Whether it’s about football transfers, relationship scandals or Westminster feuds, gossip is a glorious tool of social bonding
Gossip has a poor reputation (have you heard?). But I am going to argue in favour of this pastime, first coined by – who else? – Shakespeare.
Yet another victim of the social quicksand of the pandemic, which has dissolved the kind of commonplace interactions we now realise we took for granted, harmless gossip is a glorious tool of bonding. It’s not only me who thinks this. Prof Robin Dunbar, whom I trust implicitly not only because he heads up a fancily named department at Oxford, but because he is a fellow Liverpudlian, is of the same opinion.