Malone spends time appreciating her friends

My New Year’s resolution is to see more of my friends. As a mum it can be hard to see friends regularly, I have a lot of my daughters’ friends round for dinner, but they are six… Catching up with people (and not on Facebook) went on the back burner for the last few years, especially with me often working weekends. So far this year I have met ten friends for tea and chewed the fat! Quite literally, as it turns out seeing friends is a cake-based activity. January’s shifting half a stone will be a year round affair, but hey – I know how my friends are and I found out without pressing ‘send’. I have also attended a baby shower (why didn’t they have these when I was pregnant?), a 40th birthday party (okay, yes my own) and a funeral. I wouldn’t normally refer to a funeral as a social event, but I go out to so little events where I have to talk to adults one to one, I’m including it. I tend to only go out if I’m DJ’ing.

“I need to reacquaint myself with adult conversation again”

Last year I realised this was a problem when I found myself at my daughter’s school fete standing in a corner with headphones and mumbling to myself:

“No, no requests!”. I need to reacquaint myself with adult conversation again.
At the funeral I shoved sausage rolls into my mouth to stop myself wailing endlessly. The funeral was for a friend who died on New Year’s Eve, unexpectedly. I awoke hungover on New Year’s Day to ‘happy 2013’ texts and one text letting me know she had died (from a heart thing). Shocking, as she was only in her fifties, and she wasn’t suffering an illness. When my father died from cancer, it was a grief that starts from the day of the diagnosis. You have time to wrestle with your grief and when the death occurs it feels different to this. This sudden death thing is hard, you still think of them as alive. My friend would often pop in on her way home from work for ‘a quick catch up’. She would apologise she hadn’t been in touch for weeks when actually she was better at keeping in contact than many friends my own age. We’d swap stories and swap manicures for babysitting! She was a kool lady (taken to the crematorium in a VW van instead of a hearse), she had lived an interesting life travelling and raised four children and I will miss her older wiser woman’s perspective on things.

When I last spoke to her, I turned her down for a cuppa as I was tired and sniffly… oh, it would have been the last time I saw her! My New Year’s resolution was already to make time for more of the people I care about, but this has cemented it. Life is hectic but should include more time for human interactions. Not just declining Rihanna requests.