A whimsical title, I’ll admit, but I’m in a whimsical mood. It’s no discovery that friends play a pivotal role in our development as human beings, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes sit back and think: how did I get so lucky with mine?

This train of thought started a few weeks ago; I was on holiday with my friends and we were sat around the al fresco dinner table drinking cheap Italian wine. My friend and I were trying to pinpoint the exact moment our relationship transcended the label of mere acquaintance. It took me a while to figure it out – I named three or four memories that I thought marked the start of our friendship, before finally settling on a particular day that stuck out in my mind. It was in having this conversation, however, that I realised what was so wonderful about the way we make friends. The memories that I had thought were the inception of our friendship were more like ticks on an invisible checklist – one we unknowingly keep as we get to know someone. It is only when those criteria are marked off that suddenly this person becomes a larger character in your life – a person you call your friend.

There are periods in life that revolve around mass friend-making – joining secondary school, starting university – and other periods where the new friends seem few and far between. For me, it is the friendships I form in those quieter moments that always surprise me. In describing the way she met one of her now-best-friends, my aunt told me ‘I met her when I thought the friend-making part of my life had long passed’, and it is this sentiment that captures the beauty of new friendships. There is always room in your life for one more person, and there’s never any telling which direction they may appear from.

The friends we keep enrich us in all sorts of ways. It could even be considered self-serving to an extent: we have different friends for different conversations, turning to each one for a different reason. But we repay this service they provide us with by providing them with the same. There is even a place, I believe, for the insignificant-later but significant-at-the-time arguments we have with the people we care about. These are usually the spats after which the friendships become stronger – because we learn and change, and neither of us want to repeat the action that hurt the other.

I think there is little that I love more than the nights I get to sit and talk – and I mean really talk – with my friends. These are the moments where life slows right down – in the way an animal’s heartbeat does when it’s hibernating. On these evenings, we can spend hours dissecting and speculating, offering advice, receiving advice, rewriting our futures, and it feels like time is on our side. I come away from a conversation like that and feel like I am capable of anything I set my mind to, and that’s because I have friends who already believe I am.

Of course, friendships are not always linear – sometimes we drift apart from people who reappear in a way that just makes more sense the second time around. Sometimes the friendships end altogether, but their mark on your life remains anyway. I think what I’m getting at – as I try to formulate my thoughts on this page – is that I feel so grateful that my life is guided and supported by such a range of wonderful people and, though I don’t always feel deserving of them, how fun it is to do life with them by my side.