RIP Friends: how London fell out with friendship.

I have a confession: don’t bother calling me because I don’t answer my phone. Ostensibly, this is to do with signal issues. In reality, I don’t want to. I regard it as an egocentric demand that I speak to someone immediately. So I have also disabled my voicemail, finding its plaintive whine too much akin to emotional blackmail when I have no intention of calling back.

In truth, I’ve forgotten how to conduct myself on the phone. The necessity for improvisation, as opposed to the controlled realm of text, feels a tad awks. Most shamefully, I have been known to call someone’s mobile, let it ring once, then hang up, because ring numbers aren’t recorded and it will look as if I tried.

A Martian landing in Central London might have a difficult time with our concept of friendship. Like so many of my acquaintances, I appear to define close friends as: ‘the people who let you off not speaking to or meeting with them, but with whom you retain some metaphysical bond’. My social life is conducted according to the curious equation that the more I like someone, the less I see them. In Martian-speak this might be rendered as: ‘friends are the people you most avoid’.

And it’s not just me and my muckers. One overhears everyone making similar non-arrangements. My manicurist tells me that she has seen her best friend twice in two years, despite living three Tube stops away. I recently walked behind a suited chap bellowing into his mobile: ‘Man, it’s been ages. I can’t believe it. I have to see you. How are you fixed for July?’

We are at the point where liking someone’s Instagram picture feels enough of a commitment to friendship. When it comes to meeting up IRL (In Real Life), we go back and forth on dates until we find an evening in six weeks’ time, then, when it comes to it, one or both of you cancels. Let’s be honest, who doesn’t secretly hope that their friend will flake so one can just go home, veg out and watch House of Cards over a glass of wine and a pizza from Basilico? Yet we’ll happily meet up with randoms on Tinder dates, or engage in epic, three-day Twitter conversations with people we don’t really know.

Gone are the days of Sex and the City-style meet-ups where you all sit around quaffing Manhattans and catching up on every single aspect of each other’s lives. If I ever catch an episode these days, Carrie and the girls appear more akin to mutual obsessives than friends, and as for the Friends comrades, Chandler and co seem positive stalkers. Our televisual paradigm for friendship is now Girls: a gaggle of selfish individualists who don’t seem to particularly enjoy each other’s company.

So why did we all start avoiding our friends? The most obvious cause has to be work. Londoners put in among the longest hours in Europe: a quarter of us slog more than 48 a week, some pushing past the 70 mark. The first and last thing we do is reach for our smartphones, cramming fewer and fewer hours of sleep in between. When non-capital dwellers refer to the ‘nine-to-five’, we scoff into our insufficiently remunerated pay packets.

This leaves very little time for mere life laundry, let alone its larger challenges. My mother is seriously ill, meaning I barely meet the person I am sleeping with, let alone my friends. I need them more than ever, but they have become largely virtual. Many are just too exhausted for more than cursory relationships. ‘Now that I’m never “off” (line), I’m rarely “on” (IRL),’ sighs a colleague. ‘Something’s got to give. I’m too knackered to socialise.’

Given our increasingly virtual and global lives, we are likely to have more friends than when we occupied only ‘real life’ communities. A teacher who grew up in a Devon hamlet tells me: ‘At 18, I had one friend. At 28, I have 1,093, according to Facebook.’ Some of these relationships may be rather vague, yet when I count the people I consider close friends, I come up with 30. We change jobs more than we used to, have more sexual partners, travel more, and with these opportunities our ‘friendship stats’ have massively inflated.

So what’s to be done? I used to think the answer was to hold quarterly drinks parties: 60 or so of my favourite people, barrels of booze, frenetic working of the room. But this exacerbated rather than solved the problem: 30-second drunken conversations not being the stuff of which great intimacy is made. For my upcoming birthday, I will be dining with five individuals — rudely excluding countless other beloved beings — but at least I will get to commune properly with that five. It’s a start.