Friendship Friday - be grateful for who you have

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Hello :-)  I'm back from my break, I'd love to say relaxed and refreshed but that would be an out and out lie.  I'd love to say my mental health has improved significantly but I'm still batshit crazy.  And today - well, this entire weekend - I am unsupervised.   Oh yes!  Cue evil 'bwahahahaha' laugh.  Mr G is off to Wembley Stadium to watch Wigan Warriors in the Challenge Cup Final.   So I decided to round up a few of my friends to have a child and man-free curry night.  The child-free part is going to be a bit hard, seeing as I have more children than the old woman who lives in a shoe.   I'm really looking forward to it though, although we socialise occasionally as couples, and more often as families, sometimes it's nice for the girls to just get together and bitch about men behind their backs, rather than to their faces, isn't it?   Then, Wednesday night, one of my oldest friends of 27-ish years, Sarah, who I haven't seen for four years - messaged to ask if she could come over this morning.   No matter how busy I was today, there was no way I was putting her off.  We have one of those lovely 'pick up where we left off' friendships.  Aren't they the greatest sort of friendships?  We're in touch on Facebook and we keep up to date that way, although we don't live that far apart, life truly has got in the way for us.   But the minute we're together, it's like it was days since we last saw each other.  Those friendships endure.  So I've had a lovely morning catching up with Sarah, and her two beautiful kiddies who have grown so much, and we had a nice slice of home made carrot cake to accompany the coffee and gossip.

Tonight at 7.30pm the ladies are coming for curry.  This could get messy.  And I don't just mean turmeric stains.  Oh no.  I'm talking 'someone hide my broadband dongle or change the key on the router' messy.  Me + Wine + Home Alone = Cringe (Delete!  Delete!  Delete!)²...

I am really lucky to have some brilliant friends, and I'm so glad that over the years I realised that quality is far, far better than quantity.   I've lost friends along the way.  I lost a best friend, Emma, to cancer three years ago.  I've purposely terminated a friendship of many years where the other person was doing nothing but bring me down.  I've lost touch with friends, and having found them again via social media, some friendships have been rekindled, others not so.  The ones I expected to be rekindled weren't and the ones I didn't have turned out to be some of the most brilliant friendships I have.  I have friends that I have met online, some I have met in the flesh, some I hope to one day, and some I probably never will due to location.   If someone asked me if I had a lot of friends, my knee jerk reaction would be to say 'No'.  I'm quite insular.  But upon reading back this last paragraph, and thinking about who I have in my life, I am truly blessed to have so many wonderful people in my life.  Don't take them for granted, make the time to reach out to them, even if it's just a card in the post, or an email, or a text message.   I miss Emma so much, her number is still stored in my phone and I can't bring myself to delete it, I'd give so much to have had more memories of us as adults, but life got in the way there too...  So - don't take those people in your life for granted, you never know how long you've got them for.

M x