I just love being alone, but that doesn’t make me lonely

Britons are increasingly going it alone, whether they are alone or not. The Association of British Travel Agents has released figures demonstrating that solo travel is all the rage – and not merely as a result of wanderers having no one to wander with.

The number of Britons travelling on their tod is up by almost a third since 2011, fuelled not only by the rising number of single people, but by those who see lone travel as a means of ensuring that they can do what they want. And this despite the extra £2,049 per year it costs with the dreaded single supplement. Still, what price freedom?

TV dinners are staging a return, too – up by a third in just four years, with 2 billion sold in 2017 – given that 45 per cent of meals are now consumed in private. Meanwhile, the online restaurant reservation service Booktable estimates that reservations for single slots have risen by 38 per cent since 2014.

At fashionable grazing spots such as Lorne, in London’s Victoria, a quarter of places are designated for solitary diners. After all, what could be more glorious than consuming one’s agnolotti while reading, or gazing into space?

Despite the national panic about social isolation, loneliness is very different to loneness; a quality that modern culture dispenses with at its peril. Our constantly tech-, work- and people-connected lives spur us into a collective claustrophobia, without space to do nothing and breathe. Small wonder that the activities we tend to fetishise – running, baths, sleep – are pursuits we do on our own.

I have lived on my own for the best part of 20 years, and find it the ultimate indulgence. Having charge of one’s own space makes one fearless, resilient, cowed by nothing, as well as sane and social when one does emerge.

I find people who have never lived alone terrified by life: frightened by every bump in the road as they are every bump in the night. A single-parent colleague is so terrified by the prospect of an empty nest that she is securing a lodger – “Not for the money, but just in case…”

Maybe it’s being the oldest of five, but I’ve never come across a door I didn’t want to shut. An introvert who attended theatre school, I can “pass” for the opposite extreme.

However, without time on my tod to defuse, I rapidly spiral into nutterishness. In the manner of a less glamorous Garbo, “I vant to be alone,” both crave it and fundamentally require it.

A friend, a mother of four, has imposed a house rule whereby all her offspring have to go to bed once supper is finished. They don’t actually take to their beds. They can do whatever they want, so long as everyone goes off and cultivates some “me time”. The result: they all get along beautifully, unlike my own forever-ontop-of-each-other brood, which continues to descend into internecine warfare.

At the age of 47, I am finally about to cohabit with my partner. We will be maintaining separate living rooms; a fact that people seem more shocked by than if we were having different bedrooms. To us it feels self-evident: allowing for that coveted shut-door.

Being selfed isn’t selfish, quite the reverse. Without a functional relationship with yourself, you’ll never have a functional relationship with other people.