Friends and Relations

When I was a child, I didn't really treat friendships very seriously. I was revoltingly fickle, in fact, if the truth be known. The reason was, I think, (excuses, excuses), that I had heaps of cousins. Every holiday, we would be packed off to stay with one or other lot of them, and it seemed to me that my bonds with them were infinitely more enduring and authentic than my schoolyard friendships, which were usually based on flimsy pretexts such as needing someone else to hold the end of the skipping rope.

Cousins, it seems to me, are also the best of all family - or, to use the term my anthropologist friends are fond of, 'kinship' - relations. They are not so close that there are no holds barred when fights break out, but still permanent, tied by blood, known since birth, part of one's life through thick and thin.

What prompted this apparently pointless meander through my unoriginal views on the value of this particular kind of relation (and, of course, there's nothing particular about cousins - indeed, everyone in the world is probably ultimately a very distant cousin of everyone else) was the visit I've just made to some of my favourite cousins. They live in a lovely part of Devon, and while I was there I went for a short walk:

Back by Popular Demand

When I say 'popular demand', I mean one person, my Twitter friend Aptronym, vaguely asked if there might be a few extra Cambridge stone faces in the offing - but that was enough encouragement for me:

Yes, We Have No Potatoes

The Guardian tends to hold itself aloof from frivolous correspondence on such subjects as pocket potatoes. Nevertheless, occasionally a reader slips a jokey letter through:

More Things I Like About England

The daily BBC racing tips, after the morning news. How these have survived the do-gooding urges of the modern world I cannot imagine, but I hope they continue forever.

The letters pages of the newspapers, which I've noted before. At present a correspondence on the subject of potatoes and their non-culinary uses is running in the Times. The first I saw opened with the wonderful line, 'My father never went anywhere without a large potato in his pocket.' Sadly, I didn't have my camera with me, but her is another example, plus some amusing efforts, on other subjects but written in a similarly batty vein: