do.

  When you’re feeling terrible, you probably do want someone close to you to know that you’re in pain. It meant a lot to me that Helen let me sit at her kitchen table and cry. It meant a huge amount to me that Jo and Lorna were with me when I thought I was probably going to die quite soon. I have wept in front of my friends Ros and Nick, when the pain in my legs came back, and when they scooped me up and took me in. Sometimes you just need a witness to your pain. But I’m not so sure about the talking part. I think it can help to talk about something once or twice, but not over and over and over and over and over and over again.

  Cows have friends. A ‘lecturer in animal behaviour’ called Krista McLennan has shown that cows even have best friends. When a cow is put in a pen with her best friend, she has, according to her studies, a much nicer time than when she’s with a stranger or on her own. Her cortisol level is lower and so is her heart rate. She may or may not whistle a merry tune. She doesn’t seem to feel the need to give a blow-by-blow account of her latest upset or slight. She can just chew the cud, shoot the breeze and be soothed by her friend’s smell and the sight of her lovely big eyes.

  The psychiatrist Simon Wessely has done a lot of research on trauma. He has, for example, done studies on the survivors of the London 7/7 bombings. What he discovered was that getting people to talk about their trauma straight away sometimes did more harm than good. ‘People,’ he said in a recent interview, ‘are a bit tougher than we think.’ After the bombings people who were directly affected were offered counselling and the ones who got it took longer to recover than the people who didn’t. ‘Most people,’ he said, ‘will cope through normal social networks.’ Normal social networks where you talk a bit, and then move on.

  What I want from my friends, increasingly, is fun. I want a laugh. I want to have a nice time. When I meet my friend Lisa, for example, we sometimes laugh so much my cheeks ache by the time we part. Laughter is good for you. All the studies show that laughter is good for your health, your immune system and your general sense of wellbeing. But it’s a bit like the sex-is-good-for-you thing. No one wants to do something because it’s good for you. We want to do things because they give us joy.

  After a column I wrote about the culture of the NHS, I was asked to give a talk. The column had been about how people do a much better job if they like their work. The headline, which I didn’t write, was ‘The Secret to an Effective NHS Workforce: Fun’. I was asked by the director of HR at Surrey County Council to give a talk on ‘how to have fun in the workplace’. Yes, I really was asked to talk about how to have fun in the office. I thought of The Office. I thought of David Brent. ‘How would you like to be remembered?’ says one colleague to Brent. ‘Simply,’ says Brent, with his usual smirk, ‘as the man who put a smile on the face of all who he met.’ He certainly put a smile on my face for reminding me just how awful office life can be.

  The most fun I had in an office was at the Poetry Society, but an awful lot of that seemed to be about margaritas in the sunshine on the roof, San Miguel in the Poetry Café, and gathering outside my office to mark some tiny victory with cava and Kettle Chips. I wasn’t at all sure how I could turn this into anything that might seem like a practical policy for middle managers at Surrey County Council, so I talked about the work of the neuroscientist Antoine Lutz, who showed that organizations that are nice to their staff are much more productive than those that aren’t. And I talked about a film made by an Israeli film director, Yoav Shamir, called 10% – What Makes a Hero? He wanted, he said, to ‘identify the secret ingredient all heroes share’. He met a bloke who leapt on to the New York subway tracks to save a man who had fallen off the platform and into the path of a train. He met a woman who had hidden Jews in Belgium in the Second World War. He met a surgeon who had given away 99 per cent of his income. Shamir didn’t, unfortunately, find the secret formula. What he found was that the ‘heroes’ he met all said that they had a lot of fun.

  You can’t prescribe fun. There are people, apparently, who run laughter workshops, in hospitals and workplaces, but they are probably the kind of people who do ‘mindfulness for the bottom line’ in banks. Count me out. Count me in if you can make some money out of it, but really, count me out. Fun is in the eye, or wobbling shoulders or stomach, of the beholder. It’s that delicious sense you have when the world suddenl
y feels lighter because you’re having a good time with people you like.

  Many years ago, when I was working at the Southbank Centre, I had dinner with Gore Vidal. He was as funny and sharp as you’d expect. There have been many times in my adult life when I have thought of his line about friends. ‘Whenever a friend succeeds,’ he once said, ‘a little something in me dies.’ It would be very nice to think this was never true, but sometimes it just is.

  Three of my closest friends at school got into Oxford and I didn’t. I had applied to Jesus. I had given my life to Jesus. But Jesus, it turned out, didn’t want me. Balliol, Brasenose and Somerville did want them. They all had private tuition and I didn’t, which may have played more of a part than God. My friends all met their partners while they were at Oxford. I had one semi-platonic relationship at Durham for five weeks. They all started having babies. I didn’t. Did you really expect me to go to those school reunions?

  One by one, my friends paired off. I would make more single friends and then they would pair off. They would do this because this, for the most part, is what people do. When they introduced me to their partners, or got married, or had babies, I would try very hard to smile. I tried to feel pleased for them, but sometimes I just wanted to stamp my feet and yell: ‘But what about me?’

  I once walked out of my friend’s husband’s book launch after he had given a speech about finding the love of his life. I was so eaten up by envy I couldn’t stay in the room. Oh, and let’s not get on to books. Why are so many of my friends successful writers? No, don’t tell me it’s because they actually sit down and, you know, write books. ‘Writers,’ said Salman Rushdie at a literary dinner I once went to, ‘are people who finish books.’ At the time, it seemed both obvious and profound. They are not, in other words, people who dream of writing books, but who can’t be bothered and can’t face the rejection.

  ‘A man’s friendships’, said Charles Darwin, ‘are one of the best measures of his worth.’ Let’s be generous and assume he was talking about women, too. I have learnt to swallow the odd stab of envy towards my friends because they are the finest people I know. And when I talk about friends, I don’t mean the people you might meet for coffee or lunch or a drink. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar thinks we can’t maintain stable social relationships with more than about 150 people. I don’t think my active social circle is as big as that, but there are quite a few people I meet for coffee, lunch or drinks, just because I like them.

  Friends are something else. Friends are the people who are there in the middle of the night when your heart has been broken. They are the people who will offer you a room when your flat is flooded, or when you’re so exhausted that you have decided to buy yourself some time off and rented out your flat on Airbnb. Friends are the people who cook food for your parties, because they know you hate cooking, or who open their hearts and homes to you, because your weird illness has come back and the doctors can’t seem to do anything about it, and nor can they, but at least they can offer you some company, some home-cooked food and some nice wine.

  It goes without saying that you will do the same, or something similar, for them. Because that’s the other thing about friendship: it’s equal. It’s reciprocal. It’s give and take. When I was young, I seem to have had a sign on my forehead that said: ‘Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. Come, all ye moaners, all ye slackers, all ye takers. Suck me dry.’ And they would, and then they would skip off until the next time and I would be left feeling as if someone had filled my pockets with stones.

  I’ve toughened up. I’ve pruned. I have a strict vetting policy now. We all sometimes slip up, of course. I’ve told friends off when they have hurt me or let me down and they have done the same to me. Friends are necessary critics. Sometimes they tell each other truths they don’t particularly want to hear. But sometimes when I hear people talk about their friends, I wonder if they actually like them. So let’s get back to basics. Friends are people you like. They are people whose company you enjoy. We should all find some space in our lives for people who can’t give us as much as we give them. But they are not our friends.

  The Ancient Greeks used the same word, philos, for a friend as a lover. Some of my friendships have been a bit like falling in love. That sense of something stirring, igniting. Sometimes, it’s a sense of a shared passion, but often it isn’t. Quite a few of my friends come from very different cultures and backgrounds. I have known Winston, for example, for sixteen years and in that time he hasn’t mentioned a single book. Friendship isn’t to do with similarity. It’s to do with the spirit.

  Friendship, according to the research, is one of the key factors in developing resilience. It helps you develop a stronger immune system, increases your tolerance of pain and reduces the risk of depression and early death. Those of us who are single or gay are often much better at building strong networks of friends than what Bridget Jones called ‘smug marrieds’. Just don’t come knocking on our door when your relationship breaks up. In friendship, you reap what you sow.

  In that capsule at the top of the London Eye, I looked out at this city I love. To my left were the Houses of Parliament, that place that had, over the years, occupied so many of my thoughts and columns. Ahead of me was the National Gallery, where, three years before, I had stood in front of Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine and had a strange feeling that I was standing in the presence of God. On my right was Tate Modern, where I had recently seen the Matisse cut-outs with Jo. When Matisse did them, he was in a wheelchair and had just had his second operation for cancer. The pure, shining simplicity of the work had made me cry.

  I smiled at Nick, and Ivan, and at their friends Amanda and Esther, who had generously offered me the use of their flat for a couple of weeks while they were away. And I remembered something Matisse once said. ‘There are’, he said, ‘always flowers for those who want to see them.’

  A charmed life

  ‘We need,’ said the academic, sitting in the Great Hall of an Oxford college, ‘to re-envision money. We need to work out how much we really need.’ I was meant to be chairing the seminar, on the ‘philosophy of money’ at a festival of ideas, but instead I felt like giving the speaker a slap. She was a Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy. Her job is to have big ideas. I wanted to yell out that most people didn’t have the luxury of thinking about money as a philosophical concept, and that I had hardly thought of anything else since I had lost my job.

  It’s easy to think money doesn’t matter when you have enough to pay your bills. As a child, growing up in a family where both parents worked, I barely gave it a thought. My mother certainly didn’t take money for granted. Her father died when she was twelve and her mother got up at 4 a.m. to work at a post office to pay the rent. My mother grew up on jumble sale clothes and free school lunches. When she married my father, they lived in a bedsit in Earls Court, with a shared kitchen and bathroom, and my mother walked a couple of Tube stops to her job every day, to save up for a Sunday lamb chop.

  When I was nine months old, my parents bought, by mail order from Rome, the house in Guildford my mother still lives in now. It was the only house still available on the estate and more expensive than the one they had hoped to get. At first, they couldn’t afford carpets and my mother had to paint the floors. I was often expected to wear my sister’s hand-me-downs. We went out for a meal, usually a Chinese meal, once a year. I got a Saturday job when I was fifteen to save up for the blue cheesecloth dress I’d seen at Dorothy Perkins and the tight jeans my mother said made me look like a tart. We weren’t rich, but we were comfortable. I never, ever had to worry that we wouldn’t have food on the table or a roof over our heads.

  Until I was thirty-five, I earned around the average wage. For a while, when I had a crippling pain condition in my mid-twenties, I lived on benefits. It wasn’t easy, but I knew that if I’d fallen into serious financial difficulty my parents would have helped me out. I took a pay cut to join The Independent, at the age of t
hirty-nine, and for many years earned slightly less than a teacher. In the last couple of years there I earned a fair bit more. I was extremely lucky to be able to buy my first (ex-local authority) flat when I was twenty-nine. At the time, you could still get something on three and a half times your salary. I wouldn’t be able to buy an airing cupboard on what I’m earning now.

  Because I own my flat (or will do, when I’ve paid off my mortgage), my worries about money are in a context where I would always be able to access some cash. I’m lucky. I really am very, very lucky. But having no regular income has made me think about money in a way I never have before. And I now know that people tend to think about money much more when they haven’t got it.

  ‘My friends had things I didn’t have,’ Ken Olisa told me, in the office of his boutique merchant bank overlooking Regent Street. ‘As a child you either want something or you don’t want it. You don’t say “there’s a normal distribution and I find myself in the top quartile”. I was envious of some of the things my friends had, like a holiday for longer than a day, for example, which is what we did. But did it matter? No, I don’t think so.’ Ken was cheerful, as he nearly always is. If you ever try to get him to moan about anything, you’ll have a challenge on your hands. So, I asked him, as the mixed-race son of a white single mother and a Nigerian father he never knew, living in a house with no bathroom, at a time when a black bus conductor was front-page news, was he really not aware of feeling disadvantaged?

  Ken laughed. ‘I can remember a few times when I got grumpy about not having a father,’ he said. ‘And sometimes being black was difficult. There were people asking funny questions all the time. I was once asked how I went to the loo – and they didn’t mean “is it inside or in the yard?”! But I think in the scheme of things, no. I was telling our daughter – we have two daughters – about how my mother and I celebrated Christmas. We made our own decorations. She would buy one big slab of chocolate, and break it into pieces, so we’d have one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and that lasted a week. And that was part of the fun of Christmas. So,’ he said, with a smile that was like a flourish, ‘I had a very happy childhood.’