Do you have a friend you contact only when you need to be mean-spirited? Or someone you would categorise as a chaos friend? If not, you just might be one ...

The New York Times recently explored “the vexing problem of the ‘medium friend’”: people who aren’t your ride or die, but more than mere acquaintances. How much of each other’s bandwidth should you take up? Is there an imbalance in how you perceive your friendship?

I am less interested in the problem than the expression (and the man in the article who, mind-bogglingly, ranks his friends in a spreadsheet). We are increasingly attuned to the importance of friendships for our wellbeing and becoming more thoughtful about how we make and maintain them. Perhaps it is time to try labelling friends, like plastic jars in tidy people’s pantries on Instagram?

Since the pandemic, remote properties have been marketed for off-grid living. But a life spent gardening and eating cormorants is not for me

I have just been to the Hebrides, because trudging across tussocks in the rain is my ancestrally transmitted idea of fun. The weather was fine, actually, and the midges hadn’t reached peak summer blood lust, which meant we could indulge in that universal holiday activity: fantasising about living in the destination.

On one walk, we stumbled across the perfect beachfront cottage, utterly isolated, accessible only on foot or by quad bike. Was it the perfect end-times home, we wondered; was there enough growing land, a fresh water source, high ground for spotting marauding – possibly mutant – attackers?