I have a very simple method of working out who will be a long term friend and who is a random person who might well be nice:

They have fed me. A lot.

Look this is a pretty easy requirement to meet and is indeed also met by the ladies in supermarkets who hand out free samples but it is important. And also a little bit more refined than that. To be precise I mean that they consistently feed me upon multiple occasions, usually with food they have cooked themselves.

My best friend used to give me her butter sandwiches and hula hoops. I know this isn't home cooked goodness but it was all she brought to eat and she always gave me at least half when I had nothing. Half a butter sandwich means a lot more when you're hungry. Now we meet up often just to bake things together.

My closest friend from university used to carry around a packet of biscuits and feed them to me when I got cranky. I got through a lot of custard creams writing our Dissertations together.

Other friends have cooked me noodle soups, baked birthday cakes and burnt marshmallows together. I always seem to notice exactly how much they mean to me as a friend with a gob full of food.

This kind of concerns me. Do I only choose my friends because of what I can get out of them? Are only the best chefs allowed my phone number? 

Nah that's not right. I think that it is more that from experience I know that food is a way of showing care. The food in a sense doesn't matter. This is why the sample ladies are not all my friends. It is those people who feed me because they see I haven't been eating properly, who pay attention to the things I say I like, who notice how to calm me down. Those are the people who I want to invest in, to make them happy and return that care because I can already see they are invested in my happiness too.

In truth I know this is a bit silly. That the more time you spend with someone the more likely you are to be fed by them. Causation versus Correlation and all that jazz. But hey. What else have I got to think about at half eleven at night?