This morning, friendship arrived in two phone calls.
One came from a friend apologising for being quiet because work had taken over. The other came from a glorious friend who lives far too far away for regular hugs and, naturally, our conversation soon wandered towards rocks.
That conversation began with Moss Agate and the promise of spring, but it left me thinking about the people I call my best friends: the women I have loved for decades, whose lives, creativity and achievements I feel genuinely privileged to celebrate.
One of these women has been part of my life for forty-one years. Another has been beside me for nearly thirty, and two more have shared the best part of the last twenty years with me. There are other precious friends woven into my life too, some of whom I rarely see, but who are no less firmly held in my heart.
Friendships come and go. People move through our lives for a reason, a season or, if we are very, very lucky, long enough to become family—not the family we were born into, but the family we find and continue to choose.
My Framily.
The People Who Know the Real You
Rachel and I met when she came to my high school. We hit it off instantly and have been there throughout everything since.
She knew me when we were girls, before life had asked either of us to become all the women we would eventually be. She was sitting beside me in Biology when I told her that one day I was going to open a shop. I said that, on the night before it opened, we would sit on the floor behind newspaper-covered windows and drink a glass of champagne to toast the beginning of that chapter.
Years later, we did.
By then I was exhausted. I had been working full-time and spending my nights setting up the shop. Rachel talked to me on the phone through those long evenings and came in to help. Ash, who would later work with me, dropped off coffees. Those small acts were part of making the dream possible too.
On the final night, it was just Rachel and I. Our favourite songs were playing while we sang and danced around the shop, laid out the stock properly and dusted everything one last time. Then we poured the champagne, made our toast, removed the newspapers and cleaned the windows.
There were tears. Rachel told me she had always known I would make it happen.
It was surreal and more than a little magical. She had witnessed the dream when it was only something a girl had announced in Biology, and she was there when it became real. We had kept our promise. It happened because I was inspired by the love and support that made it happen.
That is what it means to be known across a lifetime. Some people meet the person you are today. Others carry memories of every earlier version of you and somehow make room for them all.
Ash came into my life through coffee—which, if you know me at all, will sound entirely appropriate. She worked at the local coffee shop, and I loved the way she treated every single customer. She had such a glorious sense of humor and knew the right way to engage with every single person in their own unique way. She has such a gift for that. She also loved my shop, so asking her to come and work with me felt right.
Ash has an inexplicable way of making me smile. She loves the colour red, is obsessed with shiny things and will happily tell me how wonderful she is. If I tell her, “You are wonderful,” she is quite likely to reply, “I know.” That is such a precious and unique quality to have. It is not ego, it is almost a defiant way of telling yourself something to anchor it into your being.
Her current great love is netball, although I believe we may have moved beyond enthusiasm and into the territory of a genuine problem. She is brilliant at encouraging and developing young players, and I love watching her pour that enormous energy into helping them grow.
Nicole is my little nature-spirit friend. She seems entirely in tune with the seasons and is the walking, talking epitome of kindness and generosity—sometimes giving so much of herself that I wish she would keep a little more in reserve.
She adores her husband and two gorgeous daughters, and she loves plants and gardening. Last year, she told me that when life feels hard, she chooses a packet from her little collection of seeds and goes into the garden to make something beautiful grow.
I adore that. She is quite literally grounding herself and creating life, light and joy from a difficult day. It says so much about her gentle spirit: where she finds heaviness, she plants the possibility of renewal.
Cheree is my Wifey. That is our nickname for one another simply because we love each other.
She is grounded and real, spiritual without ever being preachy, deeply wise, entirely human and absolutely hilarious. She is a wonderful cook and organiser, a loving and supportive mother and wife, and one of the most naturally nurturing people I know.
When I am low, she gives me love and support, but she does not allow me to build a permanent home in that lower place. She has a beautiful way of nurturing me while also helping me see a path forward.
She now lives what feels like a billion miles away after buying her dream property out west. Selfishly, I wanted her close. I wanted coffee without planning and, more importantly, hugs without a long drive. But that was where I was; it was not where she needed or wanted to be.
We cannot keep people tied to us because we are frightened of letting them go. Love does not require possession. Sometimes loving someone means adding wind to her sails and trusting that distance will not undo what you have built together.
Cheree and I talk for hours every week without fail. I have had wonderful adventures visiting her, and the time we spend together now feels even more precious and intentional. The distance still sucks—I see no reason to pretend otherwise—but she has remained closer to me than many people who live nearby.
We know we are thinking of each other. We know we are loving each other fiercely.
When Friendship Becomes a Safe Place
These are not friendships built only upon cheerful conversations, occasional lunches and celebrating the easy things. We have travelled through school, relationships, births, children, deaths, illness, losses, wins, heartbreak, career changes and all the strange shifts that alter who we are and how our lives look.
They have seen me at my lowest. They know what lies beneath the strength other people may see, who I was before life changed me and, for the most part, how my mind works—although I suspect there are moments when even they wonder what on earth is happening in there.
One memory has stayed with me from the time when my son, Henley, was a newborn. He had silent reflux and never slept for more than forty minutes at a time. I had not slept properly in weeks.
One day, I could not have felt lower. I was sprawled across the kitchen floor, half-dressed and ugly crying—the sort with tears and ooze running down your face. Henley was screaming in pain in my arms, and there was not a single thing I could do to make it stop. I knew he could feel my distress, which made him more distressed, which made me feel worse. We were trapped in a seemingly endless spiral of exhaustion, pain and chaotic emotion.
I called Rachel. I do not think I even managed to say anything. She simply heard that we were both in trouble.
Ten minutes later, she was standing in my kitchen.
She took Henley into her arms, wrapped a blanket one-handed around my half-naked body and told me to get up and have a really, really long shower.
“I’ve got this,” she said.
And I knew she did.
I knew my baby was safe and loved at a moment when I felt incapable of giving him what he needed. I dragged myself into the shower and cried with gratitude and relief.
We were safe.
Rachel made me a coffee, ordered me to bed and stayed, loving Henley, until my husband could get home from work. She will never fully know what that moment meant to me.
I am fiercely independent, often to a fault. I am the short woman who will drag three questionable objects across a room and climb on them rather than ask her tall husband to reach something from a high shelf. The thought of putting someone out pains every part of my being. Asking for help feels like surrender, and surrender does not come naturally to me.
My father left when I was very young, and I have carried abandonment issues and the quiet belief that I am not enough—or not worthy of people staying—for much of my life. I find praise difficult to receive. Even admitting that I enjoy a compliment can make me feel as though I am being egotistical. I thrive on giving because giving feels safe; receiving asks me to believe that I am worthy too.
My friends know this. They also know that I am a little weird—there are no secrets there. Yet they continue to love and celebrate me, even when I wriggle uncomfortably beneath the attention. They interrupt my self-doubt, remind me of my strength and use love, truth and humour to reach me.
When I have finally asked for help, my heroes have been there—loving, non-judgemental and entirely supportive. Cheree once knew I needed her after surgery on a bone in my leg and dropped everything to come and help. Nicole arrived with food and practical care. Each of these women supports in her own way, but the message beneath every act is the same:
You are not carrying this alone.
Listening, Truth and Loving Fiercely
There is a difference between hearing someone and truly listening to them.
Active listening means making room for another person without judgement. It means not assuming you already know what she is trying to say, not rushing to fix the problem and not filling every quiet space with your own words or stories. It asks us to respect that what seems insignificant to one person may feel like the end of the world to another.
We cannot completely understand the depth of somebody else’s private struggle. Even when they lift the veil and allow us to see what lies beneath, their feelings remain part of their own unique story. We do not need to measure or judge their pain. Sometimes we simply need to remind them, gently, that they matter.
That does not mean fierce friendship is endless agreement or accepting behaviour that causes harm. Love still needs boundaries. Forgiveness does not erase accountability, and sometimes stepping back can also be an act of love.
My friends and I speak truth, but we try to speak it kindly. There is a great difference between saying something harsh out of anger and offering an honest thought that may help someone move forward. Not every truth is mine to give, and not every truth belongs to the other person. We are all different.
Loving honestly means helping someone become the best version of herself—not my preferred version of her, but her version.
Over decades, friendships inevitably ebb and flow. A new relationship may consume someone for a while. A new baby may require distance. Careers change, illness arrives, families need us and sometimes life simply becomes too much.
The tide pulls out, and we move with it. We do not become anchors that hold one another back. We add wind to each other’s sails so that the people we love feel safe and confident enough to begin a new adventure. Then we wait patiently for the message in a bottle that tells us they are coming home—to love, friendship and the people who have kept a place for them.
We choose the friendship again and again.
Keep the Champagne Ready
Lately, all four of these women have been creating.
Rachel has been painting beautiful watercolours filled with her love of animals. Nicole has been making extraordinary Book Week costumes and props inspired by treasured stories. Ash is pouring herself into netball and the young players she encourages. Cheree is transforming ordinary hats into works of art with intricate burned designs.
They are all clever women who can do anything they truly decide to try. They also love everything Enchantress stands for and, every single one of them, like me, is a complete magpie for anything shiny.
Watching their creativity emerge in such different ways at the same time has made my heart ridiculously happy.
Friendship is not only about having people who support us when life is difficult. It is also about having people whose happiness we can celebrate without comparison, whose creativity we can admire without envy and whose wins genuinely feel worth cheering for.
My mum and dad always keep a bottle of champagne in the fridge because, as they say, “You never know when you might need to celebrate something—or someone.”
My great-grandmother, whom I knew as Nin, believed that everyone occasionally needed a Hyacinth for the Soul—something that nourished the heart, lifted the spirit or helped us find our way back to ourselves. The older I become, the more I realise that sometimes a Hyacinth is not a flower or a beautiful object at all. Sometimes it is a person. Sometimes it is the friend who arrives with coffee, plants something hopeful, calls from a billion miles away or hears you crying on the telephone and says, “I’ve got this.”
Nature appears to empty itself in autumn and winter, only for new life to rise again in spring. It reminds us that renewal is always possible and that life itself is miraculous enough to celebrate.
We do not need to wait for an enormous achievement. There is always something worth noticing if we are willing to look for it.
I celebrate when Rach climbs something high because she wants to push herself beyond her comfort zone. I celebrate when Ash replies to a text message on the very same day—truly, miracles come in many forms. I celebrate when Nicole’s mum is declared cancer-free and when my darling Cheree reclaims her home office and transforms it into a sanctuary.
I celebrate a friend buying her dream property, even when that dream takes her far away from me, because her happiness becomes part of mine. Pride and sadness can exist together. My longing does not need to diminish her joy.
There is always something to celebrate.
Framily
We may not see one another anywhere near as often as we would like. Sometimes we do not even talk as often as we intend. But we know we are thinking of one another and wishing each other love and kindness.
We all trust our intuition—not always as well as we should, perhaps, but enough to recognise when something feels wrong. Someone picks up the phone. The right person steps forward. Love adapts to what is needed, and no one carries everything alone.
That is Framily to me.
They know the unguarded version of you and make it safe for her to exist. They share the joy and the hardship. They allow you to grow, change, disappear beneath the tide for a while and return without having to explain every moment of the journey. They feel like home.
If you are very, very lucky, you find a few good people like this.
Love them fiercely.
Tell them that they are loved, appreciated and special. Tell them you are proud of them—not only when they achieve something enormous, but when they take one brave step, survive a difficult day, rediscover a forgotten part of themselves or simply reply to your text before you have begun wondering whether they have moved overseas without mentioning it.
Celebrate the people who show up in the little ways: the text message, the coffee, the food left after surgery, the call that arrives at precisely the right moment. Celebrate the person who comes every time you break down with your newborn because you feel completely out of your depth. Celebrate those who speak the truth kindly, who refuse to judge your pain and who love you at your lowest as wholeheartedly as they cheer for you at your highest.
We should never make people earn a celebration by being impressive. We should never postpone joy until life becomes easy.
Keep the champagne ready.
A Moment for You
Who are the people in your life who know the unguarded you—the person beneath the strength, the roles and the polished answers?
Who has remained through changing tides, allowing you to grow without trying to anchor you to an earlier version of yourself?
When did someone last make you feel safe enough to surrender and say, even without words, “I cannot carry this alone”?
Whose joy could you celebrate today, without comparison and without waiting for an enormous achievement?
Is there someone who may not fully understand how much they matter to you?
Perhaps today is the day to tell them.
Find some good people. Choose them repeatedly. Listen without judgement, speak truth with kindness, add wind to their sails and keep a safe place for them to return to.
Love them fiercely.
And whenever you can, celebrate them while they are here.
Welcome to the Collective … with Love.