There is now a growing set of diary-based studies that have attempted to record the personal contacts of a large number of individuals; of these, POLYMOD is currently the most comprehensive [17] . While such egocentric data obviously provides extensive information on individual behaviour, due to the anonymity of such surveys it is not clear how the alters should be connected together. The configuration method of randomly connecting half-links provides one potential solution, but what is ideally required is a more comprehensive method that would allow clustering, spatially localised connections and assortativity between degree distributions to be included and specified.