Buddy story · The original
The first pairing, from the original Thursday call
The oldest continuous pairing on the site, and the one the whole scheme was designed around after the fact.
- Paired
- June 2024
- Cadence
- Sundays
- Status
- ongoing
They were not paired by anybody. They were two of the people on the early Thursday calls and started writing to each other between them because a fortnight was too long a gap. The scheme was designed afterwards by watching what they had already invented.
Almost everything the scheme now does came from them: the fixed evening, the short format, the ending note, the pause option that came later, and the rule that a buddy is not a substitute for a clinician and will not be asked to behave like one.
Ottoline is dry about the whole thing. She points out that they also invented several practices that turned out to be terrible, including a period of sending each other detailed weekly reports, which lasted five weeks and which she describes as homework nobody had set.
Two years and change of Sundays. We invented the format because a fortnight between calls was too long, and then somebody wrote it down.
We also invented weekly written reports, which was homework nobody had set, and we abandoned it after five weeks. That part is not in the guidance.