Hello folks. I have to warn you that I am shamelessly commandeering my poor neglected blog for totally personal purposes.  It is my blog after all.

Today is a big day for my best friend.  It is her 40th birthday!  I don’t know how the hell this happened because I remember my parents turning 40 and the “over the hill/life starts at” cards.  It seems pretty bizarre to me that she (and I) are joining this cohort.  But, so it goes, as the esteemed Kurt Vonnegut would say.

We’ve come a long way, Michelle and I.  From our first meeting in the last year of high school where, although the term Frenemy was far from being invented, frenemies we certainly were.  We liked the same boy, Ben was his name – we were girls then ourselves – and as such real friendship was certainly not on the table.

Fast forward a couple of years and we were living separate lives in Sydney.  I was in Newtown living with a mutual friend and she was in Roseville in a household of sports-crazed guys.

Our mutual friend, Paul, found it inconceivable that we were not friends and set us up on a friend date. My first and only friend date turned out to be very successful. The short bus trip from the city to Kuleto’s for cocktails in Newtown, turned into a snorting with laughter affair within minutes.

And so we quickly became fast friends, BFF’s even, as my daughters would say, discovering our mutual love of live music, all music really.  And books and food and drink…!

Oooh I’m feeling all nostalgic now. Sniff sniff!!

Michelle was there for my marriage (at 23!), first baby at 25, and because we were 25 we took it all in our stride.  A Friday night party at our place would lead to a sleepover on the mattress on the floor with a 6 month old crawling all over her at 6.00am in the morning. Despite her sore head.

We’ve seen many friends and boyfriends enter and leave our lives.  Good jobs and no jobs and terrible jobs, which have over the years led to crazy great careers for both of us (I’m so proud of her).

And now we live on opposite sides of the world. Not forever though. And it doesn’t matter at all.  So although I would love to organise a(n impossible) birthday dinner for her with Johnny Depp, Audrey Hepburn, Bernard Fanning, Khaled Hosseini and a few other select people, it won’t be happening just yet.

Happy Birthday Michelle! You are the Crabb to my Sales, or is it the Sales to my Crabb? I’m not sure. I hope we get to celebrate together soon. xxx