Life got in the way of my relationship with my oldest friends

In my late 20s and the first half of my thirties my whole social life was all about this one group of friends. We called ourselves The Urban Family. We all lived within walking distance of each other in West London and were in and out of each other’s flats and The Cobden Club (now defunct) or The Havelock pub.

Friday and Saturdays were always spent together and Sundays too, with a very late Sunday lunch at Fergus’s house which was often cut short by the fact that he had to go and record hospital radio. Lunch was mostly wine and Kettle chips, sometimes a strange Campbell mushroom soup concoction. Mostly we just smoked a lot so the food wasn’t that important. We were inseparable until quite late on and behind our peers (slowly, reluctantly as we were having so much fun) we finally all succumbed to settling down and then kids.

In my 30s I moved out of London to live on a houseboat island, sad that there was no longer that ease with the Urban Family that came from being with each other the whole time. But everyone was caught up with young kids and now I needed local friends - mum friends - people who lived nearby who could help out with lifts and all the endless juggling.

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Like a lot of people, as a parent of young kids my social circle changed by the new proximity of mums at the school gate. These were now the people I saw every day. The school gate was a whole intoxicating world of potential new friends and people to drink and gossip with through those primary school years. Rather than see old friends, it became easier as a busy working mum to either socialise with work friends straight out of the office or new parent friends that lived locally. Convenience became a key factor. West London now seemed a world I’d left behind.

Then recently I was hit by the secondary school shock: it turns out that your teenagers don’t want you anywhere near their school. They may tolerate you watching them play sports fixtures but only if you promise to be silent and not talk to anyone. They don’t really want you to know who their friends are and definitely not to compare notes with other parents. So parent friendships diminish.

And suddenly you are getting a bit too old to hang out with younger work colleagues, the divide suddenly widening. I think it was these things, combined with the emotional loss of having teenagers, the not-being-needed quite so much as they explore their own social lives and independence, that has pulled me back to my Urban Family.

Lots of the group are there still in the same familiar places, as fun and naughty as they once were. And the ones that left to live abroad are coming back home to London. There are no judgements, only love and this deep-seated affection. We are all a bit more diplomatic and kinder that we used to be with each other, no longer taking each other for granted. I realised at a party the other day that I didn’t want to talk to anyone new - only my old gang.

And that they know me so well that I can be totally myself in a way I love again. Also I can be a bit more like the old me - who I miss - that person who found joy in Ubers at 4am and deep and meaningful sofa chats you don’t remember the next day. Now, we share the fun of old jokes, 50^th birthday parties (and remembering our 30ths), and brilliant memories of the twenty years in between. And even better is that that the new generation of The Urban Family are meeting and bonding over how annoying their parents are. Dear Urban Family, here’s to another 20 years!

River of Stars by Georgina Moore (HQ) is published on 3 July