On Friendship

by Jo Bell

Reader, I have a fondness for fondness. So when Word Soup’s lovely organiser Jane Brunning asked me to choose a theme for the January event I chose friendship. In the dark winter days, I thought, we should revel in the slow-burning, deeply warming relationships that furnish our lives. Not the sexual ones that provide the fireworks; not the family ties that come with their own incendiary baggage; but the friends who share nights at the local, food around your table, those who make the bright moments especially bright and the really crap moments slightly better.

I was delighted to hear the Dead Good Poets wrangling with the theme in their own readings on the night, and to share the mic with friends like Sarah-Clare Conlon, Fat Roland, Kim Moore and Martin Malone. My poems – like English Walkers or Break in and Leave Me Flowers – often start from small gestures that make me particularly glad of my mates. I read both of these at Word Soup, but I didn’t squeeze in the poem below, written after a delicious, easy late night/ early morning in Warwickshire some years ago.

The space we share with friends becomes invisible

Was that the time we visited Seville?

The night we all lay stoned in dunes at Druridge Bay,

me swearing I could see the Northern Lights?

Or were we on the boat, each bumping round to find a bunk,

excited by the smell of salt?

Perhaps we walked the fields behind my house

to see the hilltop obelisk at dawn,

and soaked our ankles with the dew.

We did that, once.

I cannot say. For every night we’ve spent

is present now in every night we spend.

As like as not, we drank too much.

At any rate, we talked and laughed and spent the time

like hoarded coins: amazed, as usual,

to find each piece increase in value

simply by the keeping.

Nights like Word Soup are the life-blood of the spoken word scene, and it was brilliant to see the DGPs tackling the whole event with such professionalism and energy. I arrived horribly late thanks to a disastrous traffic jam on the M60. So I missed one or two of the Dead Good Poets whose own friendly, chatterbox blog I had been following in recent days. But the welcome was warm, the feedback extremely generous and it was a real pleasure to join you all on stage at the New Continental. There was a real feeling of companionship. Thanks to all of you and I’ll be back as soon as I can!