I saw the phrase ‘friendship recession’ in a headline last week, which has a musical swing to it, but refers to growing social isolation, particularly among men, due to people working from home, avoiding crowded places, being reluctant joiners… And then I stopped reading, because sociology has always bored me, ever since I was 19 and sat in Dr Cooperman’s class and looked around at the girls in the room and tried to imagine how I might strike up a conversation with one of them. Talking about sociology did not seem like the way to begin. 

I grew up in a family of eight who belonged to a tight group of devout evangelicals, half of them relatives, who believed in holding the secular world at arm’s length, so my parents didn’t associate much with neighbours, but ofcourse we children did and we went to school with non-evangelical kids and so we lived in two worlds and had to keep them separate. I knew the words to ‘Great Balls of Fire’, but didn’t sing it around my parents and I didn’t talk to my classmates about the Second Coming. I had cousins who lived on farms, and used an outhouse and cooked on a wood-burning stove, and I had city cousins who had flush toilets and rode the streetcar. A lot of sociology going on around me.