The Veins of our Friendship

Due to the weather being a little bleak, I thought I'd throw some sunshine into my blog today by way of The Radiant Rider Waite, which my boyfriend gifted me for my birthday. It happily threw out The Fool, a card that I rarely get, but which reminds me of a special friend. Funnily enough, I am going to stay with this particular friend (pictured in the pages of my journal above) this evening.

In my experience, I would say that this lady has always been the ultimate Fool. For many years while she travelled the world, I never had a telephone number for her that worked and didn't have an address. For a while, until I received a Christmas card by surprise a good few years back, I wasn't even sure that she was in the country. A friend of mine said that he had spotted her walking through South London while he and his wife were looking for a flat.

When we were younger, she and I spent a lot of time together. Being around her then was like being pulled along by one of those giant twisters. Her life was dramatic, unpredictable, but at best, fun to be a part of. When she breezed into my day, you could never really tell what was going to happen by the end of it - when together, the two of us got into some real mischief.

As the years passed, we saw each other less. Rather than a week passing, over the two decades of our friendship, it would sometimes be a couple of years before we hooked up again. My friend is one of the most generous people you could meet. Like The Fool, she is impulsive, and most often, her impulsiveness has been kind and thoughtful - if I was ever threatened, she would step in and defend me (something which extended to anyone she felt was vulnerable and needed support).

After one particular night in London at my student house, I woke up and she was gone. I was pretty poor at the time and she had paid for the entire previous evening. Another close friend had invited me to her hen night, but due to a lack of funds, I had had to decline. I had told my flame-haired friend about this in the pub the night before. When I got downstairs the following morning, my housemate told me that there was a note on the dining room table. In it, it had said something along the lines of 'If it were my hen night, I would want you to be there'. Enclosed in the letter was £30. I used the money to go to the hen night in London, but didn't see my friend for another few years.

Things are very different now. Even though still enigmatic and with a lifestyle that has more twists and turns than the London Underground, my mate has settled somewhat. We talk a few times a week and she lives only a fifteen minute car ride away from me with her 3 year old daughter. She is a great mum and our friendship grows stronger with every week. She may hold down a job, be studying for her doctorate and be a great single parent to her little girl, but she will still always be The Fool to me. We may have grown older, but we still have the impromptu laughs of today's tarot character running through the veins of our friendship.

So aside from spending the night at my friend's house, what else is The Fool telling me today? I slept so well last night. I went out like a light. I still felt the chains of fatigue this morning but got up at a reasonable hour and decided to do as little as possible today. As I said yesterday, I need to find time to rest and the last couple of days have been more than a bit manic. I needed to make a few notes about work I have done, fire off some emails, and prepare for invoices. I don't know about you, but I am one of those people who will worry and cannot rest until those kind of little bits and pieces are done. Now that that it is completed, until I journey over to my friend's house, I can do whatever I like. This is what The Fool is all about - no rules and no order. I think I will boil the kettle, run a bath, and take a book and a coffee into the bathroom for a nice relax.



Illustrations from The Radiant Rider Waite by Pamela Coleman Smith, recoloured by Virginijus Poshkus