Great friendships aren’t forged on the big nights out, but the spontaneous moments when the phones are forgotten about, and conversation and laughter flows freely, says Lauren Bravo

My best friend and I live on opposite sides of London, but we share a hairdresser. Once every two months, she makes the 90-minute journey to my flat and we both have our highlights done by Lesley, the fastest bleaching brush in the west. While she works, we gossip and cackle and unpack every idle thought and silly piece of trivia we’ve forgotten to tell each other during the intervening weeks. Afterwards we preen, we put music on and she goes through my bedroom and tries on my clothes. For a few hours it feels as though we’re teenagers again. Only with much better hair.

Increasingly I’m realising it’s these small, informal moments-between-moments that really make a friendship. The getting-readys. The morning-afters. The shall-we-just-stay-ins.