We were talking in the pub last week about friends. Now, the back bar of the Barmaid's Bosom is not known for its frank, honest and down-to-earth chats about relationships - far from it.

But the topic drew quite a response from the locals gathered.

I argued that friends are not necessarily those people you see on a regular basis, in fact one of my best mates is someone I see about every six months, but we just take up where we were before.

Electric Ted reckoned you had to know someone for at least 10 years before you could call them a friend. Well, I've known him for about six, so that rules him out, I guess!

A couple of weeks ago our cesspit backed up. Not a quick change of subject there - a neighbouring farmer is a friend, though I've only known him about two years.

He has a gizmo for emptying cesspits and I asked him if he could do something.

Now he is a very busy man, as all farmers are, but the next day, he came round with the gizmo and spent three hours cleaning all the drains out for us and our neighbour.

Now, that is a friend - someone who helps you out. On the other hand, there are those you think are your friends, but when you need a favour they don't want to know.

Of course, there are websites now where you can contact old chums, Friends Reunited is one of them, where you go on-line and put your details in your school year and all your old school chums do the same, or some of them do anyway.

It's strange how things linger in the mind. It's many years since I left the Christopher Whitehead Acadamy For Young Gentlemen and of course there are some of my old school chums on the website.

I was looking through them the other day and thought, I don't want to meet up with him as I didn't like him at school.

Now, when you think it's more than 40 year since I went to school with them, how amazing that I would still think of them as they were all those years ago. Like me, they must have changed, although I was a conceited, loud-mouthed egotistical oaf even then!

Talking of friends, I was in the supermarket queue the other day and bumped into an old neighbour I had not seen for a good two years. I asked about her sister, who I had not seen for some time. Blow me, driving down the road, who did I meet but... the very sister.

l Dave Bradley broadcasts on BBC Hereford and Worcester.