I think it’s completely impossible to overstate the importance of friends. All sorts of friends, in your life for all sorts of reasons. Some drift in and out, some are there forever, all are essential to life. Without mine, I would, quite simply, not be here.

I’m particularly lucky in that I have a large number of very dear friends. I don’t tell them nearly enough how much they mean to me and how overwhelmed I am at their continued presence in my life, or how lost I would be without them. But then I’m already considered the sappy emotional one, so that’s probably not a terrible thing! And I’m sure most of them know exactly how much they mean to me.

Much of the time, friendship just ticks along… lovely, but standard. You arrange stuff, you cancel stuff, you call friends to moan about your day. Then you hit a rocky patch in life and suddenly there they are, clustered around you, helping you through it in a myriad of ways. Not just the major rocky patches either, the little ones too. (Actually sometimes it’s the smaller ones that show you the true friends – lots of people will get involved in a major trauma just for the drama of it. The ones who care about the tiny things that make you sad are the ones who truly care about you.)

This week, the early part of which was hellish, my housemate and best friend has listened patiently and offered advice and a shoulder to cry on, despite having an infinitely more stressful job herself; another old and dear friend has let me ramble almost non-stop in texts without ever once judging me, yawning or not replying with wise and sympathetic words. A friend I miss a completely ridiculous amount since I left my old job replied to an email and made me genuinely smile for the first time in days. And unexpectedly, in the midst of a particularly stressful day, a new colleague suggested going for a drink after work to de-stress. We drank, and we chatted, and she reassured me, and we gossiped about girlie stuff (no mean feat as the majority of our colleagues are blokes) and it made me feel eight squillion times better. And work today was better for having a friend in it.

Annie once told me that people come into your life ‘for a reason, a season or forever’. I’m finding it to be truer by the day. So treasure the ones you have, don’t let go of them too easily, and always be open to the possibility of new ones, however unlikely the situation seems.

(*I know, I must get better at titling my posts!)