‘We’ve talked for hundreds of hours’: the joy of volunteering as a telephone friend

We're 50 years apart and have never met, but my connection with Pauline is deeper than I could have imagined

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.