It’s been my experience that the best friendships are born from mutual antipathy. Take the day I met my friend Claire, when she looked me up and down disparagingly before pushing me over. I don't think anyone present that day would have expected us to be swapping baby clothes 35 years later. Claire was a brave, forceful child while I was wimpish and shy. She loved to drink Ribena, which she called bat's blood. In the interests of balance, I must admit that there have been times when I was the aggressor. She likes to remind me that I used to call her ‘the axolotl’ in reference to her blue-eyed pallor as a baby. And I dare say she didn’t much care for my propensity for collapsing in nervous laughter whenever her older brother was mean to her.

When I met Rosie as a teenager, we already knew each other by repute. We actually lived in separate countries but our social circles converged in Carlisle, which the council insisted on calling the Great Border City. Anyway ‒ hilariously ‒ we were in rival bands. Mine was called Vena Cava, which I believed to be thrillingly gothic. Unfortunately we’d paid more attention to the aesthetics of the band than the actual music, and had no drummer. There is only so far you can get without a drummer, even in Carlisle. Rosie’s band was more successful - they had even been on TV. We circled each other for months like wary gazelles, until we were forced by circumstance to have a conversation and became closely bonded about six minutes in. The apex of our friendship was performing The Flower Duet at a candlelit concert, the nadir was running out of money on holiday and having to live on crisps and cold baked beans.

The trouble with such old friends is they know exactly who you’ve been at every point in your life. There is a sense of marvellous possibility with new friendships ‒ the slate is clean and you are a whole new being, in the context of that person at least. But given the choice, I’ll take years of history every time. Even if I have to wash it down with bat's blood and cold baked beans.