My best friend and I live on opposite sides of London, but we share a hairdresser. Once every two months, she makes the 90-minute journey to my flat and we both have our highlights done by Lesley, the fastest bleaching brush in the west. While she works, we gossip and cackle and unpack every idle thought and silly piece of trivia we’ve forgotten to tell each other during the intervening weeks. Afterwards we preen, we put music on and she goes through my bedroom and tries on my clothes. For a few hours it feels as though we’re teenagers again. Only with much better hair.
Increasingly I’m realising it’s these small, informal moments-between-moments that really make a friendship. The getting-readys. The morning-afters. The shall-we-just-stay-ins.
Far and away my favourite moment of freshers’ week at university was the night I spent holed up in a halls of residence dorm room watching a DVD of Fawlty Towers, with a group of new friends who, like me, had elected to skip the Crazy Wild West Hoedown happening in the campus bar downstairs. While everyone else cavorted in panic-bought Stetsons to Cotton Eye Joe, we watched Basil being hit unconscious by the falling moose’s head and congratulated ourselves on our choices.
Those new friends went on to become my housemates, my pub quiz team, my unofficial counsellors and confidantes. They’re the people with whom I have staged a gleeful fake Christmas every December for the past 12 years, the festivities growing marginally more civilised as our lives have (we eat our turkey dinner around a table now – not, as in 2009, out of saucepans while sat on the stairs). And when we reminisce, our favourite memories are never the big-ticket items. End of year balls? Fine. Graduation? Cool, I suppose. But the spontaneous kitchen dance parties? Legendary. Likewise the best part of a big night out was rarely the night itself; it was the Bloody Marys with brunch the next day, that clink of ice and hit of pepper, as we pieced together everyone’s juicy titbits from the night before like a great big gossip jigsaw.
It’s how so many of my most cherished friendships were forged – not in life-changing experiences, but in leisurely hours spent talking nonsense, howling with laughter at nothing in particular. It’s easy to feel affection for everyone in the dazzle of a Big Life Moment, or the warmth of its afterglow. But it’s on the ordinary days, the rainy days and Mondays, that you find your true ride-or-dies.
And that’s especially true as you get older. As people disperse across cities, counties, even countries, and friendship has to be increasingly meted out between the Big Life Moments; the weddings, the birthday drinks, the housewarmings and baby showers. When the casual, everyday chit-chat we used to take for granted gets relegated to WhatsApp groups and Instagram likes, and IRL meet-ups have to be scheduled weeks in advance. Idling away time together becomes a rare luxury, while savouring it becomes all the more important. No longer the easy proximity and empty diaries, which meant you could fill an evening with one magic word: “pub?”
The significant milestones can give you lovely reasons to celebrate, sure – but they can also pile on the pressure. How many times have you heard happy couples lament that they barely had a chance to exchange more than two words with their friends on their wedding day, before being swept away by a wave of excitable aunts? The hen weekends where you’re so stressed about the logistics of getting everyone from the pottery class to the knicker-making workshop that you forget to have a good time. The dinners where it takes so long to catch up on everyone’s top-line news that you’re still discussing mortgage rates and maternity leave by the time the bill comes. If we rely on the Big Life Moments to bring us together, we risk missing out on the deeper conversations and the daft interludes, both of which can make even the most ordinary of days feel like a special occasion.
So it’s important to remember all of the other ways you connect with people – and the other people you connect with. Maybe it’s the friend who drags you to their weird evening class once a month, and rewards you with a good cocktail afterwards. The pal who will get up at dawn to drive to a car boot sale, then talk you out of buying a three-foot high stuffed fox (“it’s kitsch!”). Your film buff mate who will come over to watch arty foreign-language flicks with an armful of continental cheeses, knowing you’re both going to talk the whole way through, Espresso Martinis in hand. Your Eurovision crew, your board games gang, your summer solstice picnic posse. Here’s an idea: every time you say “we should do this every week/month/year!”, why not try … actually doing that? Leave your phone in your bag. Skip the administrative catch-up and talk about whatever crosses your mind instead. Let a nothingy Tuesday night mean as much, if not more than celebrating a birthday, an engagement or promotion – and mix up some suitably convivial cocktails to match. Blood Orange Sangrias, anyone?
Don’t hang around waiting for the next Big Life Moment to get together with your friends. Because every shared evening, every new in-joke and every Seemingly Inconsequential Pow-wow (SIP?) is absolutely worth toasting, too.
Prepare to celebrate moments big and small with Grey Goose Vodka
#LiveVictoriously
