A literary cure for loneliness

Put your iPad down, ditch the phone and pick up a book. It could boost your circle of sympathy

Fortunate owners of working fireplaces in my neighbourhood have their chimneys swept by a father-and-son team of great kindliness and charm. Once every couple of years is enough, they say, unless you keep a fire burning every day. So they were surprised when a new customer called them back after only a month. Had they done something wrong? No, not at all. Eventually they realised that she wanted company so badly she was prepared to pay for quite unnecessary work.

What have we become? A society in which someone can have hundreds of online friends and yet go for days without human contact. Where the face-to-face encounters that once punctuated daily lives - and gave opportunities for the sort of casual conversation which, no matter how banal or weather-centred, makes real connections between one person and another - have largely been replaced by automaton. We swipe and scan; we click; we text people in the next room instead of speaking to them; we even check our library books out by ourselves when once we might have chatted to a friendly person with an ink pad and a date stamp.