Will Harris is isolated in a city of millions

With Bryony out of the picture, this left me floundering around for a date for the Diamond Jubilee. Not that I didn’t have friends I could call; I did, but choosing with which of them I would share this most auspicious of occasions was a tricky thing.

It wasn’t like it used to be. From the time I left university until the day I hung up my Peter Pan outfit and came to sit at the grown-ups table for good, I had a clearly defined friendship group; a tightly-knit band of rogues and lesbians with whom I spent most of my free time. Nights in, nights out, birthday parties, dinner parties; we were the recurring cast in our own primetime sitcom, and none of us could imagine a future where our exploits wouldn’t be on repeat.

Then I moved to London, that greedy metropolis, and – while it didn’t take me long to make new friends – I soon realised the city had its own restrictions for the kind of friendship it wanted you to have. Distance was the main issue. In Brighton, it was entirely possible to get home from work, call up one of your mates, and trot round theirs for dinner before the Eggheads credits had finished rolling.

“We were the recurring cast in our own primetime sitcom”

When you moved to London, however, it was a rare occurrence if your social circle lived in the same borough as you, let alone within comfortable walking distance. This meant any social engagement had to be planned and executed weeks in advance, with regular reminder emails in case one or the other of you lost your diary, your short term memory, or – on those days where the Tube delays were especially trying – your will to live.

What you ended up with, then, was a compartmentalised series of friendships: two people over here, one there, and so on. The kind of tribe-based arrangement that knits people together in the smaller towns simply refused to take root in London’s concrete. The Tube lines that ought to have brought us closer together somehow became the bars that kept us apart.

So the real problem, with the Jubilee just days away, was not so much finding someone to marry my own plans with, as finding someone whose existing plans I could shoehorn myself into at short notice. This was not as straight-forward as it sounded. Betsy and Ruth, my uni girls, had now moved to Dalston, where they were busy squeezing the last hedonistic drops out of their 20s. They, Betsy’s Facebook page informed me, would most likely be spending the Jubilee doing shots off the abdominals of a 22-year-old holiday rep in Tenerife. Australian Pete was always good for the craic, but any longer than three hours in his company put your liver in danger of combustion. Which left James Claridge, and the A-Gays.