On Tuesday night, we attended a classical music concert at the local art centre, sitting in pews up in the rafters. Backpack rattling, Mike sat behind us. An erstwhile musician, Mike is scrawny, perpetually stoned, sporadically bathed, with a pointy visage drawn from Beavis and Butthead. At one point he opened a tin of beer, which the whole audience must have heard. After Tartini’s Trumpet Concerto in D major, he shouted, “Fuck yeah!”

Afterwards we had drinks in a bar down the street, obviously not with Mike. Anna’s teenaged granddaughter just had a baby, and Anna was recalling how the other set of grandparents hasn’t contacted her daughter and son-in-law since the birth. Anna started crying. It's been a weird month for her. She sold her house and is living in temporary accommodation; greeted the birth of her unplanned great-granddaughter, requiring lending childcare at the drop of a hat; and went into surgery thinking she might have to use a colostomy bag for the rest of her life, a prospect she had kept to herself. (It turned out that she had a rare condition, usually found in men, in which her inflamed appendix had attached itself to the bladder, slowly poisoning her body.) Meanwhile she has managed to maintain her art practice, creating work for upcoming exhibitions and residencies.

“Strong” is a word often applied to my friend. Sometimes “strong” means you don’t ask for help when you need it most. Sometimes “strong” means you don’t cry when you want to wail at the sky. And sometimes “strong” means, after drinking too many quarter-bottles of post-concert wine beside an open fire in a bar, you allow yourself to lean, if only for a moment, into the shoulders of your friends and have a good weep.

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