1. Midlife isn’t the easiest time to make new friends, nor sustain the old ones. Sometimes I am more lonely than a writer dare admit, striding the streets of my present, holding one of my children’s sweet hands, dependable as the incoming dusk, carrying the bags and the keys and the time and the solutions and the blame, knowing where we are going, and how long it will take, pointing out the daisies shutting up shop for the night, forecasting the rainbow, while all the while I am elsewhere, back in the perpetual summer of my childhood, knocking on the doors of my childhood, waiting for the friends of my childhood to come out to play on the streets of my childhood, beneath the high noon sun of my childhood, until the mother of my childhood - dead now, almost five years - appears at the door, backlit by the past, wiping her hands on her sari, to call us in for dinner.
2. Then again, what of the Indian woman who sat next to me at the Julia Donaldson event in Edinburgh two years ago? Same age as me, though paler, Bengali my father would instantly note, as he did right then and there in my head, where the voices of my parents reside congenially alongside those of my friends, keeping me company in this more solitary stage of life. I was with my daughter, clutching the mouse who outsmarted the Gruffalo, she with her nephew holding - sorry, I can’t recall. As the stories were told and the songs were sung and the babies were bounced on the knees of the determined mothers, first words were gingerly passed back and forth between two middle-aged Indian women in the language reserved for strangers with shared undocumented histories. Afterwards she was the brave one who contacted me on Instagram. “If you ever fancy going for a walk with a fellow brown woman…” On Portobello beach our similar hands made shy swirls in the sand as we shared stories the way girls swapped Garbage Pail cards in the playgrounds of my childhood. Then we went for another walk in Leith and talked about our dead mothers and our same-age fathers softening with age. Then we went for noodles. Now we are friends.
3. Then again, sometimes life will happen and I will want to mark it with a friend, and no face will materialise to inhabit that sacred noun. And I will scroll through my contacts, and start writing halfhearted messages on WhatsApp, and a mist of dissatisfaction will descend, bringing with it the desire to run which comes for all middle aged people, now and then, squeezed as we perpetually are between the past and future of our too-set lives, until the blessed demands of that too-set life intervene to chivy all that into the past, and I will forget that I needed a friend, because the children need me to put them to bed, and I’m dropping by 9pm anyway, and solitude is an old pair of pyjamas - nothing easier to put on.
4. Then again, what could I possibly have to complain about? I’m a restaurant critic! Every week I eat out somewhere different in Scotland, scouring the land through its menus, eating the story this country tells itself through its food, answering again and again the most gleeful question of them all, the one that never gets old - what can I get you? Meanwhile, opposite me sit a cavalcade of friends old, new, or in the process of being made. We eat and drink and talk, but nothing is recorded of that last part. My reviews are a record of the food, service, atmosphere, and history. But what of the words digested with my friends? Where do they go?
5. Then again, what is a friend if not a partner with whom you’ve been through two births, three deaths, two books, various essays, two mortgages, half a dozen job changes, two rescue dogs, how ever many Sunday night period dramas and viewings of Carol, and all the breakfasts, lunches and dinners I’ve cooked in love and haste, and the trips home to London, and the kitchen discos, and the most devastating arguments, and the biggest laughs over the smallest things, and the private language only we speak, learned over twenty years of what I too easily forget is friendship too.
6. Then again, after my mother died it was my oldest friends, the ones who knew her from the start, whom I yearned for most. I needed the proof only old friends can provide that her life mattered, that mine matters, that any of it happened at all. Recently my oldest friend and I sat on a bench while our four children played in the park around us, and she told me about her mother falling ill with what has turned out to be three different forms of late stage cancer, and we were at once two terrified mothers and two little girls hurtling down the hills of our childhood on our bikes, and I told her that since my mother’s death I have had no choice but to walk through a door into the second room of my life, and that room, though my own children, partner, and precious life are contained in it, is so cold and unfurnished, and often I want only to retreat backwards like a spooked puppy, shut the door for good, and we held hands, and would have wept if it hadn’t been for a disaster involving my son and her daughter and a soft toy thrown over a wall on to a train track and so we leapt up out of our anguish to sort out the mess made by the next generation, and the conversation was left there hanging, like a lost hat on a fence, until we could return to pick it up once more. And that’s what the best of friendships are - a conversation that never ends.
7. Then again, I have barely seen her over the last two decades, which is half the time we’ve known each other.
8. Then again, friendship is the memory that lives outside you, the history kept by a separate consciousness in time.
9. Then again, I miss my friends, which is another way to say I miss life’s first act, the way there were more friends then as there was more future, and all those I loved were alive and well. Who knows where the time goes?
10. Then again, who knows what friends the future holds?