How do you make a friend? Is there one big event that throws you together and kick starts the Friendship, or is it a more gradual emergence, a slow development of shared respect and laughter, whispered secrets and knowing glances, ridiculous rituals and frankly gluttonous eating habits. How do you lose a friend? Is it with a bang, a dramatic explosion making the previously strong friendship rapidly unviable. Maybe just as the friendship grew from an initial murmur of air growing into a strengthening breeze, it can slip away in an equally intangible fashion. The death knoll sounds as one of you becomes increasingly circumspect about events you would once have rushed to share with the other. An ever-pervading coolness exists where once there would have been warmth and genuine closeness. Then the slow realisation that the friend you pine for, and remember with such bitter-sweet nostalgia no longer exists and the person you see before you no longer has capacity to become that remembered ally. But then consider the theory of relativity (although no doubt Einstein would be disgusted to find his theory bastardised for such angsty purposes) has the friendship changed because you now look on from a different perspective. Perhaps it is a change in you yourself that has led to this slow erosion of the foundations of your friendship. But if this is the case then how did you change? Was it a decision you made, or a change in behaviour you consciously initiated? Or was it the inescapable changes that time and experience impose upon our character that are so hard to identify and analyse. Whatever the reason, despite repeated heartfelt efforts to the contrary, how ever much I try and grab the dissipating wisps of our love and friendship, I know that they are beyond my efforts to save, and it makes me sad. I wish I knew what to do. Any answers gratefully received.