Table for Five

by Izzy Bromley

There are so many people just like us, I think, people with no partner or a family of their own. People who live alone, earn decent money but work long hours so it’s not always easy to find the time to have fun. People whose friends are starting to pair off and make new families while they are being left behind. It’s strange because people like us probably don’t look lonely from the outside, and yet there we all are. There seems to be a hole in our lives, a space that I always expected would be easily filled but which seems to be empty.

‘We’re a proper mixed bunch and you’d never have put us together. But together we are. The community tablers. Stupid name, I know, but that’s us. The mismatched, the lonely, the ones who at that particular moment didn’t quite fit in, didn’t know which way to turn.’