I’ve never had that many friends. 

I’ve never had that many friends. I guess I’m just not a people person. If that’s the case, I have to say it doesn’t bother me. To be honest, I’m deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to have hundreds of chums and whose every utterance begins with, ‘My friend Sally …’ this or ‘My friend Caspar …’ that. As if the only reason for these poor souls’ existence is to be considered in relation to this one exceptional individual, like tiny planets orbiting some mighty sun.

I could count on the fingers of one hand those people I consider to be my real friends, i.e. women with whom I have an absolute affinity and whom I wouldn’t think twice about calling up in the middle of the night (a theory I’ve recently put to the test). Beyond that, I suppose, there exists a light scattering of acquaintances – people whose paths will occasionally cross my own – who are perfectly pleasant, but I wouldn’t for a minute consider play a significant role in my life.

I’ll sometimes find myself in mid-conversation, having agreed to go round to someone’s house for a coffee, and think to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing sitting here listening to this drivel?’ And it’s all I can do not to get up and say, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve made a terrible mistake,’ and head for the door. But, of course, one just sits there, enduring and even perpetuating what must qualify as one of the world’s most tedious conversations, knowing that you’re not actually about to do a runner, which only makes things worse.

It’s not quite the same I know, but once or twice lately I’ve been politely chatting with someone and have had this peculiar impulse to do something quite drastic, even violent. There’s this old dear who has lived on our road since the Iron Age and knows everybody for miles around. She’s not a gossip. In fact, I doubt there’s a malign bone in her body. But I bumped into her in a local teashop and she was being so sweet, and I was being so sweet back to her, and after a couple of minutes of this I had a powerful urge to just punch her on the nose.

Of course, this is a little different from people not being sufficiently interesting. In fact, I suspect that it’s bordering on clinical psychosis, which rather worries me. If I was being super-rational I might say that perhaps it’s me wanting to show that despite the calm little scene that we’ve created there’s actually all this rage and chaos bursting to get out. And that everything is very far from being all right. But I know that if I did actually sweep all the crockery off the table, or grab the old dear by her hair and start swinging her around the place, then in no time at all I’d be carted off to some remote institution, and that wouldn’t agree with me at all.

Years ago, when I was still in my twenties, I was on a train heading up towards the Lake District and this young French girl got on and sat down opposite me, and we got chatting and she told me about this amazing trip she was having, right the way across Europe, long before such a thing became quite common, let alone for a young girl on her own. Anyway, she really was quite charming and at some point she produced this little notebook with an elastic band round it which was crammed with bits of paper. And she told me how it contained the names and addresses of all the wonderful people she’d met on her travels, which meant that she could pitch up in just about any city in Europe and know that she’d have a place to stay.

A little while later she went off to the toilet and I was left staring at this precious book on the table before me. And I had this dreadful compulsion to get a hold of it and fling it out of the window. Really, I had an awful struggle. I mean, she must have spent a good five minutes saying how she’d simply die if anything happened to this book, then went off and left it right in front of me, as if I’d been set some great moral test.

Of course, I didn’t actually fling it out into the fields of Warwickshire or whichever county we happened to be travelling through. But that strange urge certainly unsettled me. And I’ve sometimes been inclined to think that it was because she was living the bohemian life that I coveted for myself, and that I simply wanted to punish her for that, and for being so condescending. But the truth is she wasn’t remotely condescending, and the only possible explanation is because I knew it was exactly what I was not meant to do.