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ways I found to mask my addiction. I remember those Sunday mornings when I would grab the car-keys at around 10.13am, saying, ‘Just popping down to Croydon for the Sunday papers, dear. I shouldn’t be more than, oooh, let’s say an hour.’ And I would dash off and sit in the car with dark glasses on, agog to the omnibus edition on the car radio. I don’t suppose the boyfriend ever suspected anything – although he did say: ‘Why are you taking a flask of cocoa?’ and ‘What’s wrong with buying them from the man on the corner?’
    I expect the
Archers
euphoria stage was something Wittgenstein went through, too – and Edward Gibbon, I shouldn’t wonder. The other novelties certainly wore off, in time. The tidying of newspapers, for example, started to look like a mug’s game, so I ditched it. I expect I can call in a specialist with a fork-lift truck when I can’t kick a path to the window any more.
    For a while, too, I made a point of playing records with significant words – ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair’; also ‘I’m Still Standing’ by Elton John – and lectured friends on the potency of cheap music.
    But now the flat is sometimes eerily quiet, and I rattle aroundin it, like a lone Malteser in a shoebox. It is an odd thing, this single life. And Gloria Steinem’s famous feminist axiom – that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle – has been of strangely little comfort. I agree with the sentiment, but I wish she had chosen a different image. Unfortunately I find it very easy to imagine a sardine on a mountain-bike joyfully bowling along country lanes; or a tuna in a yellow jersey winning the Tour de France on the happiest day of its life.

    One of the consolations of getting older is that one day you look in your address book and find you have acquired a list of specialists (hairdresser, mechanic, hypnotherapist, carpet-layer) whom you can mention in conversation and pass on to your friends. ‘Try my Ear, Nose and Throat man,’ you say, offhandedly. Or, ‘My acupuncturist knows an aromatherapist who recommends a plumber who could really help you with that!’ Gosh, it makes you feel sophisticated. And at the same time, of course, it helps you fill the rather big address book (with pussy-cats on) that somebody gave you for Christmas.
    I now have a builder, a carpenter, a gas man, and a painter and decorator. Most exciting of all, however, is the handsome ‘24-hour emergency gardener’, whose services I unfortunately rarely need. I sometimes think of him in the small hours, though, and picture him trouble-shooting in a dark garden somewhere, lashing daffs to splints in a high wind, looking Lawrentian. Should I call up with a bogus middle-of-the-night problem? ‘Thank God you’re there!’ I might say, feigning a verge-of-tears voice. ‘It’s – er, a 24-hour emergency! And here I am, clothed only in these – er, diaphanous jim-jams, unequal to the struggle with the elements!’
    The only glaring hole in my list of blokes is under ‘window cleaner’, because the local chap simply refuses to clean mywindows, on the grounds (I think) that I didn’t register with him in 1948. ‘Excuse me,’ I say periodically, pretending that the idea is quite a new one, and that we have never had the conversation before. ‘You wouldn’t do
my
windows, would you?’ He looks down at me from his position on the ladder, and just says ‘No’, but he packs the word with an impressive degree of hostility and affront. My question seems to offend him; I don’t know why. I mean, he is a window cleaner.
    I mention all this because it is a great advantage of the single life to be able to say ‘There is something wrong with the heating; I think I’ll get a man in,’ without having to negotiate with the boyfriend first. Boyfriends, I find, tend to reply ‘No, let me take a look, I’m sure it’s straightforward,’ and end up emptying the S-bend on to their shoes at three