No woman is an island

Posted by Katy Regan at 10:52 on 26 Feb 2010

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So, it seems I am appalling at this solitary confinement thing. Last night, after 36 hours (pathetic, I know)  of not speaking to anybody I know besides mums at Fergus's school, I cracked. Fergus was at Egg's so I guess I could have gone there, but sometimes Egg and I wind each other up and sometimes, you just want to be out-out, you know, not in someone's house-out.

 I had to go to the local pub anyway (no, really I did) because I realised, two weeks after leaving it there, that I had left my debit card behind the bar. Turned out it was so long, that by the time I went to collect it, I had forgotten my pin number. Nice.

Anyway, I figured after staring at my four walls for 36 hours it would be rude not to have a cheeky pint whilst I was there, you know, picking up my bank card. So, I texted Matt Black, but he was working so he couldn't come out, so I decided just to go to the pub alone.

It's a cosy, canal-side, ancient little pub; the sort of pub it's ok to go and have a pint in alone. Not that I am discerning about that sort of thing, let's face it, I'll drink alone in any old boozer.  However, aside from the fact that all the old, leather-faced men at the bar taking snuff laughed at me for forgetting my pin, it was also embarrassing, because as I took myself off with my pint, I bumped into two women I know.

I was so delighted to see familiar faces, that I probably looked a bit deranged with happiness and far too much make-up on for collecting a debit card (don't get out much these days).

"Hi!" I said, thinking cool, maybe I can just join them. "What you up to?"
"We're at a school committee meeting"
Oh. Even I wasn't that desperate to crash a school committee meeting. Yet.
"Who are you out with?" They said
"Er...myself."

Then I took myself off with a newspaper mumbling something about meeting other people later. Lies, all lies! I had been caught out as a woman-drinking-alone.

So anyway, then I wandered down to the other pub thinking, there's bound to be some mates down there, somebody I can have a drink with. No. Nobody. In fact that's a lie, there was somebody I know, but after asking me who I was there with and after I answered, "Er...myself" he said, "Looks like it's time to go home and get a takeaway then?"

Oh dear. Clearly even too sad to join him and his mates.

By this time, I was a pint and a half down and really in the mood for some company.
I composed a text to someone I know who lives nearby to see if she fancied a glass of wine but then thought better of it when I realised it was 9pm. I mean, you can't just rock up on someone's doorstep at 9pm, can you? Citing thirty-six hours of solitary confinement as your excuse. That's just lame.  So then I texted MB to ask him to send me one of our friend's numbers, but then I thought better of that too, since it was now 9.45pm and if she was going out, she'd be out. There's really only one pub everyone goes in where I live.

Never mind, I thought and after reading another newspaper, I went home and went to bed. Then, the strangest thing happened. I woke up about 3am experiencing what I can only describe as the physical sensation of loneliness.  A kind of spatial thing, it was bizarre. I suddenly felt, like actually physically felt, like I was a tiny being on my bed, in this gigantic room.  It caught me in one of those middle-of-the-night irrational panics, so real, that I actually considered calling Egg to see if I could go and stay at his with him and Fergus. Egg said, when I told him in the cold light of day about my experience, that I am ridiculously in touch with my child side and that is the sort of dream a four-year old has.

Anyway, then I got over it, went back to sleep and woke up at 6am with an urge to write this. And I've been thinking ever since, about this loneliness thing. Thinking that there's something strangely reassuring about it.


I have only ever felt really lonely once before in my life and that was different, there was definitely nothing reassuring about that: I was twenty-one and a sheltered twenty-one at that, and had just arrived in France to work as a teaching assistant in a high-school as part of my degree. I was staying in a God-awful boarding school that looked like some sort of German bunker. I had a tiny room with an iron bed and a scratchy, grey blanket (this is no exaggeration). For the first three weeks I so lonely, that when I tried to eat, I couldn't swallow for the enormous ache in my throat. Tears would just stream down my face without warning. I would go to bed under my itchy, scratchy blanket, silence save for the gurgle of the boiling industrial radiators and yearn for daylight where I would go to lessons and teach little eleven-year old French squirts -  but at least I would have human company.

So this is nothing like that, this is just feeling a bit lonesome and there's something kind of nice about it, something which ironically makes me feel connected.  I want people, I need people, I like people. I do not have autism. I am normal, I am alive. I am a fully-functioning human being.

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