ANY excuse, right?

I was out for a Sunday afternoon jog and I was not having a nice time. This is not unusual. My aching quadriceps and I were struggling round the pond in Queen's Park when we spotted some cygnets.

Oohing and aahing over floating fluffy balls is much more entertaining than moving slowly in a running motion, so my quadriceps stopped and I stopped with them.

On a bench just next to where I'd ground to a halt was a woman also gazing swan-ward. I commented on the cygnets. She gave me some top level bird-related intel - her dad used to take she and her sister twitching - and before long I was also sitting on the bench sharing a packet of Hobnobs.

I've since seen Dora on the same bench several times and will also sit for a while with a biscuit. We're on hugging terms now.

It's one of the things I absolutely love about the community I live in. I know that I can go for a walk along Victoria Road, the main shopping thoroughfare, and I will see a slew of familiar faces.

Occasionally I'll go for a walk and find myself with an impromptu walking companion. I can go out for a pint of milk and find myself somehow having coffee and a natter in a local cafe or, if it's evening, in a local bar sharing some small plates and a G&T.

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So it was interesting that one of the main comments last week, in response to the most recent "happiness index", which details the happiest and unhappiest places to live", was that rural locations are preferable to city living as there's more of a sense of community.

Those living in the Highlands and Islands spoke of being able to drive along and wave at everyone they passed, knowing their name or, at least, their face.

They spoke of being able to turn to neighbours for support and being able to turn their children out to play in the street, safely assuming dozens of pairs of eyes would be on them, able to return them to their parents should anything go awry.

Families said they had moved somewhere remote, leaving behind the city, in order to live with this sense of community. But I dispute there's no sense of community in the city.

It's easier to become anonymous and it's easier to be left out when proximity isn't forcing interactions, yes, but even in built up areas you can know your neighbours. There are likely to be many more community initiatives to take part in, and those are likely to be easily accessible. Community Facebook pages are brilliant for bringing people together for litter picks or helping dog sit or skills swapping.

Loneliness has been described as a modern health crisis - an epidemic, even. It's said to be as damaging to longevity and smoking and increases risks of cancer and a weakened immune system.

In Chicago scientists are working on a pill for loneliness. A clinical trial, overseen by psychologist Stephanie Cacioppo, gave 96 lonely people oral doses of pregnenolone, a hormone primarily produced by the adrenal gland.

The hormone is associated with stress reduction and the idea is that regulating the levels of stress a person is experiencing could control the fear that makes lonely folk withdraw from company.

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They would still feel lonely - a necessary sensation, like hunger telling us we need to eat - but feel more confident in their interactions with other people.

I understand the notion of loneliness in a crowd. How much worse must lonely people feel in a city when all around them seems to be intimate, friendly connections. Is medical intervention, when loneliness is labelled a health crisis, really necessary?

There's an advertising campaign doing the rounds on Facebook at the moment urging people to make small connections every day. A comedian is sent out to sit on a bench in a shopping mall and see who chats to him and who chats back to his opening gambits.

It's a mixed bag in response. But why? There's a real suspicion from some people when folk they don't know try to make small talk. Other people love it.

We're not encouraged to chinwag. In other advertising news, I spotted a poster on the Glasgow Subway the other day, promoting a hairdresser's new app for booking appointments. The thrust of the ad is scorning the old fashioned notion of calling up for an appointment.

I find this really sad. Ditto self-service checkouts. We're using technology to sever little daily human interactions. I like saying hello to the checkout assistant - even if it takes a little bit longer. I like phoning up for appointments and talking to a human being.

There are many different initiatives set up, such as Chatty Cafe, to encourage people to break bread with strangers. Some people's hell is a stranger chatting to them at the bus stop; other people need to be in the mood. However, developing a pill for loneliness seems a brutal indictment of where we've come as a society, medicalising what we should be destigmatising.

There's nothing wrong with being lonely and nothing wrong with the desire to talk.