Can you make new friends in your 50s? I’ve found them in unexpected places

2 months ago 14

Opinion

December 26, 2025 — 11.30am

This nearly-done year. Maybe the fastest of my life. And not completely balanced. A little bit from column A, a little bit from column B.

I saw Richard Clapton sing The Best Years of Our Lives at the pub, hung out a lot with my brother, got lockjaw from overwhelm, woke up almost every day with my beautiful man, was lucky to still have both parents, got invited to literary festivals.

Wasted money and would do it again, deadlifted over 1½ times my weight, had yacht rock as my top Spotify category, made new friends.

And I wrote this column 50 times.

The 680-word space is a privilege. An incredible opportunity to noodle away at whatever’s on my mind and hopefully yours, from Meghan to menopause to men behaving badly. On that note: why is the only person in jail over the whole Jeffrey Epstein moral morass a woman?

I love the creativity of it – deciding what will interest or infuriate, working out how far I want to push something and whether I can get in print again the story of my husband being ordered to shoot the shark as a young quartermaster gunner.

But the best part is what happens afterwards. The often unexpected conversations that land in my inbox once the column stops being mine and starts being yours. Writing in public creates a strange intimacy. A shared space where people recognise themselves, or parts of themselves and decide to speak.

Whether it was my own Chris being courageous enough to have his alcoholism revealed and writ large via my book, or whether it was simply getting to an age and stage where you feel you need a random listener – who knows. But this year the overarching theme was blokes reaching out about their personal lives.

One inner-city regular correspondent, we’ll call him MT, is a teacher but really a writer. He shared with me his perfect first-draft stories about relationships that captured the feeling I used to have in the backyard of a Carlton share house – when hearing a screen door slam and the smell of jasmine made me melancholy for something I hadn’t yet lost.

One weekend MT emailed that he’d been dreaming about numbers all night: “Woke up, went back to sleep, numbers again, shares and square roots and formulae for distance of the visible horizon and scab healing. I got up to walk the dog. My Saturday needs to improve, but she just told me to hang the washing out.”

In his “first fan mail – age 56, a man”, Jason told me about his affair (“my deepest shame that I don’t regret”) and how he cried at something I wrote about my daughter.

“Am I your target demographic?” he asked. “You allow me to feel better about being me, a complex fella, a romantic at heart, bursting proud father of four, advocate for women, respectful in discourse, but still a man hopelessly aware of any potential untethered boob in a room.”

When our old warrior dog Maggie died in 2024 and I was convinced she was communicating with me from beyond the grave through commercial radio, Melbourne doctor Chris Hazzard emailed about spirituality meeting science: “There is no question in my mind that when our mortal body dies, it continues on in another state.”

Veronica, reader Chris’ wife of nearly 60 years, had died a couple of months earlier. A renowned firecracker, she took her last breath as Moomba fireworks on the Yarra went off. Now she comes to Chris, he says, in the form of dramatic rainstorms.

Chris, 84, and I are now regular pen pals. His stories are better than mine – hitchhiking to the Snowy Mountains with no money, being “cut off” by his parents when he took up with Veronica in 1965.

Last month he made me lunch at his 1800s place in Richmond, where he dug up a 1913 halfpenny in the garden. My grandfather Jack Halfpenny was born in 1913. Chris gave it to me.

We had bruschetta. There were bowls of dates and cherries on the table. I felt as lucky as I ever have.

Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media and the author of Boogie Wonderland (Affirm Press).

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