The Big Read: The rare bird of friendship

I came late to adult male friendship, although I don't know how I managed without it. I had male pals when I was younger, of course, and buddies and guys, people I thought of as friends but who were really just people I watched sport with, or drank with or made jokes with or passed the time and played pool and talked shit and tried to meet girls with.

Don't get me wrong, all of those are worthwhile occupations, and at this very moment I can think of very few more delightful activities, but friendship is a rarer bird.

About 10 years ago I started having dinner on Thursday evenings with three friends. Actually only two of them were friends - we all knew each other separately - and the third guy was someone with whom they themselves were each separately friends, and soon enough he and I became friends too.

We all met each week at the same time at the same restaurant in Parkhurst, and for most of those 10 years we've each ordered pretty much the same thing, although it's true that I did start off ordering the chicken pizza and at some point in 2011, perhaps in response to some now-forgotten trauma, I switched to the prego roll and I've never looked back.

At the end of each evening we split the bill four ways, no matter how much each individual has drunk, on the principle that only schmucks, small people and Capetonians nickel-and-dime their mates. Once I came up R30 short and had to borrow it and I was known as Thirty Rand Guy until I paid it back.

Someone at an early stage called it Supper Club as a joke, and as with all annoying nicknames it stuck although that's not what it was at all. The food didn't matter and it wasn't a club: it was just four guys getting together because we liked each other's company. Sometimes we talked shit, but mainly we talked about shit. We discussed whatever was on our minds or in our lives.

We talked politics a lot, and movies and ageing and secrets and sexual strategies and the industry we work in and, of course, sport, although not as much sport as you'd think, because one of us was American and, although he had an admirable and altogether un-Yankee grasp of cricket, during certain stretches of the conversation each rugby season his eyes would glaze over and you could tell he was thinking about the TV reboot of Battlestar Galactica again.

We laughed a lot, except when we argued. For some reason some of the worst quarrels involved the US election primaries in 2008. I forget now what the issue was but it's possible that for a time I had become an ardent Hillary man. Soon I shall be vindicated.

We spoke about personal things. If you had to make a decision or there was something painful or confusing in your life and you wanted perspective because you might be wrong or going crazy, you brought it to the table, where three friends would listen and tell what they did when it happened to them and be honest. If you were wrong, someone would say. If you wanted advice, three voices would knock and rattle against each other to reach some spiky consensus. Mostly, you learnt again the life-saving lesson that you can never learn enough: that you aren't alone or especially unique, that no matter how anxious, insecure, outrageous or depraved this thing is that you're feeling, other men have felt it before and will feel it again, and this is how they handled it.

During the time of Supper Club two of us have married and one of us has acquired then parted with a dog; we've all written feature films and three of us have directed one; one of us has moved cities, another's had a baby. We've won awards and lost jobs and grown older; we've all been in love. When I moved to Cape Town a few years ago my attendance grew necessarily more sporadic. I felt exposed and uncertain, a spindly figure on a sweeping plain. I don't know if the decisions I've made have been much better or worse than those I'd have made with more regular access to the table, but they've certainly been more tentative and lonely.

This month I flew up to join a special edition of Supper Club. We had a photograph taken and we compared it with a photo from seven or eight years ago. We're older now, but pleasingly unbroken. Charlie is leaving to try his hand in Los Angeles and we're proud of him and love him and we hope he'll succeed and we'll miss him far more than this column can say.