“Friendship, ‘the wine of life’,” said James Boswell, should like a well-stocked cellar, be thus continually renewed.”

The month of May, and its leisurely bank holiday weekends graced our oft-gloomy English shores with early summer sunshine, yet still my head was hung low. Before I moved away from my home of ten years (equivalent to my entire ‘adult’ life) I could find nothing more satisfying than alfresco drinking with friends during British Summer - that intoxicating glow you get from mid-afternoon sunshine mingled with wine.   

However, since breaking my foot, it’s been difficult getting around, and I’ve made little progress getting to know people in a new location. In the absence of ‘drinking buddies’, the beer garden – the great British bastion of drinking holes and fine conversation, has become, for me, distinctly second-rate. If friendship is ‘the wine of life’, then the beer garden is the cellar, and without companions that cellar may as well be empty.

If you are drinking solo, there are a number of ways you can keep yourself occupied, including smoking cigarettes, which serves a number of functions.  For example, the action of inhaling and exhaling can be meditative, and blowing smoke rings actually exercises the muscles around the mouth. Of course a cigarette may also be used simply as a prop to look at ease, especially when the person you want to want strangers to think you’re waiting for doesn’t show.

Food is also a good focal point, as well as being a great mood-enhancer.  But let’s face it: a chip off someone else’s plate always tastes so much better.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy my own company, in fact, I positively relish my solitude, and often at the most inopportune moments (when at work in a busy restaurant, for example). But it’s easy to become complacent when you’re options are limited to your boyfriend; not to say that he isn’t an ample drinking buddy, but co-dependency is not a sustainable condition for a healthy long-term relationship, and neither is alcoholism.

Someone I shall name as a ‘Randomer’ requested my friendship on Facebook the other day. For once it was not a single forty-something male looking for no less than a ‘relationship’, but an attractive young woman (if her profile image was indeed her own, and current). But she already had four hundred and forty eight friends – did she really need any more? Apparently so, at least for the purposes of ‘networking’, although what she was promoting I cannot be sure. Suffice to say I rejected her request.

You may think this was hasty, given my grumbling about being recently friend-deficient, but I already have seventy eight ‘friends’ and still not one drinking buddy among them. Had I accepted this random request, I would have been little more that a unit in an ever-increasing hierarchy of numbers. That said it’s not as if I call (or have possibly ever called) all of the one hundred and seventy two contacts in my phonebook...

I’ve never been the kind of person that finds it difficult to make friends. In fact, I’ve often had the fleeting urge to shed a few over the years, simply to keep the numbers down (namely, the units of alcohol consumed per capita). I often hear of a similar kind of mass culling being performed on social networking sites, such as Facebook: the numbers are regulated on a much larger scale, but the ethos is the same: crowd control.

But however many so-called ‘friends’ you may virtually ‘poke’, tickle, or remove from Facebook, genuine flesh-and-blood buddies will always be in demand.  In fact, having just spent a formidable day sorting out the abundance of nostalgic mementos collecting dust in my dad’s garage (old cards, letters and cheesy ornaments given to me by friends over the years) I was gutted to find out that my boyfriend – my sole ‘buddy’- has just been to see the new Indiana Jones film without me. 

Apparently ‘Buddy’ sites are very popular these days: JOIN HERE NOW – the best value for money and the quickest way to meet new and interesting people. I’m considering joining.

By Amanda Carey/ MOLI