Still Us: What 50 Years of Friendship Teaches Us

What happens when you sit around a table with people you've known since primary school? In this episode, I'm joined by three old friends, Joanne Gallacher (Stanley), Nichola Prescott (Preston) and Lorna Read (Symon), and rather than a carefully planned interview, we simply start talking. We chat about what has changed over the five decades since we first met, what hasn't, getting older, caring less about what other people think, the different versions of ourselves we show to different people, and whether friendship really needs regular contact. We talk about friends who are there for a reason, a season or a lifetime, and what makes an old friendship feel so comfortable. There are memories, disagreements, laughter, a little nostalgia and quite a lot of “do you remember when…?” And somewhere along the way, we realise that although we've all lived very different lives, there's still something familiar about sitting around the table together. Perhaps that's one of the lovely things about old friendship: you can change enormously, and yet still somehow recognise each other. So pull up a chair and join us for a very ordinary, and rather special, conversation about friendship, memories and the people who have known us longest. Stories of Survival in the Modern Age features honest conversations about resilience, reinvention, and being human in a complicated world.