Male friendship is in crisis

Most of my women friends work hard to keep ancient friendships alive; the seasonal lunches, shopping trips and afternoon teas are observed as scrupulously as the feasts of the liturgical calendar. ‘Friends make all the difference in life,’ my mother used to say. In her late eighties, she would defy the wobbles of Parkinson’s and haul herself on to a bus for the all-important ‘Tea with Daisy’, inscribed with a shaky hand in her diary. My sister was the same. In September last year she marched her girlfriends off to Whitby for a week of what I assume was slightly manufactured jollity (she was dying of cancer), but you’d never tell from looking at the photographs.

I’ve never thought male friendships were so robust and now, after lockdown, I’m certain of it. But it didn’t seem that way when we were young. Alcohol was our bonding agent at university and that wasn’t hard to sustain when my mates slid into jobs in merchant banking, and I landed in Fleet Street with an American Psycho expense account.