The closing of a Jewish school in London and the loss of friendship |
The immortal line from Rob Reiner’s classic 1986 film “Stand By Me” about four 12-year-old boys in late 50s small town America was, of course, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12…Jesus, does anyone?” The film is currently on re-release to celebrate it’s 40th anniversary. That only happens to those few films that touch on something universal. It didn’t matter where you were from or where you grew up, if you had ever been 12, you were gripped by the film’s central message that there’s something all at once eternal, fragile and infinitely more powerful about the friendships that we have in early and mid adolescence than the ones we have as adults.
It’s not something you can ever have again – you can’t reproduce the quality of what it means to have friends when you are 12 when you are 20, or 30, or older. That message was brought home to me forcefully when I heard that Immanuel College, the UK’s only Jewish private secondary school, my son’s school, was proposing to close this summer due to financial pressures imposed by the Labour government. Of course, there........