BEST FRIENDS

I think that it’s really significant that Diamonds are supposed to be a “girl’s best friend”, but that traditionally, man’s “best friend” is his dog. Actually, I’m not all that keen on either diamonds or dogs, but then I’ve never really found myself to have all that comfortable a fit within society as a whole.

Fizzbok at the moment seems eager for me to grade my friendships into various categories or degrees of friendship, which seems like a recipe for disaster for certain personal relationships to me. Like having a “league” on your speed-dial, none of us want to be “graded” and find out that we are not considered to be “close” friends any more but have been “demoted” to the level of merely being a “passing acquaintance” or “someone I worked with once”.

This, rather naturally I imagine, is their response to the competition from other “social networking” sites who have their “circles” so that you can keep personal information about your more “wild” antics away from your more intimate relationships, which is only a natural thing to want to do, I suppose, but does move us all into a whole world of deception and secrets which might be considered an unhealthy shift in matters of personal openness.

You can say what you like about these sites (and many do) but they were developing a pretty level playing field and were very democratic. By telling one person something, you were pretty much telling everyone and, whilst some people wisely proceeded with a certain amount of caution, others seemed to forget this and would be shocked if their employer suggested that one or two of the pictures they posted were deemed “inappropriate” for the position they held, or when family quietly suggested that the overly intimate pictures of their children that they had posted could be seen by far more people than just dear old grandma.

“Best” friends… How do you define that anyway? If it’s someone you see regularly, I have none. If it’s someone you exchange messages with on a regular basis, those who would most qualify probably wouldn’t be the obvious choice that people who actually know me would consider. I did have a “best” friend for many years - or at least I think I did - but nowadays I’m not so sure that I have. Different lifestyles and priorities have changed us both beyond recognition and we barely see each other any more. I like to think that we both know that if either of us ever really needed the other, then we would be there for them, only I’m not entirely sure whether I’d even ask these days.

Anyway, when it comes to matters of a more abstract notion of gender, you can blather on about “Mars” and “Venus” to your heart’s content, the truth is that men are from Earth, and women are from Earth and we need to get used to the fact, and that pretty everything that men and women can do, apart from the obvious biological limitations, can be done just as well - and sometimes considerably better - by someone of the opposite sex, and we should stop trying to perpetuate some kind of gender war with our ridiculously stereotyped notions of what it is to be a man or a woman in this crazy mixed up world of our which has enough tensions in it without us deliberately adding further complexities to it.  Maybe if they can start making “Diamond Dogs” we’ll all be able to have a “best friend” so maybe that famously occasionally androgynous Mr Bowie was on to something after all.

It’s strange, really, Mr David Bowie has a lot of fans amongst people I know and whom I have yet to determine the category of. Perhaps it’s their ages? Maybe musical preferences might be a good way to go in terms of sorting them out into their various pigeonholes…? It’s something to consider, anyway.

Somehow, however, as musical influences go, Mr B somehow never really managed to get onto my radar. My sister’s record collection which ended up being a big influence on my own musical tastes later on, making me aware of things like “Hawkwind”, “Harvey Andrews”, “Zeiger and Evans” and “The Monkees” when other people my age had all but forgotten them, did contain one LP called “Pin Ups” but I don’t recall it being played very much – I think that I was more fascinated by the bizarre cover art - and so his music did rather pass me by.

Apart from “Space Oddity”, of course, which was always on “Top of the Pops” for a while and probably piqued my interest because of all those “space” references, and my friends probably danced a lot to “Modern Love” and “Let’s Dance” whilst I stood at the side of the room being too “cool” (or – more likely - far too self-conscious) to dance at the Sunday night youth club and other parties.

Sudden flashback to watching the silhouettes of the vicar’s many daughters moving and shaking very beautifully through the near-darkness of some living room or other, all happily blaming “it” on “the boogie” whilst I sat on the couch being ignored by them and trying (and failing) to look “cool” about it. Happy days…

One former girlfriend did have a selection of David Bowie’s LPs which, I think, were (for a time) all that remained after she cleared out, and even those I don’t remember us playing all that much either, and certainly not afterwards. I guess it’s those little personal experiences that can influence how we respond to certain musicians and what they do, and it can sometimes have nothing to do ith their talent or ability. If it reminds us of something sad, we’d just rather not listen. I did once buy a “Greatest Hits” double CD set, although that just seemed to gather a lot of dust, too.

It’s all rather ironic, of course, that, when I think back, I can remember the record sleeves far more than the tunes, which probably just proves that I was always far more interested in the visual arts than the aural ones...