I always thought I would lose my best girlfriends to motherhood. To mum WhatsApp groups and playdates – and not being able to get a drink after 7pm because their child is teething. But actually, I’ve lost them to something far worse.

They’ve all buggered off abroad.

The news of my collective best friend’s departure couldn’t have come at a worse time. I’d just come out of an intense long-distance situationship. I was already wallowing in a sea of self-pity when a bessie announced she was moving to India for most of the year. Another had already relocated to the United Arab Emirates post-Covid, and I was only just getting used to pretending Abu Dhabi was “not that far”.

Then the final one moved to Bath, which I know is not technically abroad, but from where I’m standing in South London, it may as well be Magaluf.

It happened one after another, like they were all handing in their resignation letters to our social life.

My circle of friends had completely defied the odds until then. We genuinely felt like we’d hit the jackpot: women well into our mid-to-late thirties who had all, very deliberately, lived within walking distance of each other. We still went out, went raving, went to festivals and made bad decisions after what was always supposed to be “a chilled BBQ”. We........

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