When you are single at a dinner party it’s not easy. Everyone else is there in a couple and you aren’t. They whisper secret confidences into each other’s ears and you sit there with a smile on your face, deprived of the private persona. But as the years go by you find other people emerging as singles too. Divorces; break-ups; abandonments; whatever. And, of course, you are a professional single, your steely competences in the field honed over long years of experience. How to insinuate into the conversation of a couple; how to offer the enthralling alternative option; how to just walk off into the night, free, the charisma of the singleton intact. Those newcomer singles do not have the skills. I mean, you don’t learn the dark arts of the single overnight. In a play you might write about the subject, all the couples would disappear one by one over the five acts of the drama, and in the last act everyone would be single. Except the initial singleton who would turn up (coup de theatre!) with a partner. The wheel has turned full circle. From then the cycle might begin again.

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