Sophie Goddard has hardly seen one of her very best friends in the past two years – which is why she’ll be making up for lost time with an extra-special gift this Christmas …
There are few people you can send a 20-minute voice note to without worrying you’ve overcooked it. My friend Jane is one of those people. We met in secondary school back in our hometown of Bournemouth about 25 years ago, later discovering we’d actually crossed paths years earlier in our local playgroup (I’d bitten her after she stole my favourite toy, apparently). Once we’d successfully glossed over our toddler years, we became firm friends and, as teens, spent hours in each other’s poster-adorned bedrooms, discussing serious topics such as Russian hamsters, boys we fancied, driving lessons and whose parent could be cajoled into picking us up from town that Saturday.
We quickly learned that where one of us lacked, the other came up trumps. Jane valiantly agreed to parallel park my Vauxhall Corsa ahead of sixth form French lessons, for example, and I, in turn, would gamely hand over my hair straighteners for a precious weekend loan. When we had our belly buttons pierced aged 17, Jane carefully manoeuvred me – perilously close to fainting – into the back seat of her car afterwards, distracting me with uncanny impressions of people we knew until the dizziness had passed.
