Don’t pity me as an only child. It’s a gift to enjoy being alone

It’s Christmas 2017, and I’m laying the table. Teaspoon for the bread sauce. Coaster for the gravy jug. Three sets of cutlery. And lo, four placemats – not for our plates, but for the different meats on offer.

That’s right: last Christmas, we ate more varieties of meat – turkey, ham, goose and beef – than we had people at the table. Not because we’re a greedy family, but because two parents, plus one child, only adds up to three.

Such is the life of an only child. Well, this one, at least. I was reminded of this Christmas feast reading that the actress Elizabeth Hurley wishes that she had had a second child. Her son, Damian Hurley, 16, whom she had with businessman Stephen Bing, is an only child. “What would have made more difference in my life is if I’d had more than one child,” she told Grazia.

As one of three – Hurley has “a big sister and a little brother to squabble with and to love” – she would say that, wouldn’t she? Only an “only” can know the joy of being sibling-free.

I have long relished my only-child status. Though my parents divorced, and my father was often posted abroad, I had an idyllic childhood climbing trees, riding ponies and sailing. I read more books than Matilda, encouraged to make friends in literature by housemistresses and bookworm parents. My mum was my mother, father, sister, and brother in one – and my best friend.

There were no sibling squabbles on the way to the beach: we sang times tables instead, and listened to Anne of Green Gables tapes. When we got kittens, the pair of us sat on the kitchen floor, coaxing these shy creatures onto our tunacovered knees.

We were, for a long time, necessarily inseparable: wherever she went, I went too. Testament to this is my long-held nickname, “Bear” – after five-year-old Eleanor who clung, koala bear-like, to her mother even as she tried to walk around the house.

Mum tells me that, like Hurley, she would have loved for me to have had siblings. I’m glad that didn’t happen – how she would have had the energy to have such an intense relationship with more than one of me, I can’t imagine. I often think that, when I get married, I’ll have just one child of my own, so happy was my experience.

Plus, now I’m an adult, I regard my only-child status as central to my identity. In a world where everyone seems to be part of some “ism” or other, I see myself as a left-handed only child without a middle name. It is those things in tandem that still seem most remarkable.

It’s true that people make assumptions about only children. We are spoilt, like Roald Dahl’s Veruca Salt. We are unable to share. I plead guilty to that last charge: when I went to university, I wrote my name on my pans in permanent marker.

But growing up, I was the envy of my friends who came from big, boisterous families. It is only now that the envy is returned – when at Christmas, their tables are laid for 20, while ours is only ever laid for three.

I am also told that I must have had a lonely childhood, but I resent the idea that spending time on your own could ever be considered lonely. Enjoying your own company is a skill that so many people never develop – and it’s the first one I learnt.

I don’t baulk at a free weekend; I don’t feel the “fear of missing out”. I’m happy in my own skin, I don’t need someone to play with. And that, truly, is the greatest gift my parents could ever have given me.