After a broken ankle and a pandemic, what’s a fender bender between pals?

An advantage of not driving is that when one of your best friends reverses her car into the side of the car belonging to another of your best friends, you’re the only person in the offending car who doesn’t have skin in the game. Still, it’s more than a little awkward, sitting in the back seat of the convertible with my knees drawn up to my chin, feeling a bit like a miserable child whose parents are having an argument in the front.

I’ll go back a few fields. We are on the Sheep’s Head peninsula in West Cork, where Friend A lives on her own and where, last November, she missed her step in the dark and shattered her ankle so badly that she is now basically bionic. We kept trying to get down to her, her Dublin friends, but between Covid and work commitments and storms and everything else the universe could summon up, it was only last weekend that Friend B and I finally pulled up in front of her cottage.

It is worth mentioning that since we last visited in the autumn, Friend B has acquired a new car. Of which she is inordinately proud. As we wound up the muddy track to Friend A’s cottage, scraping our way through the deep potholes that pit the way, I joked that the trip was knocking several grand off the value of the gleaming new car. In retrospect, it was probably just as well that I got that quip out of the way early doors.

Anyway, we were only in the door and still at the hugging and crying stage when Friend A decided we should go to the pub. Friend B offered to drive — not least because she wanted to show off her new car to somebody who might be a bit more impressed than the disinterested passenger she’d just ferried all the way from Dublin — but Friend A has only recently started driving again and she insisted. And lo it came to pass that before the new car’s engine had even cooled, its side panel was stoved in by an older, muddier, but as it turned out, sturdier, model smashing into it.

I don’t know if there is a book on the etiquette of crashing into your friend’s car but if there isn’t, then I might write it now. As it happened, both my friends behaved impeccably in the circumstances; Friend A’s outpouring of grief, regret and embarrassment dampened down stoically by Friend B disguising with stoic resignation the fact that she felt physically sick (she confided to me later). And me piping up from my concertinaed position on the back seat that it all could have been a lot worse and nobody had got hurt, and then immediately regretting opening my beak as I suspected both friends were silently cursing me for being the one who won’t drive to Cork and therefore neither of them having the opportunity to drive their cars into mine. It was all massively complicated and under the circumstances, probably just as well we were heading to the pub.

Friendships have been sundered for far less, but when you have been friends as long as we have, then you know that by the end of the weekend, the whole episode will have become a funny anecdote (albeit one that I find much funnier than the others do). We have, after all, weathered worse.

That’s the thing about long friendships. You choose each other when you are young because you make each other laugh and you enjoy getting into scrapes together. Very few friendships start out with a frank appraisal of how this interesting new person might react when you are bereaved or widowed or you have an unplanned pregnancy or your marriage breaks up or your mental health falters or for any of those other traumatic obstacles that make up life’s tough tapestry. Yet we have seen each other through all of those and worse, our tight little tribe of formidable women scattered across thousands of miles who step up at the first sign of trouble.

And then one of you breaks her ankle and you can’t visit her during her long stay in hospital because of a pandemic and when she finally makes it home an impossible work schedule means you can’t go and clean her house and bark at her to sit down.

And then, finally, you can. And you clean and bark and cry and she crashes into your car and somehow, in between all that, you still laugh like drains and act like eejits. Because that’s why you chose each other all those years ago. Because that’s what friends are for.