It was my birthday two days ago and I took the day off work to do nothing. It is not particularly rare that I do nothing, however it is exceedingly rare that I do nothing without suffering from monstrous guilt. The rules are different on birthdays, however: you can do whatever you want.

I woke up at 8am and opened my blinds and through the skylight of the kitchen downstairs I saw a single yellow balloon float past. I felt guilty to have accidentally witnessed what was presumably my birthday surprise, and pretended I hadn’t seen it. I got back into bed and lay there for a time, feeling sleepy and looking at things on my phone, then went downstairs when I felt sure whichever of my flatmates was blowing up balloons had had enough time to do so.

I spoke to Sam and Laura, who were eating breakfast at the table. They said happy birthday, but they had not blown the balloons up – it had been Sarah Rose, but she was in her room. I made a coffee and took a slice of the Colin the Caterpillar cake that my improv group surprised me with the previous evening, then went upstairs to knock on Sarah Rose’s door to thank her for the balloons. She gave me a hug and said happy birthday, and then surprised me with a little gift bag containing some fizzy Haribo and a colourful oblong box.

“A dildo!” I exclaimed, opening it. “How did you know?”

It was not a dildo: it was sunglasses. I lost my own sunglasses last autumn, and since then have been stealing Sarah Rose’s second pair every time the sun comes out. Another hug and a big thank you and I headed back to my room to lie on my bed and sip coffee and open my cards: I received around six in total, I think, plus the one from my improv group which had really charmed me and made me feel very special.

The previous evening was the final class in my eight-week improv course, and we’d all gone for drinks at a pub near Bank in central London. Twelve of us plus the teacher, Connor: what a journey. For two hours every Tuesday evening since mid-March, myself and these one-time strangers had been meeting in a room near Warren Street to put on accents, make up stories, wave our hands, shriek, dash, collapse, raise quizzical eyebrows, and guffaw until our cheeks were weary. I don’t often give out advice on WorldHangover, but here’s one thing I’m sure of – if you’re new to a city and you want to make friends, the following things do not work:

• Going out boozing
• Going on dates
• House parties
• Drop-in classes
• Poetry nights
• Smoking areas
• Day festivals
• Going to the gym

This works:

• Book onto a weekly class

That’s it – that’s the only reliable way. Everything else in the list requires some form of organisation to maintain the friendship, which will die in its infancy in a city like London where people are desperately afraid to commit to anything for fear of missing out on something even better. This ‘even better’ thing very rarely actually comes along, but people will bend over backwards to keep alive the possibility of it – cancelling plans, flaking on friends – just in case. That, and people naturally (and understandably, I suppose) want to devote their limited free time to people they know already and can relax around, rather than sitting opposite the guy (me) they met in a smoking area two weeks ago who just suddenly popped up on Instagram asking in a timid and rather forlorn sort of way if they fancied going for a drink and possibly becoming best pals. You can do that sort of thing in Berlin, no biggie – but it took me a long time to accept the rules are simply different here. I’m a pig-headed old bastard sometimes – I need to suffer a lot before I accept I’m beat and agree to adapt. But I’ve adapted.

Classes, however – they work. Not drop in classes, mind you. They’re no good: it’s different people every week, and therefore no more effective than walking up to people at bus stops and asking if they’re in the market for a new buddy. No: courses. Book onto a course that lasts, at a minimum, a couple of months. Nobody needs to take up the embarrassing mantle of organisation, nobody is too busy, nobody is too cool to commit; it carries you nicely through that awkward period where it feels a bit too soon to start jotting-in friendship dates.

Everyone on my improv course was great fun. Of the twelve, there are a handful I can picture myself hanging out with on a regular basis in a nice little gang. On Monday we all went to the theatre together to see an improvised Jane Austen play, Austentatious. The actors at the beginning fish around in the audience for a good idea for a play title – someone in the show I attended yelled out ‘Mary Shelley Comes to Dinner’ – and then they improvise an entire 1.5 hour play based around that.

Having tried improv, and knowing how hard it is, I was left in quiet awe by the actors. The play, which began as nothing but two ladies setting an imaginary table, slowly grew into a romantic gothic horror tale about Mary Shelly arriving at Jane Austen’s house with her mysterious new boyfriend in tow, who it soon becomes apparent is a Franekstein’s monster-esque creature made from the reanimated bodies of chickens. There were double crossings and mysterious strangers, monster hunters and stagecoaches and midnight transformations – I laughed my head off, and I laughed all the more because my new friends were all laughing.

It can be a little disorientating, making a lot of new friends quickly. I remember having the feeling at multiple points throughout my life; the first time was in sixth form, when I made four or five new friends within a few weeks of starting at the school and found myself wandering along beside them one day, feeling completely at ease and comfortable, thinking how curious it was that I didn’t know they existed just two or three months before. Same thing with Vic and Klara when I first moved to Berlin – same thing with Ben, Seth and Hattie in Australia – same thing with my improv group now. On Tuesday night in the pub, after our final session, I looked around and thought how odd it was that we’d all spent so much time together, felt so comfortable in each other’s presence, yet I still didn’t know any of their jobs, or where they lived, or anything about them at all, really, beyond their sense of humour and how good their comic timing was. There’s something quite nice in that.

So – I opened my birthday cards and two more presents: a book from my mum (The Beautiful and the Damned by F Scott Fitzgerald) and a chalk bag for climbing from my friend Alex. I consider these to be excellent presents (along with the sunglasses) because they are things I really wanted that will simultaneously improve my life while also making my bedroom look cooler: I have placed the book on my book pile and hung the chalk bag on my clothing rail. I like it: you can look around my room and see my personality in all corners, now. I remember fantasising about that when I was in Colombia – decorating a space, making a nest, getting into hobbies.

I’ve gotten into climbing, by the way. I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned that here before. I’ve been going to the climbing gym since last autumn – that is, the gym area only – but I recently upgraded my subscription to include the climbing wall. You get stronger so quickly, it’s amazing exercise. A bit hazardous to your body of course; there’s a lot of potential for injury – shoulders, fingers, knees – but then, I figure my body is usually treated extremely gently by the simple act of working from home, so in fact a bit more rough-and-tumble and a few scratches here and there might not be such a bad thing.

My finger strength is increasing slowly, but I think I need to climb more often and eat more protein to see real improvement – once a week isn’t gonna cut it. I didn’t get it originally; listening to more seasoned climbers yapping excitedly about how they were striving to conquer a particular route and were gonna focus on it all day, I couldn’t help but think ‘why?’ I saw no reason for them to strain and suffer and huff away in finger-shredding chalk clouds. But I am gradually beginning to feel the pull of it – the desire to improve, to feel yourself progress, to learn proper technique and climb with elegance. As it is, I climb like a puppy: a lot of panting and grunting and wiggling. I’m strong in relation to my body weight, so I can heave myself up a wall without too much drama with minimal technique – but the second a route requires a little finesse/balance/forethought/tact, I slide off and down like a gherkin hurled against a McDonalds window. The more experienced climbers stare at a route a long while before they try to climb it. They mime the moves they need to do with their hands, frowning at the higher up holds. But my brain isn’t wired to learn this way: I get very little value from being shown or told what to do. I climb how I’ve lived the last ten years: fuck it – learn on the job – aaah disaster – try again.

I lay in the park for an hour on my birthday, topless and spread-eagled. I called my mum, my dad, my brother and my grandparents, then I went home and played some Playstation. They I went with Sarah Rose to Argos to help her carry home a new fan she’d bought, then I went to get my haircut, then I played more Playstation, then I went to meet my friend Allie – who I go climbing with on Fridays – in the park, and she gave me a cupcake. Then I met my housemates and we went to the nearby pub, a Wetherspoons named The Fox on the Hill, where I saw Richard Ayoade two weeks ago, bizarrely. And my flatmates bought me three beers and gave me another present: a picnic blanket, which I’d mentioned I was considering buying only the week before.

We came home after two hours in the pub and ordered a giant Chinese takeaway, and I was so excited for it that I ate it all in almost a single breath and then sat bloated and winded. I went to bed in the evening feeling very lucky, and I thought about my gifts for the day – 

chalk bag, book, sunglasses, picnic blanket, cupcakes

– and I thought that, even though I’m still poor and frustrated and scared and still a bit lost at times, the gifts people had decided I would enjoy seem to indicate something positive: that I have, without really being fully conscious of it, become the kind of person who gets climbing chalk, picnic blankets, literature, sunglasses and cupcakes for their birthday. And that’s exactly the sort of person I want to be.