My parents are not the sit you down and give you a lecture type. They never sat me down and said, “the most important thing you can be is a friend”. They never said it, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t hear it. The message was always clear.

I heard it every December 30th when my dad would spend the day moving the furniture into the garage and take every door in the house off its hinges so their New Year’s Eve parties could contain everyone he’d had a pint with in the previous year. I would take coats at the door, which went upstairs and onto a bed, as was customary in the 90s. Then I’d stand open-mouthed at the door-less doorway in my pyjamas watching grown-ups spin each other round and laugh their way into a new millennium.

I heard the message every time my mum used an excuse as weak as the rabbit’s birthday to fill our conservatory with chattering women strewn across wicker chairs, always someone without a chair pedalling absent-mindedly on the exercise bike holding a plate full of cheddar and ritz crackers.

(As I got older that conservatory became the site of all of my more daring acts of friendship exploration. If the walls could talk in that conservatory, I would really hope they’d keep their mouth shut.)

I heard the message every time my brother filled the climbing frame with noisy upside down boys who drank all the squash. Years later the same boys, bigger now, would fill the landing with clouds of Joop, and like a salesforce clad in shiny shoes and freshly ironed Ben Sherman they would file out into the night. I’d half-wake to loud whispering at 3 am, then again, a few hours later to smelly piles of them on the living room floor.

As a little girl, my own version of this was all I wanted. The first time I found it for myself it was giddy and exciting and fraught and painful, the way that everything worth having is. It was linked arms, pairs of silver heart necklaces that snapped in half, being left out, leaving out, water parks and discos and discos in waterparks; it was deconstructing first kisses and sleeping top tail.

In my twenties it was dancing until my feet burned and my backcombed hair collapsed, it was being locked in dance-floor hugs with gorgeous girls who spilled vodka down your back with their inebriated enthusiasm. I sometimes couldn’t breathe when I thought about how much I loved them. We were propping each other up when we wanted to try an elaborate high kick, we were holding back hair when we were throwing up the vodka we didn’t spill down each other’s backs; we were spinning in dizzy circles till we skittled ourselves and a load of innocent bystanders onto the sticky floor. It was staying up late, it was being crammed together in toilet cubicles. We were dancing, we were singing, we were swearing in the shopping centre, we were rock and roll, we were always all for one and one for all, we never left a girl behind; and when dawn broke, we were all safely together, sleeping in a heap on someone’s red sofa. 

If you are twenty-five and scared your friendships will change, I promise you they will. But don’t despair grasshoppers , in your thirties something new is coming. There were the years we stood at each other’s windows and my heart burned with how much I missed them even when they were three feet away. There is still dancing and there is still singing in cars. There has also been a lot of floating on our backs in the sea. A lot of saying “aren’t we lucky” but meaning “aren’t you incredible”. Some of you will have babies, and some of you will not. You will all wonder what life is like for the other ones. None of you will understand. But understanding is overrated, when there is so much admiring each other to be done. Your friends will also make new versions of themselves, and you’ll get the thrill of meeting the best mate you met at twenty-two when she was six. There will be so much you don’t have to say and there will still be so much talking to be done: one long conversation that can cover everything from euthanasia, to Married at First Sight, to aging parents to conservatory nostalgia, a conversation that you can put down and start again mid-sentence three months later.

I don’t know yet what friendship will look like in my 40s, or 50s or 60s, or 70s or 80s. But I hope it involves taking the hinges of every door in my house. I am excited to see where I’ll next make a friend, and I wonder where I’ll next lose one.

Because you will lose them.

I have lost friends.

Some just by growing up, some by moving on, some I’ve left carelessly like school jumpers in the park. I’ve phased people out, I’ve been phased out, I’ve let people down, I’ve been let down. I lost one of the best because he was torn from this place unexpectedly, much too soon. I only hope he landed somewhere softer.

I know that to be a friend is the most important thing you can be; it’s a thing that can last for twenty minutes or fifteen years, and leave you profoundly changed; it’s a way you get to fall in love over and over and over again. And maybe blood is thicker than water but it’s definitely not, as life-sustaining, as crystal clear, as refreshing *.

 *unless you’re a vampire, but none of my friends are.