AS A topic for midday discussion, the findings of an opinion poll were exercising callers to a Radio 4 phone-in on Tuesday. A headline in a national newspaper set the worry ball rolling by exclaiming: "Ninety per cent of whites have few or no black friends."

No one on the phone to Call You And Yours seemed much impressed by the poll or what it discovered. There was, as is usual in such exercises, a deal of grumbling and the occasional ray of good sense.

The poll causing a mild stir was carried out by the Commission For Racial Equality. Its headline discovery was that more than nine of out ten white Britons have no, or hardly any, ethnic minority friends.

Attempting to discuss your feelings towards such a finding is fraught with difficulties - and offers many chances for the liberal-minded person to wring their hands and, truth to tell, end up looking daft and saintly stupid.

With that caution in mind, I happily put up my hand and admit I wish I had more black or Asian friends; and also that my children did too. But now I've said it, I feel a touch ridiculous. After all, what should matter in life is having friends and not their ethnic background.

Still, I'll stick with this for a moment. With my idealistic head on - the one that generally suits me so well - I do wish I had more friends from different ethnic backgrounds. It would, says this talking head, make my life richer and more interesting to have such friends; it would help make me more understanding, give me a deeper view of the world; wouldn't it?

Now my other talking head - the slightly cynical, heckling one - butts in to observe that this is nonsense. For a start, it is not possible to legislate for friendship; there is no imposed quota of what sort of friends we should have; friendships develop through circumstance and liking.

This too is true, and anyway that headline figure is not really all that surprising. Minority ethnic groups comprise less than ten per cent of the population and tend to be concentrated in urban areas. So, statistically speaking, it is not remarkable that so many people should have no friends from a different ethnic group. Perhaps they rarely meet any.

There is a high possibility of this being so in a city such as York, which remains predominantly white. In daily life, the chances of meeting people from different ethnic backgrounds are fairly slim. Of course, this is a situation that suits some people just fine, because they are hostile to "otherness" and don't wish to upset their narrow view of the world.

Another finding in the poll was that 47 per cent of ethnic minorities say white people form all or most of their friends. Again, this is not surprising, given the statistics; but it is encouraging. If nearly half of people from an ethnic minority count white people as close friends, then plenty of friendships are crossing cultural barriers.

Perhaps an opinion poll, however carefully conducted, is too clumsy a tool to examine something as personal as friendship. In the end, we are friends with people we like and if we live in a culturally mixed part of the country, some of the people we like will come from different ethnic backgrounds.

My early days as a journalist were spent working in south London, where friends and colleagues came from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds. Striking up friendships was a matter of proximity, warmth, liking, time spent together doing the same job, and long lunches in the pub (whatever happened to those?).

The ethnic background of your friends didn't come into it. The friendships just happened. In the end that's what friendships usually do.

For all that, the CRE survey may be useful as a snap view of what the country thinks about ethnicity - except that friendship is personal and not political. My idealistic head tells me it is what happens beneath the skin that matters most; and my idealistic head usually has the last word.

Updated: 11:10 Thursday, August 05, 2004