Dolly no mates - making friends in a new city

One of the things that worried me about leaving London was that I'd have to start being nice, friendly and approachable to strangers. Nobody wants to make new friends at forty. All that effort! I'd rather go back to school. Luckily for me I had the advantage of a ready-made network of pals in Brighton, including my best friend of 20 years, so I didn't come across as too desperate to join the in-crowd, however, saying that I did want to make new friends, if only to exert my new Brighton smugness with people who understood.

While there are plenty of places to meet people in Brighton (the Waltzer being a favourite hangout of mine), the benefit of having primary school-aged kids is that you are forced into a social scene every day and there's no room for grumpy new mums in our school playground.
Thankfully, in the twins class (year 1) all the parents were immediately lovely, despite yet another DFL coming to town. Perhaps it was the novelty of having rowdy twins come into the class, but they made friends quickly, which meant I did too. It took less than a week to be invited on our first playdate and little more than two to be invited on the first mums pub crawl. All in all a good start.

The thing is with Brighton *smug klaxon* is that everyone is friendly. People feel very lucky to live in such as special place (sorry, I know how pukey that sounds) and that rubs off on everyone. There are fewer reasons to be miserable here and that makes the world of difference to a town's residents. Brighton is a really friendly place and I promise you, you will have no problem in finding like-minded folk to take to the pub. Me for instance, see you on the pier!