Friendship

‘Of course, there will be no air quality now,’ said a friend, shaking her head over my support for Brexit. ‘You what?’ ‘Air quality,’ she said. ‘Or green belt. Or Sites of Special Scientific Interest, preserving the countryside and wildlife… All those really good EU regulations have all gone now.’ ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I started to feel exasperated, inwardly thinking, ‘Uh-oh, here goes another friendship…’ ‘All those EU regulations safeguarding everything. All gone. No more air-quality rules. No more SSSIs.’ ‘So you’re saying Brexiteers have ruined the air now, are you? That’s where we are up to with the scaremongering? No more air now we’re out

Should we be surprised that friendship isn’t always mutual? That is one of the findings of a team of researchers at Tel Aviv University who’ve just published a paper in an academic journal. They asked several hundred students to identify which members of their peer group they considered to be ‘friends’. On average, half the people included in this category by each respondent did not feel the same way about them. According to the researchers, this news would come as a shock to most people. The students in the survey thought that 95 per cent of the people they regarded as ‘friends’ would identify them as ‘friends’ too. But I

[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/265889180-the-spectator-podcast-the-lying-game-the-art-of-post.mp3″ title=”Ariene Sherine and Cosmo Landesman discuss dating” startat=1244] Listen [/audioplayer] I am crouching with a tall paper bag over my head, with holes cut out for eyes, nose and mouth, while sniffing a stranger’s hairy armpit. All the faces around me are equally obscured by paper bags, and each is inhaling the scent of underarms; we look for all the world like a very niche branch of the Ku Klux Klan. This is not a gathering of white supremacists or strange fetishists, but an ultra–modern speed-dating night called Romancing the Armpit, and I am here to find love. Aged 35, never married, and alone for nearly two years,

There’s a danger that in what follows your columnist may seem to be recommending an attitude. Please don’t think that. It’s true that I would never shop a friend for drink-driving — but frankly I doubt I’d shop a friend for murder. This column isn’t about what we should do if we know a friend drink-drives — responses will be various and variously arguable — but about shock at my own serious misreading of my countrymen. I was tooling along in our Mini on the first Saturday of the year, with BBC Radio 2 playing. It was Graham Norton’s fizzy and engaging morning show, where a regular feature is his ‘Grill

Last Tuesday I tried to sign up to a new life. My wife and I argued, slightly. ‘I don’t think this will work!’ she laughs, and I reply feebly: ‘But babe, it’s the future.’ (My use of the word ‘babe’ is like a label on the conversation — WARNING: HAVING ARGUMENT WHICH I AM ABOUT TO LOSE). She protests that she needs a car for ferrying kids and clearing the allotment and occasional 5.30 a.m. starts at work, and I produce a small piece of plastic and wave it, like Neville Chamberlain. This is my trump card. I have signed up to Zipcar. With this rectangle I can unlock a hire car

I was drifting in and out of sleep last week, listening to the news, when suddenly eight words — at first sounding no different from the general run — slammed into my senses. ‘Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers is dead.’ For the first time I knew how it felt when ‘the earth stood still’. One of the two brightest flames of my youth had been extinguished. I was friends with both Phil and Don Everly for some 45 years and it was, to be sure, a dazzling friendship. Beat this for its beginnings: it was 1960 and we met at midnight, boarding the Flying Scotsman at King’s Cross, surrounded