It happens to a lot of people: the pleasant, affectionate person you were friends with gradually becomes distant, changed, someone else. A while back I was friends with someone who, I later learnt, was being kept aloft with antidepressants when we met. There is evidence that such drugs can cause personality change.

One odd thing about the CharityJOB recruitment site is that there isn’t, as far as the F.A.Q. seems to indicate, any requirement that advertisers must actually be charitable under some plausible definition or legal registration. Cosmo Coffee’s advertisements for such skilled professional work as graphic design, administrative support, H.R. support and market research, among other roles, …

I think one of my correspondents is sulking. People sometimes do after having it explained to them in practically scholarly detail why they were wrong to take umbrage in the first place.

The world doesn’t change when your feelings do; and how slowly we come to terms with that! As children we learnt that there were other thinking beings like ourselves, and a world to share with them; although a person decades older may be found dropping the most carefully disguised of hints, then growing frustrated with those …

It is unfortunate that this term has already been used to mean something different, but I have not been able to think of a better label.