At times this was expressed through seemingly insignificant gestures – such as wishing each other a happy birthday – but it offered something entirely absent in the offline world: solidarity, comradeship and, above all, acceptance.
South Africa has not changed – and has not forgotten such comradeship and solidarity.
However the comradeship and solidarity also shows through, with Marilyn remembering a good day in the kitchen: "One day the doors flew open and all these young lads and lasses came in carrying trays and it was Durham University and they'd had the big ball in the night time and all the food that was remaining they brought for us.
Embrace, instead, "the Scotland of Adam Smith and John Smith, the Scotland of civility and compassion, the Scotland of comradeship and community".
JUST over 40 years ago, Greek and Turkish book-lovers alike burst into tears as they read a new Greek novel: in "Farewell Anatolia", Dido Sotiriou drew on her childhood memories to describe the comradeship of two shepherd boys, one Christian, the other Muslim, who go on to fight on opposite sides of the Greek-Turkish war of 1919-22.
Zimbabwe's case is the most egregious, disgracing the countries nearby, especially South Africa, whose leaders hide behind a misguided sense of past comradeship and racial solidarity.
He said he had become used to the comradeship.
Comradeship and the desire to die honourably made sense to him, but not much else.
Mr Kagame was Mr Museveni's intelligence chief in the early 1980s, when they were guerrillas in the bush fighting the dictatorship in Uganda.But when the two men met this week at a Ugandan safari lodge, their comradeship was fraying.
The possibility was emphasised by putting them all in the same bed, straight as pins and with their crowns on, as they appear in stone reliefs at Autun, in Burgundy, and in the Louvre.Certainly, whatever they had been before, they were forged in comradeship afterwards.
Worse still, the economics of private armies may undermine the peculiar basis under which countries ask soldiers to risk their lives for unquantifiable reasons such as patriotism, loyalty and comradeship.
