How to make friends during a pandemic – and why it's still worth doing

Subscriber's newsletter

The other day I sent out an agony aunt column to paying subscribers of this newsletter. It’s a little bonus email I decided to trial a few months ago that I really love doing. I have always wanted to write an agony aunt column ever since pouring over the ones in Sugar, Shout and J17 as a teenager (those are all British girls’ magazines popular in the 90s by the way!) The problem with doing it is I often think of more things I should have said after I have sent or I write far too much because I get so into it and have to cut it back to make it readable.

I had the latter problem on Monday. I got so into writing back to the reader who has shared her problem that I wrote way too much and did a big cull. But I really liked the points I made and thought they would be useful so I have decided to devote this newsletter to one of the topics brought up in the question a reader sent in (the reader raised several issues hence me writing a lot and this was just one of them!)

I think it’s probably s…