All best friends were strangers once. Why, then, does reaching out to someone you don’t know, making platonic connections in the modern world, feel like such a bold, even brave thing to do? Let me tell you about my friend, Pauline. Like all good friends, we make a point of catching up at least once a week, talking for hours about everything and nothing at all.
But Pauline and I, while always there for each other, are unlike more conventional companions because, as well as being born 50-odd years apart, and living several hundred miles from each other, we’ve never actually met. We’re telephone friends. It was the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic and I was watching cat videos on YouTube.
An advert popped up – an older-person charity seeking to combat social isolation through weekly telephone calls. Thirty minutes a week was the commitment. A simple chat could change an older person’s life, so they said.
There were rules, of course. You were only to speak on the phone, only to know each other’s first names, never to meet in real life. Now I volunteer for several elderly charities, but back then I hadn’t given much thought to it.
Yet the idea immediately appealed. Perhaps it was an age thing. I had just turned 30, a milestone no one can fail to ignore, and I was beginning to wonder what mark I was leaving on the world, what my future held, who I was.
And then there was Covid, of course. It’s no coincidence that this all started in 2020. Was it a sense of privilege I .