With friends like these...

It's enough to cause you to lose faith in mankind.

If you’re known by the company you keep then ours hasn’t been particularly salubrious. Among our motley friends are gasbags, kleptomaniacs, pretenders and charlatans. There are those who’ve pinched our ideas, jobs and friends. We’ve been asked out for dinner to a restaurant but left to pay the bill on some flimsy pretext. Our cars have been borrowed and returned battered and bruised. Some have asked for loans of clothes, others of furnishings, some even our home for setting up meetings with prospective suitors for their children whose weddings we haven’t been invited to. 

“I like maverick people,” I’ve explained to