When tea and sympathy are all we can offer friends

We all know that the nature of friendship changes over the years. Many of us try to guard against this by operating a strict “one in, one out” policy with new friends as we get older, purely to try to continue to be good friends to the ones we already have.

Some of these friends may have been with us since childhood and saw us through the teenage years when the main criteria for BFFs was the ability to say “No honestly, it looks lovely on you” and to refrain from nicking their boyfriends.

These are the friends who you can call at any time of the day or night in later years and kick off the conversation by blubbing “But I love him, I can’t bear my life any more” and they will get out of bed, put a light on and talk you down. They will arrange to meet up to share vats of alcohol with you for medicinal purposes. They will then go back to bed.

When you get past those years, the vats of alcohol often tend to be replaced by vats of tea and the seemingly insurmountable problems faced by friends often involve either offspring or ageing parents.

The problems may change but your techniques for helping don’t and I find myself feeling increasingly useless when it comes to friendship these days – especially when many of us are already propping each other up through the usual adjustments of family life, such as empty nests and sick parents.

Two very good friends are currently going through terribly worrying times with their teenage children. Tea, cake and a non-judgmental ear seem hopelessly inadequate to the scale of the problems, yet they are all I have to offer.

As a group of friends, we rally round when one of us is struggling. We offer tea. Or gin. We hug our friends, hoping to comfort them when we know nothing will make their fears and worries disappear.

Hopefully the fact that we’re there with our teapots and recommendations of good books and films for distraction purposes is good enough. Because that’s all we have.

We know nothing will make their fears and worries disappear