For two months I moved in a haze between my full time role as a journalist for this newspaper, wife and mother.

I can recall the time of year only because I had been dually visiting my husband in hospital and also been part of the state government’s  budget lock-up in a grey and white meeting room on Hobart’s Princes Wharf.

I remember feeling split by the excitement of budget papers – one of my very favourite reads – and the tragedy of my husband’s condition. I remember it snowed on my way North that night.

That evening I went to my friend Annie’s house to collect our 10-year-old son.

Annie and her husband were waiting in his office with a heavy looking shopping bag.

``You don’t have to keep doing this alone,’’ he said.

Inside the bag were some items of function and comfort – including English breakfast tea bags and the latest, electronic diary, so I could at least try and remember appointment times and places.

I cried, as you might, and felt `friended/loved/connected’.

This week, a `Friendship Study’ by the Royal Society of Open Science reported that our number of friends peaks at age 25.  ``Our social networks shrink from the age of 25’’ the study claimed.

The study’s authors sound like they might have been a group of grade 12 students on an independent study line.

Thinking, I remembered my very first, very best friend – Veronica Diamond. She would have been 58 this year.

At age five she disappeared from my life because of a bone cancer in her leg. (Not because she lost mobile phone coverage.)

I went to FB to see if the name lived. And sure enough, there’s a 30-something Veronica Diamond living in Endicott New York and the post at the top of her FB page read : ``A true friend is truthful to your face, and loyal behind your back’’.

My inner hippy couldn’t help but smile at the synchronicity of the young Veronica Diamond’s `friendhip’ post.

Real friendship, according to the aforementioned `Friendship Study’ is determined by how often we call a person and the length of the call.

``What age do we hit peak friendship?’’ a report on the study teased.

The study, which was based solely on mobile phone usage, used data collected from 3.2million mobile phone users.

Of course, as we all know, friendship didn’t exist before mobile phones.

Shock horror, according to mobile phone data, the most calls to friends are made before the age of 25, when, according to the study `friendship starts to decline’.

``They found that those aged 25 and under talked more (on the phone) to friends than any other age group, looking at how often they called a person and the length of each call, with our social circles decreasing with age…

``Our results indicate that these aspects of human behaviour are strongly related to age and gender and that younger individuals have more (mobile phone) contacts...’’

Some of us might argue that mobile phone use is not a reliable measure of friendship.

Or, that we get wise and use our mobile phones less after age 25, but hey, who would let maturity get in the way of cheap study which could also have been called ``There’s one (sucker) born every minute’’.

Of course, my definition of friendship is my Annie moment, or the Donelda moment when a green curry appeared before my eyes as I languished with a broken ankle, or Angela bringing Bruno’s figs like little works of art, carefully laid on their leaves, or the Kim moment when a pile of Canadian magazines, a red teapot and ginger tea arrived at my back door mid-winter flu season.