When Anne was matched with Katie for Dining Across the Divide in 2021, they sounded quite far apart on immigration. They met in Argyll and Katie arrived “with the saltire on her mask”. Anne remembers “expecting to meet a Tory Brexiter. Not someone as lovely as Katie. I’m delighted.”
Katie said back then: “Anne and I were like soul sisters.” And now – a few days after a walk they had near Anne’s home in Dunoon – she amends that. “It’s like discovering a long-lost sister; not even a sister, a twin. There are very few things we disagree on. I can’t think of any other friend I have who’s so in tune. It’s kind of odd, meeting somebody in the way we did and finding we’re so perfectly matched.”
You could call their hike a Dining reunion, except it’s not, really, because they see each other all the time. “Fairly quickly after we met, we were phoning each other, meeting for coffee, going for walks. She and her husband came to a party I was having,” Katie says. Anne drives a beat-up old Fiat Panda and loves going in Katie’s Tesla. “Katie’s doing a massive project with her husband, building a house from scratch, with vegetable plots, bees, so much attention to detail and care: I’m taking such vicarious pleasure from it.”
Katie spent her working life as a dentist and didn’t have much time to socialise. “Friendships suffered a bit,” she says. “People didn’t tolerate being delayed and cancelled. It has been quite hard, re-establishing friendships, but it’s taught me a lot. As you get older, and more open-minded, you discover lots of very unlikely people will make very good friends. But I wouldn’t class Anne as that. We are very, very alike.”
“We’ve always cared about the bigger picture, both of us,” Anne says. “Biodiversity, the future of the planet – we care about life, for other people, animals, and from that caring, we agree. We also gossip about anything and everything.” Katie thinks Anne has been more successful in her career and has lived a more varied life (ultimately working as a psychotherapist). “I don’t think that’s true,” Anne says, laughing. “I think we’ve both lived – when I say good lives, I don’t mean without trauma and anguish, that’s impossible, but good, nonetheless.”
“I certainly didn’t expect to come out with a lasting friendship,” Katie says. “I hope she’d say the same.”
“I more than like her,” Anne says. “I think I love her. But don’t put that - I wouldn’t want to embarrass her.”
