The people in our lives, part two

Jane Austen wrote this, in Northanger Abbey: ‘There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.’ I identify strongly with this sentiment, and today being (apparently) UN International Friendship Day I have been prompted to ponder friendship and friends and what makes for a deep, meaningful and rich friendship. It seems like there’s a day for most things with the UN but, despite its many flaws, it is an organisation of vision and principle and therefore has a purpose for declaring an International Friendship Day. It turns out this day was instituted in 2011 because, according to the UN, friendship is one of the key components in building human solidarity, which is needed if we are to tackle (collaboratively, one imagines) the many challenges facing our world. The UN’s definition of friendship is thus a fairly targeted one – that’s not meant to be critical – which aims to promote dialogue, to ‘accumulate bonds of camaraderie’ and, which I think is rather lovely, to ‘weave a safety net’ that will protect us all.

This definition, whilst excellent, is somewhat targeted so it prompted me to poke around the internet for other definitions or description of friendship. The marvellous C. S. Lewis writes that ‘Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…’ In one of the most famous verses of the Bible, Jesus said that ‘Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ Which he of course then did, on the cross, the ultimate display of love and friendship. George Santayana wrote that ‘One’s friends are the part of the human race with which one can be human.’ Most strikingly to me, Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet that poor old Polonius advises his son Laertes on his departure to faraway lands thus: ‘Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.’

As I have written before, my parents have a knack for friends that stick and it is one that I hope I have inherited. I feel very blessed to have a group of people in my life who I can laugh with, cry with, go on holiday with, share a summer evening with, pray with and, ultimately, turn to in times of crisis and in times of joy. Some of them have been in my life quite a while now and some of them are relatively recent friendships. A particularly significant friendship in my life is the one I have with a marvellous couple called Georgie and Berrin without whom, it is fair to say, I would not have survived four years in Havana. They don’t do social media on the scale that I do so whilst they crop up in multiple photos on my FB/IG feed they’re never tagged. Actually as I haven’t blogged much from Cuba (for reasons that I shall return to another time) you, dear reader, may not realise the extent to which our lives in Havana were connected and the importance they have to me as a result. So, on International Friendship Day, when we reflect on how friendship weaves a safety net around us, I thought I’d share a little bit about Georgie and Berrin, without whose safety net of friendship I would definitely have fallen through Havana’s multiple potholes.

Georgie was the Lower School Principal at ISH, and Berrin the Curriculum Coordinator, so they made up half of our four-person leadership team (the other two being me and Mike, the Director). I first met them when I went to Havana for a pre-job-visit-thing in April 2016 and remember thinking to myself that I would never be as together, interesting and professional as these two people. I also remember asking Georgie all week to take me to a supermarket so that I could get any idea of what was available and her putting me off and off until the final morning I said ‘Oh, we didn’t go to the supermarket!’ and she said ‘Yes, because we want you to come back.’ Sign number 1 that she was both devious and a good ‘un. When I returned in August 2016, after three days in my new home the air conditioning failed (read about that saga here) and, after three days of ‘no, no, I’ll be fine, it's not so bad, honest’, I finally caved and accepted their offer of an air-conditioned spare room until the a/c was fixed. Sign number 2 that they were, collectively, good 'uns. So, basically, I moved into their house in my first month in Havana and I never really left. I didn’t grapple them to my soul with hoops of steel so much as super-glue myself to the patio chairs in their front garden. 

Those patio chairs were comfy

It helped that they are extraordinarily good hosts, with a well-stocked drinks cabinet, amazing (seriously) food, a comfy front garden, a delightful dog called Antilles who loves cuddles (two initially – missing the great bear Aureus still, who died in 2017) and a spare room that I ended up using for several more weeks during my time in Havana, as did my parents who stayed at Casa del BG during their second visit to Havana. I guess it also helps that they are, quite simply, brilliant people. Georgie is smart and wise and has an extraordinary ability to understand with depth and precision any given situation; on top of that, she falls asleep in a car faster than anyone I have ever met. Plus she organises the most amazing parties and bakes things like ‘burnt butter salted caramel bourbon brownies’. And no matter how much we joked about #coldandunemotional, she has the warmest, kindest heart of anyone you could hope to meet. Berrin is funny and LOUD and also smart and wise, as well as possessing an almost Renaissance Man ability to turn his hand to just about anything both in schools and at home; he is basically a polymath. He says stuff and I think ‘how the hell do you know that?’ and somehow not only does he know it, he’s right about it and has applied it correctly to a given situation. It’s annoying but also brilliant. 

    

The only other people my cats seemed to tolerate...

In my four years in Havana, I spent the majority of my time with them: apart from work, there were beach weekends and evenings at the Playas del Este or Club Havana; a memorable weekend away with other friends from the ‘cupcakes and bubbles’ group to Cayo Levisa; many, many dinners out across Havana, from our regular Bella Ciao pizza and wine nights to cocktails and lobster tacos on the roof at El Frente to a more recent favourite, Jama in Old Havana, arguing about dumplings and drinking enormous gin-mojitos. Evenings at the ballet. Sundowners in the pool on the roof of my building. Saturday mornings buying veggies at the agro and fighting the queues in the supermarkets.

My most favourite thing that we did was our weekly Sunday Supper Club. This grew out of the almost accidental yet weirdly regular suppers that sprang up initially with Alice and Anthony (the aforementioned cupcakes and bubbles’) and, after they left, Jeremy joined our little bubble (and later the lovely Maria), and Sunday Supper became a weekly fixture. Planning SSC was an evening event in itself involving multiple messages and discussions about who would bring what. The trick was to take whatever Cuba had to offer, supplement it with whatever we had in our store cupboards or had smuggled into the country after a trip out, and adapt recipes to suit. SSC ran, with a few brief interludes, for 18 months and was, I can safely say, a highlight of our week. It has now gained global fame and I am asked to cook Sunday Supper whenever I go to stay with other people. I keep saying it’s not a one-woman show, but no one seems to care.

Just one of many Sunday Supper Clubs

So, having superglued myself to them in week one of my time in Havana, I’m still slightly amazed that they put up with me for the amount of time they did – though, as Berrin said when lockdown started, I’m now basically part of their family unit so it seems to work. We called ourselves the Pack on our group Whatsapp, which is reflected in their final amazing act of kindness before we went our separate ways. Leaving Cuba during Covid was proving to be a little challenging and then, in early June, we found out the flights we had all booked for July were no longer a certainty as the authorities closed the airport indefinitely. We heard rumours of a flight leaving to Mexico City via Cancun, and were able to book tickets for all three of us (plus a few others, it turned out) for June 19th. And then it turned out that the flight would take pets, which had been a huge worry for me as I was trying to work out how I could get my two cats out. You were only allowed one cat per passenger and it was at this point when Georgie said that she would take responsibility for the other one, flying through to Mexico City with me so that I could then could hole up there and plan the route home (ironically easier than trying to get them out of Cuba). When I said, ‘But that’s not really in your plans for flying on’, she said ‘We’re a pack. We leave together.’ 

And that’s the shorter, blogg-ier version of my friendship with Berrin and Georgie. As G said one day, it’s not so much friends, it’s framily. I couldn’t have survived Havana without them; I miss them already; and I look forward to the next Sunday Supper in some other location. If they’re reading this (ha!), I return to the words of Jane Austen: there is nothing I would not do for you. Thanks for all the bubbles.

PS. Now that I’m temporarily gainfully unemployed as of August 1st, I have time (and a lack of self or other censorship) to blog again. In coming weeks on A Brunskill Abroad: how I’m not abroad anymore and what that feels like; how utterly mad life in Cuba can be; and how some expats really should know better.