It's a peculiar thing, loneliness, and there is a lot of it about, smack dab in the middle of boomtime city life. So many young people get jobs straight after school or college and quicker than you can say "curfew" they move out of the family home. I'm all for this kind of independence, as it often means that people start to like their parents as well as love them, and to learn that socks and shirts are not self-cleaning. But it would be naive to suppose that everybody moves into a Friends-type scenario where flat life means a constant stream of people popping into your large duplex to borrow your cappucino machine.
Instead there are a lot of people sitting in tiny bedrooms in Rabbit Hutch Heights, which they have had to sell a maiden aunt or two to buy, calculating the likelihood of talking to somebody other then the pizza delivery man before Monday. And what's disturbing about loneliness is that it's still a taboo subject.
In Martin Amis's novel, Money, he writes of the "smell of batch", that pervasive air of unkempt dishevelment that hangs over bachelors of a certain age and temperament. Loneliness often seems to give off the same kind of aroma - or at least, when you're feeling lonely, you're firmly convinced that an air of solitude, despair and failure hangs around you like your own personal set of flies.
Much as you want to communicate your loneliness to somebody, to tell somebody that you have no reason to suppose that you're not the last person left on earth, it's a difficult state of mind to own up to. There is the pride element - nobody wants to sound like a right Norma No Mates; it's much more impressive to sound as though you can hardly move for tripping over very close friends.
Lonely sounds sad, as though you must be a rather dreary companion, too full of misery and despair and bad poetry to be any fun. You reason that telling people of your loneliness is likely to send them scuttling away at a rate of knots - doesn't loneliness suggest that you're clingy and desperate, after all? Of course, none of this is entirely true. Loneliness is often just the absence of somebody to tell about all those minor details of the day. My flatmate is currently away and I've gone quite strange in the head without somebody to keep up to date on the sprained toe, the local developer who succeeded in getting planning permission to subject us to a fug of dust and wolf whistles for a few months and the mug that fell clean apart in a straight line while I was washing it this morning. These are the kind of things that are endlessly fascinating in context, but that friends might find slightly scary, should I call with no other agenda than a desire to discuss toes, builders and mugs. In fairness, I don't find them that fascinating myself - it's more that these are the bits of chit-chat that form the basis of day-to-day banal communication; the kind of communication that staves off loneliness.
Loneliness is not about having no friends - nor does it mean that you are a Dreary Dora. But the one about the loneliest place being a crowded room is a cliche for a very good reason - it's absolutely true.
THE crowded room can be a real one, as when you trawl through pubs trying to look busy and popular in the hope of meeting somebody you know before you have to make the embarrassing journey back out the door, or when you are surrounded by acquaintances and find that you have nothing to say. Or there is the metaphorical crowded room when you are just lonely despite all your lovely friends and family, when you feel as though you're standing in a wind tunnel listening to distant voices of other people engaged in the world, focused, committed and, invariably having fun. To stretch an already over-used cliche one bit further, you could almost say that being in your 20s can be a bit like being in that crowded room. When you're in top form and feeling sociable, it can be one long party, such are the possibilities and opportunities for excitement. But, if you're down, it can seem as though everybody else is getting on with their lives, that the constant partying, talking, gossiping and networking is designed solely to alienate you personally. My dearly beloved flatmate will be back in two weeks and we can discuss trivialities and the Big Questions to our hearts' content. But really, loneliness isn't about living alone any more than this column is about me being deprived of company for two weeks. It's about the need to stop pretending for a moment and say that sometimes it's lonely out there - and that there's a crowd of us in it.