There are 8million of us – and we’ll tidy up when we’re good and ready

IN the world I grew up in, only strange or sad people lived on their own. You avoided kicking your football into their gardens because eccentricities brought on by their excessive alone time could mean the end of your game.

You wanted your football to go astray in the gardens of ‘normal’ young couples with washing on the line and toys on the grass or, failing that, of twinkle-eyed husbands and wives who told you you reminded them of their grandchildren.

You dreaded solo householders – often with good reason. I remember one muttering grump emerging from his back door with a screwdriver when he heard our ball bounce on his precious patio. As we peered in horror over his garden wall he performed the coup de grace. There was no bounce when the ball landed back on our side of the wall.

Well, if football in suburban streets is still a thing, there is sobering news for kids who can’t kick straight. A record eight million Britons now live alone, accounting for almost a third of all households.

According to figures from the Office for National Statistics, single occupancy homes for the first time outnumber those shared by couples living without children. That sounds like mucho alone time.

Rarity

Those young owner-occupier mums and dads from the world I grew up in seem like a rarity now. Twentysomethings today are more likely to be spending half their salaries on rent for one bedroom flats for one. Marriage, even cohabitation, may be years down the line for them – longer if they have fixed ideas about the box sets they enjoy or singular views on décor.

Those kindly empty-nesters of a certain age who told you to come in and get your ball any time so long as you minded the roses?

Today a sizeable number would be ‘silver splitters’ – middle aged, middle-income solo householders who lit out on their own when 25 years of marriage appeared to threaten 25 more of stagnant routine.

Then are those like me: children who once wondered at the strangeness and sadness of neighbours with no one to share their home... now all grown up and finding it quite normal and copacetic to be sharing their living space with no one.

Indeed, on performing a quick audit of my accommodation since leaving full-time education I find I have lived alone for roughly two-thirds of the time and feel no stranger, sadder – or even more isolated – than the next person.

Quite the reverse. There are times when cohabitation seems a much more odd antidote to the stresses and strains of the working day than coming home, cracking open a beer, putting on music and mouthing silent appreciation for being the only one in a room.

My home lifestyle works. I know where everything is because I put it there and I know there is plenty milk in the fridge because I am the one drinking it.

I don’t feel guilty if the place is a mess because I am the sole occupant and I will tidy when I have time – without feeling that my timescale is impacting unjustly on a cohabitee’s quality of life.

Storage space? That’s all for me – as are decisions about what is stored where, for how long, whether it is fit only for the bin and if there really are things living in it.

I rather enjoy spreading my goods and chattels into the guest bedroom too, stopping regularly to remember as I do how lucky I am to have the whole place to myself. In years gone by entire families would have squeezed into the one-bedroom tenement flats young singletons now consider pokey. So, as a recent upsizer, I am fully cognisant of my good fortune.

Romantic

I am aware, too, that living alone is one of the things in life I am really rather good at. I know dozens of others who show similar aptitude for the thing which, as children, we would scarcely have dreamed could happen to us.

We understand that to live contentedly in our own space is neither to eschew relationships – romantic or otherwise – nor to exhibit Garbo-esque cravings for solitude.

Many couples thrive on separate living arrangements these days and feel the one sure-fire recipe for tearing things apart is moving in together.

But I am cognisant, too, of the small voice in my head which tells me that, for all my natural and acquired gifts in the art of living alone, this nonsense must some day come to an end.

You will cohabit again, it tells me, before the sound of kids playing in the street becomes even a tiny bit irksome, before you get anywhere near shaking a fist from behind a window and telling the person on the other side collecting their football how old you are.

Yes, you will settle down for good before it comes to that and feel grateful for the presence of another prepared to share a home with you in spite of all she will by then have learned about you.

Twinges of anticipation for this day are already being felt: slippers which are not mine left by the bed; smells which I do not wear on a shelf in the bathroom.

Well, I suppose she can keep them there if she wants to. Actually, I hope she does.