We all have a common invisible enemy in the world we are fighting right now, its important that we keep in touch with our friends.

I came across this quote from perhaps the greatest philosopher of all time Aristotle while reading this morning.

Normally over the last few weeks on a Friday I’ve written about trying to do something different at the weekend and it got my back to thinking about the power of friendship, especially when right now there is not much if any opportunity for any face to face good old fashioned physical social interaction.

Last week I got together with a group of friends online, to check in with each other and have some fun, after a few of us had a bad week, it was a chance to catch up and also just try something different from the usual messaging.

At the end of the day it had several benefits for us all, in terms of improving mood, helping us to feel normal again and for those of us who had not enjoyed the last week, it provided us with a fresh audience to have a good moan at, and generally get a lot of frustrations vented.

Last week must have full of family fun for some of the guys, I can tell you…

Anyway, the power of friendships at this time, is more important than ever. In this regard technology can help us massively. We can still catch up via video group calls, it’s good fun, something different and gets us halfway there to the social interaction we all enjoy and need as human beings.

I was actually just talking about this with my partner, and we both agreed its that physical social interaction with people that we miss.

Anyway back to the idea to connect with each other last Friday, the challenge was to try and have a party, or a night at the bar online.

Catching up on video calls brings the challenge of who can bring the most interesting beer to the party for example. Especially for those of us who aren’t allowed to leave the house where we are right now.

As the week went on the challenge of connecting and making it fun and a trip down memory lane for us became a real challenge.

Some of the fun was searching around and dragging the stuff out the back of the cupboard that’s not seen the light if day in years or making our own. It gave us a creative challenge for the week and something to look forward to on Friday.

Music streaming is also our friend, we can create a playlist to suit us and share it, knowing people across the UK, Europe, Scandinavia and Central Asia were listening to the same music at the same time was honestly pretty cool.

A diverse mix of heavy metal and dance music is what most us listened to back in the day, getting creative with this challenge was and is great fun. It’s also surprising to discover some stuff you hadn’t listening to for years and equally to discover to your horror that some of the stuff you listened to endlessly back in the day is actually truly awful…

This reappraisal of our social lives and having to move online has also reconnected a bunch of us who have not been in touch for years having spread out to the 4 corners of the world many years ago.

I cant begin to tell you how much fun the week was, the challenge of the music to bring, the challenge of digging around for drinks in the cupboard. We also told each other exactly what was happening in our lives, stuff you probably wouldn’t on messaging, but would have face to face.

One of our friends was potentially facing redundancy from his job on the Monday, he might have told us that on text but not how he was feeling. He got the advantage of telling his best mates what was going down, and we all got to give him feedback and then check in on Monday and see how it went.

All was good in the end thankfully.

What that one experiment has done, is have us all in communication as a group this week, getting more social interaction and its been positive for us all. We don’t need to have a drink, we can have a coffee and a catch up, lunch, whatever your thing maybe, and we are sharing music and video back and forth in the group, its not normal, but its the new normal and its fun with friends and that’s ok.

This week the Friday night fun is a check in and a chance to discuss some ideas we have, some of us in writing, some art, some business, whatever we are into.

Next week is going to be a quiz based on our myspace pages from back in the day, which should be interesting….

Anyway the point is as Aristotle said, the antidote for 50 enemies is one friend.

Reconnect with some of yours through the power of technology if you can, embrace the new normal and with your friends get together to defeat the commons enemies of the virus and the monotony of quarantine, because together we are stronger and together we are the antidote.