Over my many years, I have thought about friends, noticed how many are fleeting, well meaning and basically pants. You must come to supper sometime. We might plan something for this or that. I’ll drop in one day when I’m passing. Nothing comes of that nothing throwaway nonsense. A real friend sticks, not like something you want to rub off, but a ‘just there’. That person whose eyes tell the truth, no sliding, no judgement, no agenda. Asking, yes of course, but not again with an agenda, but instead with a naive and wild interest into a world of a person whose life they have never lived. They step into it. There are few of these.

I have many now. I could never have imagined this. Mostly women, but men too, and doing things, community things, lunches, orchard things, so many other things I haven’t ‘thinged ‘with yet.

Friends are not the likes on your pistogram, in the workplace, in the schoolyard. Friends come in the one who says hi when no-one’s looking and who stays at your back when things tipshit.