The Season for cozy reads and some musings on friendship

 Every year I put aside the crime novels I have on my TBR pile and get out my Jane Austen novels. I know them all by heart, or, to be, honest nearly all of them as I never could get into Northanger Abbey. I have just started Sense and Sensibility. It's like visiting friends you haven't seen for a year. I know what to expect and it is all going to turn out fine. We all need that feeling in our lives and there is no better time for calling it up than the dark winter months before Christmas.

Speaking or should I say writing of friends, made me stop and think for a minute. In my latest Christmas novel CHRISTMAS AT THE WISHING WELL writing under my Romance pseudonym Peggy O'Mahony, one of the characters says: "There are people for short journeys and people for the long haul. Knowing the difference means understanding friendship."

Short haul people are very often the people you have a good time with when you go out. You can chat to them at parties, wave at them across the tables at restaurants and know they will wave back equally enthusiastically. But they are not the people you confide in when life kicks you in the solar plexus. Someone once said that real friends are the people who, when you have made an atrocious horse's rear end of yourself, don't think it's a permanent job. Real friends, few and far between as we all know, are the ones who know you and still like you. Now that is a comforting thought.

Back to Sense and Sensibility. I sometimes ask myself why the novels appeal to me so much apart from the feel-good aspect. As a writer, I have a fairly critical eye. Jane Austen stays true to her characters. They don't change into something else. In Sense and Sensibility, Sir John, a warm-hearted type with not much brain, ends up promising a puppy to the villain of the story when he sees how upset he is over Marianne, although he is very fond of the Dashwoods. That makes him very human and very believable.

One thing I know, I never can write like Jane Austen and I don't intend to try. I expect every author writes what is in them to write and we all hope that our readers will like it.

Who goes there?

I read the other day that a friend of Prince Charles told the media that he (Prince Charles) had seven eggs cooked for him every morning and then decided on which one he would eat, depending on how cooked or not it was.  We are assured that this is a myth and the Prince does no such thing and I can hear a collective sigh of relief all over the egg-eating world at this very important discovery.

 It set me thinking, though.  Who was this friend who blabbed about something about which he/she obviously knew as much as a reader of a secondhand copy of Hello at the hairdressers?  How do you define who a friend is?  If you are a celebrity you'll have lots of "friends" spilling your guts to the media any time you have half a personal crisis.  "Friends of the couple, who wish to remain anonymous say ...."  What kind of a friendship is that? 

So what is a friend?  For me, a friend is someone who knows when to keep their mouth shut.  Someone who doesn't dish the dirt on me or give away my darkest secrets - I haven't got many, in case you're worried.  And someone who makes me feel good about myself most of the time while still being able to give me a verbal kick up the derriere if I get out of line. By definition, this is an "intimate" friend - again another invention of the media.  I either have friends of the above calibre or I have "acquaintances".  I don't expect too much from acquaintances.  They can be lots of fun to be with - people I really like - but I'd never tell them anything I'd regret telling to even the cat in the morning.  And I might not like it if they criticize me behind my back, but hey, I probably do the same to them.

The most hurtful thing is to consider someone a friend and then discover they've been tearing you to pieces as happily as a terrier with an old slipper.  That's happened to me a few times in my life - can't say I've learned from it, either. I have the feeling that it happens to celebrities a lot - otherwise it would mean colossal job-loss on those glossy gossip magazines even with all the eye-boggling "confessions" and interviews with the rich and famous.  You have to have a quote from a "friend" of Brangelina or Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson or any other celeb who migh be currently in the spotlight for whatever reason.

In the old days the sentry guarding the gate to the city said something like "who goes there - friend or foe?"  It would be good sometimes if we could ask this question of those around us - not that I think anyone would admit to "foe."  But perhaps a telling silence might suffice.