Where did everyone go? The painful truth about loneliness in middle-age...

British middle-aged men and women are some of the loneliest in the world – something that both Eleanor Mills and Grant Feller found out the hard way. Here they explain how they overcame it – and how you could, too

Alone together: we are living through an epidemic of loneliness, but it doesn’t have to be that way (Getty)

It’s a strange thing to find yourself lonely in mid-life. It creeps up slowly as the kids leave home, or friends move away. Lives that were once thronged with people, bursting with activities, days that felt like an endless to-do list that never got completed, give way to a phone that doesn’t ring or ping. In place of the busy-ness come echoing evenings, endless weekends.

A friend who lives on her own and whose children are at university came to visit the other day. With a rather sad laugh, she told me she’d become “the woman who is a bit too keen to chat in the post office”.

I gave her a hug. I realised that because she has moved out of London a few years ago, although we chat on the phone and exchange texts, we hadn’t actually seen each other face to face since before the pandemic. And she’s someone I consider a good friend.