Letter: Real friends

YOU DEVOTED nearly a whole page last week to the difficulties women experience in sustaining friendships in the face of the structures, disciplines and conflicts of the workplace ("Who said that girls leave their scraps in the playground?", Real Life, 28 November). The really astonishing thing about the article was that it contained not the slightest acknowledgement that men suffer exactly the same difficulties.

Of course, if you think that men are essentially calculating self-serving operators who can manage only passing alliances in place of the warm caring person-to-person intimacies that are the essence of a woman's relationships with others - well, then, you're in the grip of a false stereotype. Spread the news: men quite often have friends, too. Real ones.

PAUL BROWNSEY

Glasgow G6