Are friends electric?

I think I’ve just lost a friend. It’s a really weird feeling. Like anyone who reaches my advanced age, I have lost plenty along the way through just not seeing them, not staying in touch, generally falling out of each other’s orbit. But this is the first time I can remember thinking, in the way you do when a relationship ends, “Right, that’s IT.”
The weird bit about this is going to be that we see each other very regularly as we work together, and that I am known at work (he’s massively senior) to be a friend of his outside work (he recruited me). But after a long spell of “yes, we must catch up properly” and cancelled supper and drinks appointments – I cancelled a couple, he far more - I finally felt something snap. You see, we’d both had Wednesday in our diaries for over a month, and he turned out to have gone on holiday this week, having said last week (when I said jokingly, “Still waiting for that cancellation notice, A”) that he would absolutely not cancel, it was getting ridiculous and he really wanted to see me.
It’s a really uncomfortable feeling. I don’t want to be the needy, high-maintenance one, but I need to balance that with a strong feeling that this is not a reasonable way to behave, and that old friends don’t simply get their secretaries to send a cancellation note in these circumstances.
Part of what is annoying me is that I feel I’ve stuck by him out of loyalty when he’s had an extremely bad press at work. There have been persistent rumours (yes, that sort of rumour) about him and other colleagues, about him behaving in a high-handed manner with others, and I have refused to listen to any gossip. Call me naïve, but even when he left his wife and surfaced months later with a much younger woman, I still didn’t entirely believe that the rumours were (all, at least) true.
And yet, and yet… he’s terrific fun to be with, a good conversationalist, interested in lots of things. I’ll miss him, but I can’t number among my friends someone who isn’t prepared to put the slightest effort into maintaining a friendship. I doubt he’ll miss me, or even notice any change in our relationship, but it will be a change that has already happened with others in his circle, and I’d stake good money that it’ll happen again. As someone said about Mrs Thatcher’s downfall, “if you create a wilderness around you, you are doomed, in the end, to inhabit it”.