A friendship is mostly b-roll. Errands, waiting for buses, being wrong about directions together. If every meeting requires a highlight, you’re dating the spectacle, not the person. Share a silence without leaping to fill it with facts about magnesium. If you can be boring together you can be alive together.

Go where hands do things.

Bars are museums of speech

Learn to be findable.

This is the hardest. Being findable means living somewhere in public: a regular table, a habitual lane, a community noticeboard with your handwriting on it. It means answering invitations with an answer, not a fog. It means having a door that opens.

Be the one who convenes.

Everyone is tired. Everyone secretly wants someone else to ring the bell. Host the cheap thing. Name the time and end. Say, “door is soft; leave when you must.” Put crisps in a bowl. Friendship is logistics performed tenderly.