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What lockdown taught us about being best friends

Caroline O'Donoghue and Ella Risbridger sit separately in their favourite park
Caroline O'Donoghue and Ella Risbridger sit separately in their favourite park

Caroline writes...

Like many long friendships, we have our own lore: stories about how we became friends, how we became best friends, the first time we ‘knew’. It’s all very romantic. Maybe that’s a by-product of us both being writers, or maybe it’s a by-product of us both being women. Who’s to say.

Every woman I know describes their best friend like they’re a Regency-era heroine, sighing and glancing out of a rainy window, waiting for their pal to come walking down the tree-lined driveway.

But the most recent bit of friendship mythology I keep falling back on - my “this is a story that tells you all you need to know” story - is the day I gave Ella the proof of my latest book. She picked it up, her eyes filled with tears, and said: “I’m so proud of you.” And then, pointing to the dedication, followed it up with: “People are going to think we’re shagging.”

And it’s always been a bit like that, to the point where sometimes I have to stop myself and think “have we slept together, and I’ve somehow forgotten?” But no, I’ve checked my records. We haven’t.

It’s hard to write about other adult best friendships, because you can only really write from inside your own. The older you get, the more private and nuanced they become. It’s less about all the horrors and triumphs you’ve experienced together – that birthday party, or that holiday disaster – and more about the slow building of a two-person subculture.

Like all subcultures, there are haunts where most of the action goes down. Rather lamely, ours is the park. I never thought that adult life could involve the park so much, presuming it to be a place where you hang around with cans of cider as a teenager, and then bounce back to when you have small children.

Which is why, when lockdown happened, it was immediately strange. We have been seeing each other every day – or at least several mornings a week, being both self-employed and neighbours – for years. To suddenly not see someone in person for such a long period of time was disorientating. More so than the supermarket queues, or handwashing.

Worse, I am not a person who is good at staying in contact. It is probably one of my worst traits. Out of sight, out of mind: my family despair at how often I don’t return texts, I am constantly in a rush to get off the phone, I’m always strangely wary that people are trying to ‘trap’ me into conversational cul de sacs that I won’t be able to freely get out of.

I have, to my shame, allowed many wonderful people to drift out of my life in this way. So it was perfectly possible that I would have spent all of lockdown playing video games and disappearing into a work hole. I’m glad I didn’t. I’m glad we created a new friendship structure: Zoom calls for work chats, phone calls for gossip, and a podcast every week to keep us sharp.

There’s something about creative collaboration that usually relies on the energy of being “in the room”. Trying to record podcasts remotely is often an hour of stilted sentences, talking over one another, and “oh, no, you go”.

Making a lockdown series of podcast Sentimental Garbage with Ella has served as a nice reminder of just how well we know one another. We know when a laugh is real, when a pause indicates a break, when a point is made because it is sincerely believed, or when it’s just a thing we’re saying to fill the air.

When we finally met again, in our park, the conversation quickly moved on from “at last”’ to “right, what’s on the agenda?” This is how it’s always been: ‘the agenda’, first jokingly invented in a ridiculous bid to seem grown-up and responsible, now seriously kept.

We talk about our next projects and possible holidays. In a world that still feels on hold, it’s relieving that we are still moving, still walking, still pushing our counters along the game board. It’s a reminder that life has not stopped, but has merely taken a different shape - as have our friendships.

In less socially distanced times...
In less socially distanced times...

Ella writes...

I do not know how often it is normal to see your best friend. I don’t know, actually, how normal it is to have a best friend. It’s hard to tell, because we don’t really talk about friendship as adults: not friendship as I understand it, anyway. Friendship, culturally, seems to me to be romance’s little sister: much less cool, much less worthwhile, a thing to have a good time with until we all grow up a bit and get married.

You’ll meet someone, settle down, set up home, and stay there for good. This is the founding principle of how we live; and it was also the founding principle of the lockdown.

I cannot imagine how hard lockdown was on key workers; on families with children. I understand grief, and yet it is so magnified now that it hardly seems comparable to the world before; and not at all comparable to the privations of simply staying home.

But if I’ve learned anything from my own experiences of grief, it is that hierarchies of pain help nobody. And so I want to note here that this time has, I think, been hard too on people who do not belong to a traditional nuclear family.

Lockdown presupposes as default that home is where the heart is, and that’s hard on people who live alone. It’s hard on people who live in flatshares; hard on people who value their friends as much or more than their lovers.

It has been years since I went a day without speaking to my best friend, Caroline, and for most of those days we have seen each other, too. We eat noodles on her sofa, sit at the kitchen table with tea, or in the bakery with coffee and cardamom buns. Cancer scares, cancer for real, book deals, proposals, promotions, the dog’s emergency surgery, or a hangover from hell: for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, come rain or shine. And then– this.

Like everyone, we got good at Zoom; I walked our favourite paths in the park alone, although not nearly so far, and missed our routine; how easy it is to say something when someone is walking beside you, the way it was always easiest as a teenager to talk to your mum in the car. I missed my person.

Now, of course, we can meet again, a metre or two apart, and walk together again. We holler our secrets at each other over the distance; dodge round benches or behind trees when the other one forgets. We sit on long benches to take pictures, and mark the occasion.

We circle the park three times, decadent with legal sunshine and each other, and then hold our arms out like a hug to say goodbye.

How has lockdown impacted your friendships? Let us know in the comments section below.