Friends are the gift yule never forget

MAYA Angelou’s line, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”, is oft used as a kind of warning. The inference is that no matter how nice someone seems to be, any hint of a darker side is the real person and don’t keep waiting for them to behave badly before you see the truth. I’m not sure that that’s what she meant, and even if it is, how healthy a way is that to look at things?

For a start absolutely everyone can be a pain sometimes, is it on that that you judge them? There are people with whom you don’t really hit it off in the beginning but they can turn out to be some of the best people you know. Some folks have an odd manner but behave with deep kindness. So when someone shows you who they are, it can be something lovely.

Very often our gut instinct knows straight off if someone is good for us or not. But we don’t necessarily follow that, so the next best thing is time and the famously clear-sighted hindsight. Because it’s not single acts but an accumulation of deeds, words and feelings that show who someone really is.

Time certainly applies to some of my closest friends, bonds forged a decade or three back when we were teenagers. Of those there are a few that I see often but busy lives mean that there are others I see just once a year, at Christmas. We have given up promising to do better but the festive date remains. Not everyone can make it every time, some years some of us have been through a tough 12 months, but even if we haven’t been in touch much we pick up as if it was only yesterday. Friendship is a huge source of love for all of us and Christmas feels like a good point to celebrate it.