Delilah Explains... Clara

Clara was four when I was born. Up until that point, she'd been an only child and resented the fact that she was no longer the centre of attention. Nobody has actually said those words out loud but I know it's true. The evidence is clear:

• In every photo of me as a new born, Clara is scowling in the background
• Clara had a notebook dedicated to the scrawling of 'I hat my babby sistur' and similar
• I had to be taken to hospital when I was 11 months old after 'falling' down the stairs while playing with Clara
• Clara called me 'it' (it wants a biscuit, it's crying, it fell, Mummy, I promise) until I was 7

So Clara and I have never been close as sisters. Clara pretended she was still an only child and I eventually gave up trying to earn her approval. When I was 14, Clara moved out. She'd got into a university close enough to home to commute but she wanted to live the full student life (eating Pot Noodles, not washing and sleeping in until lunchtime from the sounds of it). Mum had been distraught - how could her grown-up daughter leave home? I think she expected Clara to still be living at home when she was married and popping out babies (funny, she's quite vocal about the fact that I'm 27 and still at home).

So Clara moved out and the distance transformed our relationship. We would never be the kind of sisters who swapped clothes and shared secrets but at least now we can be half-way civil to one another. I don't necessarily like Clara (she's bossy, pretentious and thinks she oh so sophisticated since she bought her flat with her boring boyfriend) but I don't hate her and we can tolerate each other for short bursts of time.

Clara is an accountant. She met her accountant boyfriend (the dull Graham) at some sort of conference and they moved in together a year ago (Mum had still been harbouring hopes that she'd return to her bosom until they arranged the mortgage for their own flat). Since then, Clara has hosted a total of 14 dinner parties (I've thankfully only been invited to one), gutted the kitchen (she couldn't stand the 'dated' look) and replaced it with a shiny new one that hurts my eyes. She tried to get us to go over to her flat for Christmas (the ambience in her living room was much more festive, apparently) but Mum was having none of it. She'd had Christmas lunch around the kitchen table at our house for over thirty years and she'd continue to have Christmas lunch around our kitchen table as long as she was still breathing. I'm sure Clara will have another bash at persuading her this year too but I don't fancy her chances.

Delilah Explains... Best Friends Part 3

So I've told you about how I met my best friends, Lauren and Ryan. I've known Ryan since I was a toddler and Lauren since I was eleven but the three of us didn't become a threesome (not that in that sense, I hasten to add. I love my friends dearly but I wouldn't want to see either of them naked) until I was 14. Lauren and Ryan had met a few times (usually over the garden fence) but they'd never spent any real time together. I hung out with either Lauren or Ryan but never both - until my sister's 18th birthday party.

Clara was having a party in the function room above our local pub and Mum said I could invite a friend or two to keep me company (I think even Mum knew that Clara's friends were a bunch of up-their-own-arses stuck-up cows but she'd never say it out loud). So I invited Lauren and Ryan and the rest, as they say, is history. From then, the three of us would hang out together all the time, which was much easier for me as I no longer had to juggle my time between the two.

So the three of us are great friends but I'm still sort of in the middle. We all hang out or go to the pub or in town together and we regularly meet up at the café on the main road for breakfast, but I'm the glue that keeps us all together. I'll spend time alone with Lauren or with Ryan but they never spend time alone together. I would never walk into my local pub and find them chatting in a corner or phone Lauren and hear Ryan in the background. They might text each other or even talk on the phone to make plans for the evening but I don't think the two of them have ever met up without me.

I don't mind being in the middle. It's quite a nice place to be.



There are some things I only do with Lauren: our twice-weekly walks on the treadmill so Lauren can flutter her eyelashes at one of the fitness instructors, girly nights in watching Bridget Jones's Diary or Dirty Dancing or You've Got Mail (or all three) and shopping trips in town.

And there are things I only do with Ryan: hanging out in Ryan's bedroom, pretending we're 15 again by listening to early 2000s music and complaining about our mums (Ryan thinks mine is the best mum you could possibly wish for. We both think his mum is a nightmare), babysitting his niece (Ryan's little sister had a child before either of us. I'm not sure how to feel about this fact) and watching Ryan's students run around on a muddy field with a ball and a bunch of students from a rival school (Lauren has never been excluded from this activity - quite the opposite - but she refuses to stand in the cold on a Saturday morning watching a field full of spotty boys. She left those days behind when we left school, apparently).

And there are things that the three of us do together: the pub quiz on a Sunday (we never win. Not even close), other non-quiz nights in the pub, nights out in town and breakfast at the café on the main road. The café breakfast usually follows a heavy pub or town session. You can't beat a belly-buster breakfast when you're hungover.

Delilah Explains... Best Friends Part II

I've already told you all about Ryan and how we met when his family moved in next door. Ryan is my best friend but - greedily - I have two.

I met Lauren when we were 11 and started a brand new school. I looked tiny in the uniform that swamped me (yes, Mum, I did 'grow into it' but I was in Year 9 by then and the uniform had long since been chucked after I'd exhausted all wear out of it). I was scared senseless. Francesca, my best friend from Primary School, had gone to the local all-girls school (a fact she grew to hate. What was the point of school without boys?) and I felt alone and completely out of my depth. I'd heard all the horror stories and they were playing on a loop in my head. I'm not saying that Francesca could ever have stopped the older lot shoving my head down the loo for a good old-fashioned bog wash, but it would have been nice to have her by my side. To have an ally.

I had no-one.

And then I met Lauren.

Lauren McIntosh was everything I was not: tall, confident and wearing a uniform that fit. She didn't shuffle through the unfamiliar corridors with her head down, afraid to meet the eye of the older kids in case they bog washed her. She practically skipped through those corridors between classes, smiling and chatting to everybody and anybody, no matter what their status was. Most popular girl of Year 10, teacher, vicious bully, it didn't matter to Lauren.

'Are you lost?' Lauren had stopped as I stood, eyes wide and darting, trying to get my bearings without making eye contact with anybody, just in case. I was lost, but I wasn't about to divulge that information and confirm everybody's suspicion that I was a bit of a loser in my baggy jumper and below-the-knee skirt.

'I'm just having a rest.' Yes, because that was better than being lost, wasn't it? Losers didn't stop in the middle of a busy school corridor for a rest between classes, did they? I was truly the biggest dweeb on earth and deserved a dunking in the loo.

'It's exhausting, isn't it?' Instead of laughing at me - or worse - Lauren looped her arm through mine and began wandering down the corridor. 'My old school was tiny compared to this place. Where did you go?'

And so, on our way to maths, with Lauren very much leading the way, we chatted about our previous schools. Like me, Lauren had parted ways with her closest friends. But worse than me, Lauren was new to the area and so couldn't even catch up at the weekends like Francesca and I. During that short walk (it turned out our classroom for maths was just around the corner, up a flight of stairs and the first door on the right), Lauren and I became friends.



Sixteen years later, we are still friends. Best friends. We've always planned to live together - like Rachel and Monica in Friends (although neither of us are particularly neat so we'd both have to be Rachel) - but it hasn't happened yet. Lauren is still working her way through the debts she accumulated while at university and I earn a pittance. But the dream is still there. One day I will escape my family. That thought is the only thing that keeps me sane at times.

Delilah Explains... Best Friends: Part One

I have two best friends (greedy, I know), Lauren and Ryan. I've known Ryan forever. He's lived next door to me for as long as I can remember. According to Mum, Ryan and his family moved in on a sunny Saturday in June, 1989 (she remembers it was sunny because she was wearing a pair of cut-off denim shorts and a bikini top. It was definitely June because it was about a month before my birthday - she'd been discussing having a pool party to celebrate my turning 2. We don't have a pool, Dad had pointed out, what with us being a very working class family from Manchester. We'll get one of those blow-up pools and dangle our feet in, Mum said. Which we did. Thankfully I don't remember it).

Anyway, little Ryan (because he was little back then, being two-and-a-half) and his family moved into the house next door. It had once belonged to an elderly couple who banged on the wall if you dared to sneeze, so Mum was delighted to see a young family replacing them. She thought they'd be able to chat over the garden wall and invite each other round for dinner parties and the young chap could come to my birthday party.

It didn't happen. Ryan's mum is a snob. She took one look at Mum's shorts and bikini top, stuck her nose in the air and scarpered into the house. She declined Mum's offer of a casserole (That's very kind of you, but no thank you. We're very picky about what we eat), Ryan couldn't come to my 'pool' party (My Ryan is a very chesty child. I don't want him getting a chill) and the dinner invites never materialised.

Mum said she wasn't going to mention the fact that the elderly neighbours had died in the house - the old man in his chair in the living room and the old girl in the front bedroom. They'd been dead for at least three weeks before they were discovered (and only then because Mum had alerted the police twice over the lack of banging on the walls. When she'd played Dad's T-Rex at top volume as a test and received nothing in return, she badgered the local coppers until they checked on them). But she accidentally dropped all of this into conversation as she and Ryan's mum hung their washing out. I do hope the smell hasn't lingered, Mum had said before she took her basket back inside.

Ryan and I probably weren't destined to be friends. Our parents certainly weren't. But Ryan was sent to an all-boys school so I was a bit of a novelty. We hung around together after school and at the weekends, either at my house (we weren't allowed in Ryan's. His mum feared we'd get the place dirty or something) or on the wasteland behind our houses (it doesn't exist anymore. There are a load of three-bedroom houses the size of shoeboxes squeezed onto there now).

Ryan is a PE teacher now (so not so chesty after all. He could have dangled his feet in my inflatable pool all those years ago). He has a passion for football and women, although the women aren't so passionate about him in return. It isn't that Ryan is ugly - he's quite cute at the right angle - but he always seems to go for the wrong sort of girl.


Bitches, he goes for bitches. There, I've said it. If they deign to date him at all, they use him for a week or two then spit him out. It's a shame because Ryan's a pretty great guy (although I call him a knobhead frequently. It's my duty as his best friend to keep him grounded and not to let his ego get away with him). He just needs to find the right girl.

In case you're wondering, I am not that girl. And no, I am not protesting too much. Ryan and I are friends. Best friends. And that's all we'll ever be.