Good communication makes for good relationships and is synonymous with high-quality friendship. The features of genuine friendship and therapy almost completely overlap. They include listening, empathising, sincere interest, respect, understanding, acceptance and a non-judgmental and non-critical attitude. In some respects, they sound like old-fashioned values and manners of a bygone age, which certainly can feel in short supply in the modern world.

Images of friends offloading over hedges or half-doors in some rural idyll spring to mind. Old sayings abound with the benefits of friendship: ‘A shared joy is a double joy; a shared sorrow is half a sorrow.’ The rarity of genuine friendship was summed up by 18th-century English physician Thomas Fuller, ‘If you have one true friend you have more than your share’, and equally so by American writer Sarah Orne Jewett in the character of Mrs Todd from The Country of the Pointed Firs: ‘Yes’m old friends is always best, ‘less you can catch a new one that’s fit to make an old one out of.’ Click here to read the full article