The only time I spoke to my three best friends in November of last year was when I sent them a picture of a billboard I’d seen in Iraq, where I was covering the offensive on Mosul for this newspaper. It showed a little girl, dressed in camouflage, holding some flatbread while posing like she was in a 1990s girl band. Quite a lot of adverts for Iraqi bakeries look like that. More British ones should.
“This is very us, isn’t it?” I wrote. They agreed, and then we barely communicated again until we saw each other on holiday in Paris a few weeks later.
“Our communications have been reduced to the occasional celebratory surfing-girl emoji
A year ago, when I lived in London, this would have been unthinkable. My friends and I were in touch constantly: spending our lives together, even though we, technically, had boyfriends/girlfriends and jobs. When we were apart, we spoke in emoji blocs and gave detailed depictions of our hangovers (“my brain is full of painful wet sand”).
I thought the background chatter would continue when I moved to Istanbul in January last year to work as a foreign correspondent. But rather than speaking 10 times a day, we are only in touch every few weeks. And guess what? After years of being in near-constant contact, I’m finding that seeing less of my friends is rather nice.
Our communications have been reduced to the occasional celebratory surfing-girl emoji, amusing bread advert, or a message after a terror attack to say I’m OK. Now, instead of spending Tuesday evenings soaking through bottles of red wine in a dingy Peckham flat and complaining, my friends and I have been going on holiday together every few months. You really get a lot more work done in the meantime — and have more fun when you do actually see each other. You know how much better everyone is on holiday? Shinier, calmer, more willing to go swimming at 4am? That, vastly multiplied, because you haven’t seen each other for ages.
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My mum — Swedish, living in the UK — has been doing this for decades. Her two best friends come to visit a few times a year, or go on walking trips where they insist on ejecting everyone else in the hostel from the communal living area so they can watch Eurovision and drink wine.
Now, when my friends and I are together, everything becomes clearer. In Paris a few weeks ago, we solved all our problems in the way that only four women talking over a five-hour lunch can. I’m assuming that’s why so many TV shows about women seem to be formatted around exactly that concept. It’s a bit like when you find yourself pouring your heart out to strangers because they’re so detached from your life. We don’t get caught up in the minutiae of everyday life the way that we used to. If you are with each other almost every day, it turns into an endless cycle of unproductive moaning: slagging off your boss or your boyfriend without seeing the bigger picture.
It helps that my friends are fashion designers, film-makers and chefs: there is so little overlap with any of our work that we rarely talk about it. Having friends whose daily lives are so different from your own is the only way to avoid becoming one of those appalling people who only ever talks shop. Bankers who only talk about how much cash they make; Middle Eastern journalists who only ever talk about internecine Kurdish struggles; stylists who can’t shut up about fashion. All equally, devastatingly boring.
I was in Prague with one of my best friends a few months ago, our heads lolling from hot wine in the autumn sun, when she finally clocked it. “You’re never coming back to London, are you?” she said, a bit resigned, slightly hopeful at the prospect of more holidays.
No chance, I said. It rains all the time and it’s boring as sin.
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“Shall we just do this, then, every so often? Different exotic location every time?”
Fine. But only if we can go swimming at 4am.
Claudia Winkleman is away
