Daily Photo No. 4: Colleagues and friends

There's nothing special about this photo at all. It's a hastily-taken and unposed snap which happens to date back to 2009 and a friend's 50th birthday party. The subjects are all friends and colleagues from my university.

I picked it because it illustrates so much about academic life, or at least my version of it, which should probably be 'academic' 'life'. Much like anyone's professional life, it involves entering a workplace with its own formal and informal rules, an established set of official and unofficial hierarchies, and people at every stage of their careers and intellectual journeys. Working long hours means that your colleagues (hopefully) become your friends, as frequent movement is common and quite a lot of us don't have children or relatives close by. 

I've been at my place for 20 years or so now, which is very uncommon, and tells you a lot about my employability skills. It does mean that I've been to a lot of birthday parties, retirement dos and more than a few funerals, and they've all been memorable. Mike, in the central of this shot, is an expert in interwar political history, specialising in organisations such as the Youth Hostel Association and similar grass-roots bodies whose characters were contested and shaped by social forces. He's also an inveterate writer of letters to the Guardian, a deliberately terrible poet and a wicked mimic: no retirement celebration is complete without his unnerving impression of the VC, the subject of which kindly turns a blind eye to proceedings when he happens upon it). I could have written a few admiring lines about either of the other two and about pretty much any of my colleagues. We infuriate each other now and then, as must any group of people whose working and social lives are so closely entwined over a long period, but my friends have been the enduring joy of what we must laughingly describe as my career – I've learned more about teaching, research, negotiating institutional life and pretty much everything else than from any source. 

One's position in the social group imperceptibly changes - I've slipped from being the impoverished postgrad on whom the old lags lavished beer money to the one who occasionally does the lavishing, remembers the birthdays and perhaps even, once a year, says something of interest to the next generation. The social circle expands and contracts as people enter and leave, or interests and situations change - one of the toughest tests is when a friend becomes a manager and the formal relationships intervene. Sometimes there's little difference, sometimes it's a fraught process that takes years to process. 

It's hard to recall the awe that I felt for the people in this shot and their generosity in welcoming me in back then. Awe has become deep respect, often hidden under badinage, but it still occasionally feels odd to provide comments on an illustrious friend's journal article for instance, or – as has occasionally happened though not to those pictured above – represent them as a union rep. 

That's it really - just a snap to say 'aw, you guys'.