How many friends do you have?

A survey by a food company called Genius Gluten Free found the average Brit has 64 friends, from work, college, university, social activities and social media.

The best age for friendship is, apparently, 29. That’s when your friendship total is bumped up to 80.

And if you think this is a lot, check social media websites where people have hundreds and thousands of chums. The pop singer Shakira, for instance, has 86.3 million friends on Facebook. I wonder what she buys all them for Christmas.

Friendship has expanded and, at the same time, devalued in the modern age through computer, tablet, mobile phone, texting and those sites that encourage contacts quite often with people you’ve never met and have no intention of ever meeting.

In this day and age, even Billy Nomates can have friends in the privacy of his own bedroom.

It all depends, of course, on how you define friendship.

We all have a large circle of people we know and with whom we interact, work and socialise. Many we like, some we tolerate. They can be chums who are good company, pub buddies. But close friends, the ones you turn to in a crisis, can usually be counted on one hand.

A study from Time Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) pointed out that 25 years ago, when we still had telephone kiosks and home computing was in its infancy, we had an average of only three close friends. More amazingly, it said that these days, despite technology, we still only have two or three.

Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford University, came up with Dunbar’s number. He said 150 is the maximum number of friends/relationships one person can have. Among these, most people have a small group of three to five very close friends. The various layers of friendship thereafter, increase in number but decrease in intimacy.

Dr Mark Vernon, author of The Philosophy of Friendship, said: “I think this idea that you can have virtually limitless numbers of friends does water down the concept of friendship. I think it’s one of those things where less is more.”

Or, as the Portuguese say: “You have five friends and the rest is landscape.”

At my age, my friends keep dying off and but I still have two or three, all younger than me. And a landscape of very pleasant chums.