but at the first sound of "God bless you, merry gentlemen, may nothing you dismay," Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.

But at the first sound of "God bless you, merry gentlemen, may nothing you dismay," Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.

One of the reasons why we tend not to make friends as often as we might comes down to a powerful background idea whose full destructive force we may not even be aware of, the belief that any decent person already has all the friends they need. Somewhere in our minds, the notion has been lodged that only very sad and inept people would, at this stage in their lives, still have a space in their social agenda for a new entrant. Almost everyone else – anyone worth knowing, talented, interesting or good – would long ago have acquired the gang to which they are now continually and irredeemably wedded. What this punishing idea misses is the extent to which a feeling of loneliness and disenchantment is in reality an ongoing and universal possibility, in no way limited to those of reduced appeal. Right now, the enchanting actor is, despite the crowds, perhaps lonely, as is the fated concert pianist, the renowned biologist, the skilled airline pilot, the miraculous neurosurgeon and that rather nice-looking person you've just spotted in the corner of the room, laughing animatedly with a group of fashionable companions. It's open to anyone of sensitivity and charm to fail to find the right sort of allies, to have outgrown their friends from school or university, to not have landed on congenial spirits at work or in the sports centre and therefore to be spending a lot of their evenings on their own. And we can know this for certain of other people because we know it, first and foremost, from a very reliable source – ourselves. We need to battle the modest part of our minds that reads our isolation as a selective punishment and vanquish it with a crucial bit of evidence available directly from our own experience. Other people who know us at a social level almost certainly find it hard to imagine the degree to which we are exposed to loneliness and how much we would still like to locate a wise, tender, funny and interesting new friend. We have built a predominantly cold and guarded society by imagining a thesis which we implicitly know to be untrue on the basis of our experience. The next time we spot an interesting person, we should stop contravening the moral of our own lives. We don't have exactly the right people in our social circle and nor, most probably, do they. So we can afford to shed our false background ideas of social life and go up and say hello.

and which betrayed in her a superficiality of character, inherited probably from her mother, hardly congenial to an English mind: still, she had her merits,

Paul never needed any coaxing to tell his thoughts, at least to congenial souls.

They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds;

and a few minutes later I heard the slam of the hall door, which told me that he was off once more upon his congenial hunt.

The strong tide, so swift, so deep and certain, was like a congenial friend in the morning stillness.

probably from her mother, hardly congenial to an English mind. Still she had her merits;

Staff now worried that they'd lose their jobs and health insurance if Ristretto were forced to close; that I—a person with whom they'd heretofore had a perfectly congenial relationship—might, in fact, be a secret monster, a rape culture apologist.