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Feeling lonely? Don’t have anyone to go to the pub with? Then a friend rental service could be just the thing you need. But what’s it like to spend a day with someone you’re paying to be your friend? 5 I meet my friend Andy in a café. Over a
Feeling lonely? Don’t have anyone to go to the pub with? Then a friend rental service could be just the thing you need. But what’s it like to spend a day with someone you’re paying to be your friend? 5 I meet my friend Andy in a café. Over a coffee we chat about music, current events and the ups and downs of our working lives. We don’t spend a lot of time talking about our feelings or our relationships, or rehashing the past. It’s not that kind of friendship. I prefer it that way and I know Andy feels the same. In fact, I’m paying him £40 an hour to feel the same. Not so long ago, friendship belonged to the things that money couldn’t buy, including 10 happiness, wisdom and good weather. In a cold and indifferent world full of cold and indifferent strangers, a friend was something you had to make for yourself. But no more: now you can purchase friendship at your convenience, by the hour. For a certain consideration, you can hire someone to go to a museum with you, or hang out at the gym, or keep you company while you shop. 15 This disturbing development has its origins in Japan, but it has also become big in the US. The website rentafriend.com maintains a database with 218,000 names on it. Apparently, 2,000 people pay to subscribe in order to find friends to take to dinner or to invite round. Although rentafriend.com has plans to bring this alarming innovation to Britain, there is currently no such service on offer. So I have had to make my own arrangements. 20 Andy is an actor. He has never been paid to be someone’s friend before, but he understands why someone might resort to buying companionship. When he first came to London from Scotland a year and a half ago, he found socialising difficult. “It actually took a long time to make some kind of contact with people other than workmates,” he says. I think Andy likes me. I can’t tell for certain, of course, but when you hire a mate for a few 25 hours I suppose you’re also buying the luxury of not caring what he thinks about you. When we go to the park with a football, I get him to lob the ball at a height where I can head it into an