Seeing Each Other
On friendship and outdoor activities
We have had an obnoxiously outdoorsy half term. For fifty weeks of the year, we are not those people, then come October we’re suddenly surfing and cycling, and now we’ve just returned from a couple of days at an outdoor activity centre.
We have been visiting this outdoor centre, Avon Tyrrell, at this time of year for the last couple of years. It is an Accessible Break so everyone there has a disabled young person in their family which makes it a really inclusive, non-judgemental place. The activities are accessible to disabled young people (there’s even an electric bike thing to take Ben in his wheelchair around the site), and their siblings maraud around with other young-carer siblings. No one worries about the noises their children (though many are young adults) are making, or thinks twice about a wheelchair, or tube feeding. There is something very joyful about being in a place where disabled people are not in the minority, for Ben especially, but actually for all of us.
Each year my friend Alex and I book ourselves into this break, and then as we pack a million bags we wonder if it’s worth it. We share a lodge with Alex and her family. Her eldest daughter E is also disabled and is completely different to Ben but we have a lot of common ground. The lodge has almost zero soundproofing so we have a fun sleeping roulette, where Ben might wake up during the night shouting, his waving arms hitting the solid wood of the walls, and that might wake E who will start shouting too. No one promises it will be a relaxing trip, but it will be fun!
We stacked crates, zip lined, canoed, made fires, and saw newts hibernating under logs. Ben went for a two hour night walk, to see bats and hear ghost stories. The kids beat the adults at a challenge course. It’s been a while since I crawled through mud. The crate stacking was a highlight, with Ben dangling high in the trees as Max chucked crates at James, who was reliant on Molly holding the ropes.
There was also, for balance, an absolutely terrible zip-lining experience where we (not the staff) got Ben’s neck support wrong so he was uncomfortable and did not enjoy it at all. It was my and James’s fault and we have apologised repeatedly to him, though he does not seem scarred. We all learnt something: don’t get cocky.
To counteract the youth hostel experience, Molly and I went to Pallant House Gallery on our way back, to catch the last week of their show Seeing Each Other. Portraits of artists by other artists is everything I am interested in, and I promised Molly a doughnut. I was particularly struck by Chantal Joffe and Ishbel Myerscough’s paintings of themselves and each other. Two Girls by Myerscough (1991) is an oil painting of the friends when they were students, both dark haired, with big earrings and pale breasts.
Twenty-four years on, they have each painted a recent version. In Myerscough’s Two Painters (2025), the women are literally painting each other’s faces, bristles to skin, wearing comfortable bras and chunky rings. In Joffe’s painting, Studio (2025), the two women are standing straight, side by side, with sheer black tights pulled high over their big pants. They look like they might start laughing at any moment, but the title tells you that they are both artists, at home in a studio.
They take each other seriously, as painters and friends, but they also make each other smile. They aren’t afraid of what they see when they paint themselves, or fearful of what their friend will see, not least because they have the solace of a long-standing friendship to bolster them. I haven’t seen deep friendship depicted this powerfully in art, and I loved it.
My friendship with Alex has been formed and sustained through being the mother of a disabled child. If you stay with another family for two nights, when you have a hectic schedule of activities with multiple children, and all of the usual complexity of your disabled child in between, there is nowhere to hide. Your friends see the unvarnished reality of what your life looks like - how you feed, change, move, entertain, speak to and about your child, and clean up when they are sick.
Most friends haven’t witnessed what that is like, close up, over days. There’s a risk of it feeling like too much for anyone else to see. Some of it will inconvenience them, and we don’t want anyone to feel sorry for us, and we worry about keeping other people awake. But there’s also something powerfully reciprocal about sharing and witnessing with friends. We didn’t walk around in our underwear, and no one was wearing tights on the zip wire, but the beauty of these kinds of friendships feels like those paintings. Being seen, through thick and thin, the love, the support, the longevity, and the bits that you wouldn’t usually make public. The outdoor activities are fun, the paintings are accomplished, but the friendship is what gives them power.
Seeing Each Other at Pallant House Gallery
Two Girls by Ishbel Myerscough (1991)
Two Painters by Ishbel Myerscough (2025)
Studio by Chantal Joffe (2025)