I blame my parents for my early hatred of solitude. With two working parents, I was an unusual kid in the early seventies; if I was ill there was little prospect of either of them being at home to look after me. Aged five, I was left alone with a stinking cold and strict instructions not to answer the door to anyone. The silence deafened me. It seemed to come out of the walls at me. I hid in my bed with my transistor radio turned up loud.

Solitude. It's a beautiful word-it's a beautiful idea-but to a five year old it was very frightening and as soon as somebody knocked on the front door I ran downstairs and answered it, relieved to get away from my own company. On the doorstep was a terrifying man on a motorbike delivering the first of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that Mum and Dad were buying in installments.

"Is your mum or dad in?" he said through his visor. I shook my head. "Well you can read this while you wait for ‘em."

I was rarely ill after that and continued to have an intense fondness for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. After all, it had saved me from solitude.

Into my twenties, I needed constant company. If a night in alone was on the cards, I would go out of my way to avoid it: go to a friend's, have a friend over, stay out all night. I found being on my own for any length of time oppressive and depressing, especially in the evening. It made me nervous. I felt wild and unanchored. I needed another person's presence to calm me down.

It changed, inexplicably, when I turned thirty. I began to dread the sound of my flatmate's key in the front door. It irritated me to see her stuff in the bathroom. More and more often I found myself hiding from people in my bedroom. At last, I took a job that was hateful but paid well, gave my flatmate notice, and lived alone. I revelled in my solitude. I stared at the wall. I wrote stories. I loved that when I shut my front door in the morning the next person who opened it would be me.

Of course, when you have a family, solitude becomes this elusive, half-forgotten desirable moment that you once had long long ago and that you dream about recapturing. Time and space is filled with ‘us' and ‘together.' Solitude has to be timetabled. It becomes a window that you set up: an hour in a coffee shop with a good book, fifteen minutes in the shower, five minutes crouching on the toilet with a chair against the door. In the midst of a crowd scene you find ways of being alone.

Other pieces from this series:
The perks of waking up alone.
Finding a place of my own, aged 37.
When I moved to London, I lost my only skill: mastery of the language.