Babyish, cruel and fickle... the joys of female friends!

SYLVIA wants to come and stay next week,’ I said. ‘But I thought you and Sylvia weren’t on speakers any more,’ said my husband. The last time she’d come to stay we’d been out to dinner à deux on her last night, and we’d come home and she’d lit a cigarette in the kitchen and said that I clearly wasn’t ‘feeling it’ enough.

‘I think we’re done here,’ she’d announced in tones of finality. She stubbed the fag out in a ramekin and we hadn’t spoken since. And now she was coming to stay. My husband nodded.

Such things have made more sense to him since we began watching The Secret Life Of 4 (and 5 and 6) Year Olds on Channel 4.

The hit reality series shows what really goes on in the playground, complete with epic disses, gangings-up, leavingsout, refusals to share, and the competition over the cute little boy with the floppy fringe. In episode one, series one, for example, one little girl makes another little girl gang up on a third in a Wendy house. They won’t let her ‘play nice princesses’ with them, and say they won’t play with her ever and ever again. She runs away and says they’re being ‘bad friends’. Later in the episode they are, of course, playing together again.

It’s piteous to watch but all too familiar. Meanwhile, the psychologists watching the footage on hidden cameras comment that the girls’ behaviour is ‘nor- mal’. And it is – not just for little girls, but for grown women.

The nation is gripped because these scrapping toddlers – far more than the movie Mean Girls ever did – hold up a mirror smeared with chocolate cake to adult female behaviour.

It simply demonstrates that, from an early age, female friendship is all too often a continuation of emotional guerrilla war by other means. Watching it, I’m reminded I’ve been dumped and rehired and then fired by friends too often to remember. My current status is that one child’s godmother hasn’t really spoken to me for 20 years. Another close friend, Janey, decided I was unhelpful over a spot of bother her husband was in at work and sacked me by text.

And I’m not even going to list all the many women in Notting Hill who are cross with me for annoying things I’ve written. So yes, I can see why, to the bemused male observer, it appears that women friendship groups often behave with all the maturity of the tantrumthrowing, jealous and hysterical toddlers at a Dulwich nursery fitted with CCTV. We also hate it when our bezzies see other women ‘behind our backs’; transgressions are punished by social death; you steal each other’s sweeties; and then, suddenly, the storm passes and you’re best friends for ever, all over again. Quite why we behave like this – status, competition etc – is for another column. But (the new, passionate, girlon-girl Cate Blanchett film Carol may be of some help here) what I’ve worked out is that women approach even their non-sexual friendships as they do a love affair.

WHEREAS men don’t, not in the same way. My husband has had the same, steady eight male pie-and-pint type friends for more than 40 years, since he was in short trousers. He agrees that sometimes they do having fallings-out – ‘but about politics!’ And while Janey won’t play nice princesses with me, her husband – the one I have supposedly wronged – has been calm and cordial throughout and we have remained on terms.

For the record, I love my girlfriends, however babyishly we behave. I hate falling out with anyone. But sometimes these cooling-off periods can come as a relief.

Female friendships can be a battering rollercoaster ride. They give me a tiny inkling of what men have to go through all the time – with women.

NEWSFLASH! Women who suffer from PMT are more likely to get hypertension later in life, as anyone who’s ever been asked ‘Is it your time of the month?’ knows. Nothing guarantees chronic high blood pressure and shrieks of ‘NO IT IS BLOODY WELL NOT!’ than interventions from the opposite sex relating to what one male yoga teacher in Montana once referred to as the ‘moon cycle’. I include of course the Chancellor’s recent decision to use a tampon tax to pay for women’s domestic violence services. And thank you to the readers who sent me a tub of Calm Down! herbal powders. I felt quite prickly about this until I saw they weren’t intended for me but for my poor dog Coco to help with her pathological fear of fireworks and other unwelcome noises – like men wondering out loud why I’m stroppy and hormonal.