Does my backyard cult really have to end?

Or should that be the gates of hell?

Whether a couple of extra children constitutes a swarm is debatable but that's how it feels this brilliant spring morning tailor-made for lockdown.

Until the premier's unhelpful intervention, all's been well for one's inner doomsday cult leader, who, in normal times is meek and repressed, but in these end days has truly flourished.

The compound is clean and tidy, my brainwashed followers (the younglings, not their mother, who remains stubbornly insubordinate) have fallen into a soul-sapping routine of woodchopping and Disney+ and I find myself whistling contently as I walk the perimeter every 13 minutes, glaring at those neighbours who wander by smiling and waving, purportedly to take in state-sanctioned exercise, but who are, in fact, casing the joint, planning an incursion on our biodome's plenitude of fuel and ovaries.

Now, that perimeter is breached and all my prepping undone.

Once again, other people's profligate offspring are churning through my dry stores, espousing whatever sedition their own unhinged leadership has been inculcating these past several weeks and, generally, roistering in the breezy joy of nourishing and important childhood friendship.

Yuck.

It's not that I don't want the kids to have friends over, I do, I just don't want them here all at once, fairly hyperventilating with a desire for companionship inflated by cruel loneliness and isolation.

Simply, I'm not match fit and would've benefitted from a staged re-entry into the world of sleepovers, play dates and birthday parties; rites, frankly, I've enjoyed being able to plausibly deny our lot thanks to Covid.

In the best of times, being exposed to other children is like being in The Slap. While simultaneously scanning outsiders for red flags, you're forever walking on eggshells yourself, overly sensitive you or one of your guileless, filterless children is about to put their foot in it.

"Dad says your mum's nowhere near 38."

If I'm honest, I'm a little envious as the kids skip down the backyard to the monkey bars or lip sync pop songs in the bedroom or play feds and militias in the chicken coop. Friendship at their untinctured stage of life is, for the most part, unequivocal, uncomplicated and watching kids embrace after so long apart is like watching severed tissue regenerate.

MORE B.R. DOHERTY:

Friendship in my own middle years, when you can be prone to the insular and obsessed with unshackling ambition from what psychoanalysts call the "false self" of youth, can be a minefield of one-upmanship and projected insecurities. It can also be enriching and revelatory, just not very often.

As we age, we tend to categorise friendship as if determining the purity of a precious metals; we subject it to a sliding scale of authenticity. There are those refined relationships we hold dear, locked safely in the vaults of our hearts; there are those we use more like currency, trading and rolling them over on the daily market of suburban existence; there are mere acquaintances, those in whom we have almost zero investment. Then, there are the people we work with, the slag of the smelting process, worthless and toxic.

Just kidding, office friends are great ... just great.

As with most things in these overanalytical times of ours, we can quantify our social success.

Named for British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, "Dunbar's number" is the number of individuals normal people with normal brains can have in their life without that number becoming counterproductive.

Dunbar said his magical figure - 150 - was "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar".

Clearly the researcher is a raging social athlete with a Filofax (he came to prominence in the '90s) heaving with contacts because 150 seems an awful lot.

My Dunbar's number is more like four. Pretty good for a male of my age, actually

Men are famously bad at friendship. Once some men are married and become consumed by such daily imperatives as earning a living, erecting razor wire, writing manifestos and teaching the kids how to lay snares, we tend not to worry about cultivating mates (although, if TV advertising is to be believed, every male in this country bonds regularly over gambling on their mobile phones).

Women, on the other hand, keep working on friendship with those of their own sex. Given how crumby blokes are (especially those who bet on the gee-gees with the grocery money) and the fact females outlive males, a plausible reason they continue to accumulate companions is to make the party all the bigger once all the men are dead.

Obviously, there is a serious side to men having no friends: anxiety, depression, suicide - all real, all devastating and, as such, much sympathy has gone their way. Society has responded to this silent pandemic of male modernity with bricks-and-mortar salves such as Men's Sheds to entice self-isolating loners to leave their caves at home and congregate in bigger caves built by the council.

Some men, it must be said, however, are lazy, selfish, set in their ways, and it's the female of their heterosexual relationship who gets saddled with filling her partner's emotional void, along with all the other unheralded chores of domesticity.

Meanwhile, the pandemic can't be a good thing for maintaining connections, especially for a gender indisposed to the practice in the first place.

I'm lucky. Not only do I have a wife who, up to a point, has been happy to humour her messianic husband during lockdown (still no progress on that dress code), we have kids young enough to hopefully emerge from the whole mess relatively unscathed, not to mention formidable bow-hunters.

Also, as restrictions have ramped up, so too has the online activity among my group of old schoolmates. The bantering about music, books and films - rarely sport, family rarer still - is less a buddies bubble and more a Gen-X time capsule, a safe place for a cohort flirting with irrelevancy.

The connection has been most welcome and, amazingly, it's been thanks to social media, something, until now, I've always spurned.

It's never too late to join a dangerous cult.