These last six months I have had the new sensation of loneliness.

I think a lot of it is masked by the fact I actually like being alone, and have always had a high capacity for enjoying being alone, and in fact need a lot of alone time. Being an only child may have something to do with it — you don’t automatically belong to a pack — all your close connections are external to the family and voluntarily entered into — they are the ones you choose to forge with others who have come to matter to you. And I always enjoy company but have never needed it badly — have often needed to recover from company in fact — if I’ve been out with friends for a night, I need to be able to have another night in curled up in bed with comfort books and tea and the radio.

I remember being happiest in that gap year of 2003-4, between college and grad school. It was a joy to have weekday afternoons free when everyone else was at work. To get up each day and say: now I shall go, and to go. I would simply walk around the city, exploring: go to the library and take out all sorts of translated literatures, visit art galleries, watch performances, go to the cinema, read and write at cafes. To have had to account to someone where I was would have been shackling, to have had to wait for others to do something I wanted to — I had no patience for that anymore. (The first time you go to the cinema or the symphony alone you felt a little awkward, almost embarrassed, but you found there were instant pleasures: you don’t become distracted by your companion, you are focussed only on the performance, and you needn’t wait: you saw something that interest you, you bought yourself a ticket, you went; or perhaps you waited till last minute, and you got a ticket, or perhaps you didn’t didn’t, but that was all right too: what mattered was maximum flexiblity, to do what was right for you that particular day, not to be tied down by a standing arrangement — and it was good.

That year, I got a lot read, and a lot written (some of it quite good), saw so many new works of theatre and dance and art, talked to people, found new cafes, walked and walked and walked, and I was learning all the time, wherever I was. That was the time I really loved my solitude - it was freedom and it was independence as well - I felt self-sufficient and never lonely, never unhappy. And with so much alone time, when I saw friends, I met them gladly, with great pleasure, but without neediness.

The trouble is that I think I’ve started in the last year or so to feel acutely lonely. I can’t say why this is — it’s not for want of people who care, whose company I have pleasure in: I’ve kept and still see all the same friends from the old set, and made new ones besides. I stil have my parents, who are affectionate and tolerant and who never make a fuss about the wrong sorts of things, and I love them. Now that I’m in school again I’ve had more mandatory preoccupations and claims on my time and much to be doing and going on with. And I still value my solitude, and the need to leave my day open — to the point that Julian occasionally complains about my being unreasonably mercurial. But for a while now there’s been a streak of corrosive loneliness in my heart — that has gone undetected until I’ve suddenly became aware of the grooves it has left. And it is not easy once you can feel where your heart has been eaten away.