The first winter here I ate dinner standing up. It took me two years to set the table for one, and another to light the candle.

Nobody teaches you how to spend an evening with yourself. You pick it up slowly, like a language, and mostly by getting it wrong in front of the mirror. These are the small rituals that finally worked for me.

Set the table anyway

For a long time I treated meals alone as something to get through. Toast over the sink. Soup from the pan, eaten while reading the back of the packet. I told myself this was efficient, which is what people say about most sad things.

The change was embarrassingly small. One plate, one fork, a glass that was not a jam jar. I sat down. The food tasted the same and the room did not, and I have not stood at that counter for dinner since.

Loneliness is what happens to you. Being alone is something you can get good at.

Give the evening a shape

An empty evening has no edges, and that is the trouble with it. So I gave mine some. A walk to the harbour wall at six, whatever the weather. A record, played through, one side only. A page of something written by hand, even if it is only a list of what the gulls were doing.

None of this is profound. It is the same trick you use on a nervous dog: predictability, and a treat at the end.

Let other people in, a little

The last thing I learned is that solitude works better with a door in it. I know the name of the woman at the fish counter now. I leave a jar of soup on the neighbour’s step when I have made too much, which is always. On most days that is enough company to make the quiet feel chosen.

And on the days it is not enough, I phone someone. That turned out to be a skill too.