Toby Young: The surprising lesson of my old friends – middle age makes you nicer

When I first suggested to my closest male friends that we have a boys’ Christmas lunch, it didn’t occur to me that this would turn into an annual institution. We saw each other three nights a week as it was, so this was just another excuse to go out and get drunk. But a one-off became a habit, a habit became a ritual, and that ritual now enjoys the same status as all the other little ceremonies that make up Christmas. Today, I would no more think of missing that lunch than I would of resigning from my job as ‘paper elf’ — the person whose job it is to pick up all the discarded wrapping paper on 25 December.

The reason it’s become so imbued with meaning is that it’s now the only time I see these friends. Part of the ritual is going round the table, with each of us taking it in turns to tell the others about the year we’ve had, our triumphs and disasters and how we’ve tried to meet those imposters just the same. Inevitably, the lunches have begun to seem like an unfolding narrative, almost as if we were characters in a play. When one of us reveals something significant, such as a marital crisis, it’s both shocking and inevitable at the same time.

The first act of this drama was full of testosterone and braggadocio. We would boast about battles won, enemies vanquished, conquests made. We all thought we were heading to the top of our respective professions and would soon be very rich, very famous or both. This wasn’t just the arrogance of youth; it was also a reflection of our privileged upbringings. None of us had had to struggle very hard to get into Oxford or Cambridge, and the good jobs we’d managed to get afterwards had come easily.