We go long-ish periods without speaking. We have that kind of lifelong friendship where we just pick up wherever we left off. He lives in London, I live on the south coast, so we only really speak when I'm in London for work and I stay over at his place. That's usually relatively frequent, but I wasn't going up much at that specific time. I should also say that he's not particularly good at organising these things and usually totally ignores his birthday, so it wasn't a huge party. Still stung though!