I was lounging around on the sofa the other night, sipping bottled beer and trying not to dribble over the darkly riveting Nigella Lawson, when I caught myself doing something extremely odd. I put my beer down on the floor, in amongst the curious pile of junk that accumulates around my feet during the course of an evening in front of the television, the various remote controls, biscuit wrappers, TV Guide, packet of tissues - well it was Nigella Lawson – and for no earthly reason, and to nobody whatsoever, declared out loud, “I’m off to the toilet!”
The common business of announcing your toilet calls to an empty room didn’t strike me as ridiculous for some seconds, but when it did the utterly sweet madness of it gave me the giggles all evening. In fact I lay in bed later that night, the wickedly seductive Nigella completely cold-shouldered, tittering quietly and repeating under my breath, “I’m off to the toilet!”
Later that same night I woke from a feverish nightmare in which I was wandering through the tiled corridors of a Victorian mental institution dressed in the white gown of a patient. Suddenly the devilishly stern figure of Nurse Lawson appeared and demanded to know where I was going. Tell me, she urged in a voice that was thick with a kind of weirdly attractive menace. Tell me or I will serve cold shoulder for tea every night .
I’m off to the toilet! I tried to say, but all at once I could not make a single sound. To my horror, my lips had fused together. I woke up shaking, certain at once of the dream’s meaning.
Living on my own was driving me to a state of agreeable insanity.
It’s not just the toilet thing. You could put that down to habit. I’ve been announcing my toilet calls for years now. I think it starts very young, especially for boys. Potty training aside, young boys are commendably unselfish when it comes to distributing their bodily waste, especially where farts are concerned. There is nothing like an appreciative audience when it comes to unveiling an award winning trouser-ripper. We used to build all kinds of games and rituals around it – Pull My Finger, More Tea Vicar, the juicy odour of a captured fart that is magically transported via a closed fist to the unsuspecting face of a smaller boy, often accompanied by a theatrical Ta da!
Our favourite was a little song. It went something like: Listen to this, too good to miss, da da da da da –
And you would hopefully end on a fine trumpet note. Unlike my friend Darren, who famously ended the song with a telling look of frozen horror. He had to do the last four lessons in his PE kit.
Anyway, it’s not just the toilet thing that’s been worrying me. I think I am developing all kinds of strange little rituals and eccentricities that I am certain were not part of any routine in the days before I lived alone. I still eat a proper meal at the dining table as opposed to carrying something in a half-melted plastic tray into the room where the television is, but now I listen to an audio book or music through my ludicrously enormous cordless headphones while I eat. They have an arched antenna that keeps catching on the drop-down ceiling light. I swear that one of these fine nights they will follow the smell of smoke and burning meat and find me jerking wildly at the table with small bolts of deadly lightening dancing around my head.
I lounge more, especially when I’m watching television or reading a book; I sprawl like a big cat in the sun, one foot brushing the floor and the other hooked over the back of the sofa. I swig milk straight from the plastic bottle while standing at the open refrigerator door, feed a black bag under the sink with kitchen rubbish until it is swollen and ripe and strangely warm, keep all my loose change in a big pot fish (the sight of a man picking through a little purse for coins always brings a smirk to my face, and I’m a man who has a secret ‘cat voice’ that he uses when stroking and conversing with neighbourhood cats), use the same plate, knife, fork and teaspoon all the time, in effect, my own personal dinner set, as a soldier or long-distance hiker might own. Paradoxically I also have four or five rolls of toilet paper on the go at any one time, so go figure.
It’s not the acts themselves that are a worry but the notion that I may be becoming institutionalised. In a way my life has taken on the kind of jumbled, illogical order of my hiking bag. A stranger rooting through my bag might wonder why I carried no maps or compasses but was never without a digital camera. I would have to explain that, as someone with all the directional sense of a recently decapitated chicken, I find photographs of where I have come from more useful and reassuring than a sheet of wet paper covered in confusing swirls and meaningless little triangles. Similarly someone rooting through my life right now might wonder why my sock drawer is so neat and fussy yet a block of cheese in the fridge has teeth marks in it. The answer, naturally, is because both are mine to do with as I please.
I think people who live alone for any length of time experience a gradual reversal of the diluting effects of being a couple. You are slowly filtered back into a purified state, a kind of super-concentrated version of yourself. The drawback to this of course is that it makes you into a kind of inbred freak who tells an empty room when he’s going to the toilet (or when he is enjoying a biscuit and a warm beverage, as in cooing ‘Oooooh, that’s nice!’), risks fatal electrocution by wearing a kind of live helmet at meal times, and grades cookery programmes into a league table.
Of course that last one might just be a man thing, especially given that Nigella Lawson always ends up on top.
