I was recently joined on a bench at Connolly station in Dublin by a man in a sludge-green coat and wide-brimmed hat who methodically pulled out, wiped and pocketed his false teeth, before bending down to the large plastic bag at his feet and pulling out a yoghurt. He turned to me, smiled, and then asked: “Would you ever find me a spoon?”
These things don’t happen so easily when you’re in a group: you’re much less approachable when eating as a couple; and none but the truly determined would approach a munching threesome. Which is why, at least once a week, I take myself out for a well-lit meal for one. I am, at this very moment, sitting in a cafe beside a woman with hair like a well-crafted plum duff, eating a cheese sandwich. At my other elbow a woman in pale blue headscarf and tweed jacket is pecking at a bowl of granola like a sparrow. In the corner, a man in gently darkening photochromic lenses is chewing through a plastic tub of what looks, from here, like gravel. We are all eating alone. And so, of course, none of us is eating alone.
A new study by The Big Lunch has found that the average British adult eats nearly half of all their meals alone. What’s more, 34% reported sometimes going a whole week without eating a meal with someone else, 25% said they always eat alone at weekends, and only 35% ate their evening meal with someone else. And if that evokes in you pangs of fear and pity then, my friends, you can shove your Tupperware where the sun don’t shine.
Mastication is a pleasure, not a crime. Eating alone is, like all sensory experiences, often best appreciated away from the hum and whir of other people. As a lone diner you can eat precisely as much as you want, of whatever you want, in the order you want, at the speed you want, wearing what you want. You don’t have to worry about someone’s gluten intolerance or chilli-averse child-mouth. You don’t have to feel embarrassed about eating an entire bowl of noodles in the time it takes most people to pick up their chopsticks. If you want lunch at 11.32am then, you know what, you can eat it. And if you choose to accompany that meal with a book, the radio, a little light napkin origami or an all-out, slack-kneed stare at the wall opposite you, then that’s your choice.
“I’m not worried about anyone thinking I’m a sad bastard,” the food critic Jay Rayner once told me. “Eating alone should be dinner with someone you love.” And he’s quite right. Solo chomping is never a sign of social failure – it is evidence that you have sufficient sense of self to be able to enjoy life’s most regular, essential pleasure entirely in your own company. It speaks of confidence, not commiseration.
Of course loneliness is a misery that can creep through your bones like poison, and it’s one that particularly affects the old. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2011 almost 40% of 75- to 84-year-olds lived alone, and 59% of those aged 85 and over. And if they live alone, they almost certainly eat alone too. Like many people I get a sour grip around my heart at the thought of my late grandmother sitting on her own in her kitchen, silently chewing through a small igloo of mashed potato or a slice of pork pie. And then I remember that I eat alone all the time. As a freelance writer, most of my meals are eaten at my kitchen table, with nothing but the murmur of a radio or hum of the fridge to keep me company. And I love it. To pity older people for doing precisely what you enjoy doing yourself is the very definition of contempt. They deserve better.
So let’s look at those statistics again. If 25% of people report eating alone at weekends, then some of those will be doing so for reasons of their own choosing. Perhaps they have the self-assurance to go round an exhibition on their own, to walk up a mountain on their own – and so the meals they eat while they’re doing so are simply pockets of pleasure, nourishment and flavour along the way. If 65% of us eat our evening meal alone, then perhaps it’s because we’ve chosen to order our lives that way. Maybe we eat our meal alone because we live alone, because we enjoy being alone and have the balls to go it alone. I know I did. For years.
Like life’s other great pleasures, eating alone is something you can do one-handed, lying on your back, in nothing but an old jumper, should you so wish. It isn’t lonely, it isn’t distasteful, it isn’t desperate: it’s a celebration of existence. It keeps us alive – as simple as that.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about my yoghurt friend from the station, let me reassure you; while we chatted, and he ate his strawberry Petits Filous, he told me that he was on his way to his brother’s in Roscommon for the weekend. He was looking forward to it, he said. Although he’d packed plenty of snacks – his brother was a terrible cook.
• This article was amended on 15 April 2016. An earlier version referred to a bench in O’Connell Street, Dublin; the bench was at Connolly station.
