Did your social graces suffer a massive setback during the pandemic? Are you only now finding your way back to navigating dinner parties, networking events and conversations involving more than one person at a time?

It’s not a trivial trend because, as we lost our opportunities to socialize, we also lost our comfort in communing with strangers and that’s bad for them and for us.

When we’re children we believe our parents came into the world just as we first encountered them and, even as adults, while we can know lots about our parents, we can never know them the way we know the contemporaries we grew up with because we simply were not there.

I’m so pleased to introduce my guest substacker, Roxanne Stasysyzn, who agreed to share her mixed thoughts and emotions on the death of yet another community newspaper. This isn’t just about one slim bundle of adverts in a suburban neighbourhood; it’s the demise of an institution that, among other things, stitched together a fractious north.

I had a scheduled Zoom meeting today, and so fired up the old Zoom room in anticipation of my client joining. In the meantime, I went into the kitchen, just down the hall, to make a quick coffee. My sweetheart came up from his office/man cave and we chatted about a radio interview he had been asked to do, one that was fraught with potential pitfalls. As part of my work is media training, and I spent a dozen years as a radio and television journalist, he was seeking my advice on how heavily he could safely tread out on that thin ice.

Later that day, having completed the Zoom meeting, I received an email from the Zoom AI, summarizing what had been discussed in the client meeting. Not only that, the summary also very accurately described the confidential conversation we had in the kitchen, prior to my meeting. The kitchen. Outside my office. Down the hall.

There’s nothing wrong with saying “we were friends” or “we used to be friends” or even “we will become friends” because each of them reflect the passive, or active, nature of those relationships. “We are friends”, however, simply cannot be.

I baked a beautiful cheesecake today, the traditional New York dense kind, not my recently acquired favourite, the fluffy Basque cheesecake. (Fabulous flavour but keeps wanting to separate, GROAN.) I even smashed up chocolate wafers to make a chocolate crumb crust as the Christie cookie company has discontinued its bags of crumpled up Oreos.

I had a vaguely alarming experience recently when two colleagues, reminiscing about our shared media past, related an incident that involved all three of us. It was one of those media events where various TV and radio personalities take part in risky, ill-advised and potentially fatal activities, such as riding race-horses and flying upside down in open airplanes. This particular event was a wind-surfing foray (it would be silly to call it a race) around English Bay. The point was to surf out to the markers, turn the corner, surf back and run up the beach to the finish line. Sounds so much simpler than the excruciating reality.

Must be something in the water. I thought that by now the dust would have settled from the Great Attrition, the Great Resignation, the Great Lateral Promotion…but nope. This week saw half a dozen conversations and coaching sessions with people looking for tips on how to navigate employment or promotional interviews because they haven’t interviewed in years!

30 years ago Darryl was a PhD candidate in Australia, moonlighting as a nightclub bouncer. One night the boss announced he had hired a female bouncer, given the number of unruly drunk women his crew had to contend with. He assured the boyos she could look after herself. Name was Martha.

I received the phone call the other day, the same one you probably get every couple of months/years/weeks. The one that asks, did you spend $4500 on a Turkish carpet at Carpetmania, many miles from where you live?