I took this photo with my Pocket Kodak—a birthday or Christmas gift in 1973. One of the best. It lived in my trouser pocket or stayed hidden up a sleeve. I took pictures of school, holidays, and whatever passed in front of me. with intent. Each photo was composed and framed in a way my mother would have approved. She taught art and encouraged me to draw. She also had me compose images and look at art since I can remember.
I’m the one holding the camera. I rarely appear in these pictures. We wore brown boilersuits when outside.
We’re in the marble hall at the main entrance to Mowden Hall School (formerly Newton Hall). On the way to our common room, or the games room, or the dining hall. It doesn’t matter. We’re in the same class, in the same dorm, the same Rugby team, swimming team and choir.
There’s a line I saw recently—some suited man delivering it to a classroom:
Spend time with five idiots, you become the sixth.
A harsher version of the softer line often attributed to Jim Rohn:
You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
Both are trying to say the same thing.
But looking at this photograph, I realise something very simple. There is only one idiot, and it’s not me!
I was perfectly happy to be part of this lot. Three of us were formerly ‘gang’ in our corner of Beamish Dorm. Not having the words for it we called ourselves a family. We’d hold hands when we fell asleep at night. We had a den in the woods too. It was our space to defend. It was wrecked during ‘den raiding’ at the end of term. So ‘Lord of the Flies,’ yet not so.
At 12 or 13, you don’t analyse your peer group. You absorb it. You learn through it. Not in any formal sense, but through constant exposure:
- how to speak
- what counts as funny
- what earns approval
- what gets shut down
You calibrate yourself against the group, almost unconsciously: Lord of the Rings, David Bowie, a part in the school play.
And with these boys, calibration was easy.
No strain. No need to perform intelligence or hide it. No need to harden up or dumb down. We were, in whatever quiet way, on a similar wavelength. Not exceptional. Not remarkable. But aligned. We made Airfix models in the cellars, we played Tri-Tactics, or billiards or ‘round the table’ table tennis. A boys’ world? We thought so.
I would have happily stayed among them. That’s the surprising thing. Through adolescence, into adulthood. I can see that now.
But that’s not what happened.
We dispersed: Sedbergh for me, Fettes, Eton. Haileybury, Stowe, and Winchester for them.
A scatter pattern across the country. None to Sedbergh. Not one. And so the “five” was broken.
Which is where the theory breaks down. Because the saying assumes continuity—that your five stay with you. That your environment is stable enough for that averaging process to take hold over time.
Mine wasn’t.
At Sedbergh, the group was never replaced.
My year—on paper—was mine. But in reality, it wasn’t. I was younger in ways that mattered. Not just age, but outlook. It was the first time away from home for many of them. A different level of conversation. A different set of experiences from the age of 7 or 8.
I found some of them infantile. Other bullies. And crucially: none of this was chosen.
That’s the distinction.
At Mowden, I had the entire year group to choose from. Around twenty boys and it worked. At Sedbergh, the system imposed a group that didn’t fit. Your house. Twelve boys at most. And because it was imposed, it felt false.
You can’t average yourself into something you don’t respect.
So I didn’t.
I stepped sideways.
I found alternatives. Books.
And letters.
Girls I had met elsewhere—holidays, from home, from trips. Correspondence that had none of the coarseness or hierarchy of school life. You could think before replying. You could shape yourself differently. That became another kind of peer group, though they weren’t physically present.
A handful of teachers—Maths, Physics, Biology—who seemed to know what they were doing. The art teacher.
So perhaps the saying needs refining.
It’s not just:
You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with
It’s:
You are the average of the five influences you accept
And those influences don’t have to be the ones nearest to you.
Which brings me back to this photograph.
Five boys.
And the sixth—behind the camera.
Already, perhaps, choosing.
I never belonged to any group at Sedbergh. Not really. It was forced, false, and not of my choosing.
And then, later, Oxford. Where friendships were easy.
Not constructed. Not imposed. Just… there. Conversations that worked. People—young men and young women—who were quick, curious, alive to ideas. No effort required to find common ground.
So is it as simple as that?
That I needed to be among smart people? Am I still an intellectual snob? I think not. I remember a boy I became friends with during the Appleby Fair when I was 14. He was a traveller boy. He was canny. He taught me how to tickle for fish.
Alive. Interested. Interesting. Mischievous without being cruel. Able to step outside boundaries without sing anything malicious or criminal.
Because intelligence alone isn’t enough. I’d already seen that. You can be surrounded by people and still feel intellectually and emotionally stranded.
What matters is alignment.
That quiet sense that you don’t have to adjust yourself to be understood.
Looking at this photograph now, I can see the beginning of that instinct.
Not fully formed. Not articulated.
But present.
Five boys in a marble hall.
And one just outside the frame, already learning that where you stand—and who you stand with—will shape everything that follows.
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