Friends

December 19th.

My best friend's birthday. It's the first time in years that I have managed to be in the room with her on her actual birthday, and our classy pizza and taittinger meal kind of sums up our relationship. Which one of us is the pizza and which one the taittinger ? Hahaha. Depends on the day. What I actually meant by that was that we both have a love of the good things in life, but an absolute abhorrence of pretension. Not everyone , it seems, can understand the difference. Happy Birthday Jacq! 44 minus 12 years is long time, but for me at least, it's still the same! Effortless.

Fitting that I should be reminded that despite distance and years, real friendship endures, on the day when the closest person to me on the other side of the Narnia wardrobe of my existence lost her battle with cancer.

My only regret about knowing Nicky Biwaki, is that I didn't know her better sooner. Our friendship was so brief in the scheme of things that most of the important people in her life will probably have never even heard of me. And yet. We were the kind of friends that could scream at each other in frustration in the safe knowledge that telling each other to "bugger off" would never actually result in that happening. It's not often that you meet someone that just knows what you mean when you say something, the exact way you meant it without further explanation. Yes, we were both from Scotland, but this goes beyond linguistic matters. (And anyway, she's from Aberdeen and no-one knows what they are talking about up there !)

Nicky and I by no means agreed about every issue , and were by no means the same in every way, despite the long checklist of things we did have in common, but on the core things that drive our beings, we understood each other.

Life was not a popularity contest for us. Better to be judged negatively based on the truth, than to be loved based on lies and manipulation. Better to be in the background and making a difference in a real way, than to be perceived to be important and powerful while in reality only serving your own image .

She was honest, she put others before herself , she was a big picture thinker , and could follow any given scenario logically at least 3 stages further down the line than most people I know, in an instant, and whatever she took part in, whatever the goal was, she was an advocate of the most utilitarian result possible , even if it was not to her own best advantage. She hated petty manipulating people. If she said she would do something, she did it. Even if a minor inconvenience like cancer got in the way. She did not believe in choosing the easy option for personal convenience over the path to the best achievable result. She believed in integrity and loyalty, especially when the going got tough . She judged by intention rather than result, and was forgiving, as long as people took responsibility for their mistakes.
She was feisty, and short tempered and did not suffer fools or foolishness gladly, but if you were on the receiving end of her ire, you usually knew you'd done something to deserve it. She had a zero tolerance level for fannying around. She could be her own worst enemy, but she could and did always examine everything from the other point of view before making up her mind. Once she'd made it up however, she was as stubborn as an ox. It took a lot to piss Nicky off, but once you'd crossed a line with her , you were dead to her, and there was no way back. (Her words, not mine). But she was classy enough that you might not realise that you'd crossed it.
Her beautiful daughter Emma was central to her existence. Her raison d'être was to give that girl the best start in life she could. She looked around, weighed up the available options, and chose what she considered the best one. Most people at HIS, even the ones who think she worked hard, will never begin to realise just how much Nicky did for that school, and how much their own children have benefited indirectly from Nicky's need to make sure that her girl had the best education possible. She was a lioness in the face of anyone she perceived to be threatening her child. It was her greatest pleasure to see Emma graduate from high school and start her life safely at university. I have every confidence that Emma will get through this and make her mother proud.

She had the most cackling brilliant black and evil sense of humour, but never used her humour to mask real malice. She knew the difference between a difference of opinion and a personal attack.

I would like to think that at least some of these things apply to me too, but Nicky had the knack I still search for, of beng able to speak her mind, argue a point till she was blue in the face, and still somehow smile through and not piss people off.

Love does not require common experience. Being in Scotland surrounded by those who may not truly understand me but love me nonetheless, and also to meet up with some of my other kindred spirits from olden days, haha, at the end of this - unbelievably at the age of 44- my first real up close and personal experience of a lingering passing, is probably the biggest comfort. I feel so lucky really.

But Nicky's life and her choices mirrored mine in so many ways. Japan experience. The unique experience of marriage of Scottish woman to Japanese man-haha. Child. Geography. Background. Basic philosophy. The way we processed, dealt and solved problems. Foodie proclivities. Communication style. What made us laugh out loud.

As I say, my only regret is that I didn't get to know these things about her sooner. When fate threw us together at our daughters' school PTA, it was only a year or so before she became ill. We never got the chance to do all the things together and for each other that we surely would have loved. We were always going to go out and paint the town red, have fabulous lunches and go to art museums, drive for hours to funky places on a whim. But by the time we'd worked that out about each other, she was already too ill to do it . We had our future business planned. I know we could've worked together and stayed friends. There are not many people I could say that about.

Friendship, love, or whatever other words we dour Scots are prohibited from talking about out loud by our national character, take on many shapes.
Neither Nicky nor I may have said the other's name as a reflex when asked in playground terms who our "best friend" is, but I have no doubt that I lost a soulmate yesterday.

I wish I could console myself with "she's in a better place" type statements. It must be great to have that comfort . I can't though. She didn't believe that either. She is gone.

For me though, from now on, on December 19th each year I will have two reasons to reflect on the importance of greats friends.

Thank you J and N.