Don't live alone: you'll end up as an old maid

When I was sweet and single, the only girls who lived on their own were either loaded or loopy

Is it desperately sad or eminently sensible for a woman to live on her own? And, while you're working that out, you might also care to consider the length of a piece of string. The question was prompted by the news that one in seven of the properties currently on the market is being bought by single women, who also account for 17 per cent of new mortgagees.

The first consideration, of course, is money. If they could afford it, I'm prepared to bet that all seven of those homes with "For Sale" signs outside would be snapped up by women, not necessarily single, just desperate for a bolthole and a bit of peace and quiet.

Apart from the eight months I spent in a bedsit in Blackburn when I was 21 and a cub reporter on the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, I've never lived on my own. I'm sure it would do me good. I'd be able to draw on my inner reserves or whatever it is you're supposed to do when you find yourself the only survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a spar in the South China Sea, or lost in Snowdonia.

I don't think I have inner reserves. If I do, they've become so flabby with disuse they'd be no good to me in Tesco, let alone on a mountain or clinging to a spar. Still, I'm impressed that young women with a bob or two are sufficiently responsible and canny to spend their money on bricks and mortar rather than clothes and cosmetics. But I'm also concerned that they will become so damned independent and self-sufficient they'll end up old maids. You can see from that last remark what a sheltered and old-fashioned upbringing I enjoyed. My mother wasn't exactly Mrs Bennet, but she took it for granted that my sister and I would get married and that our husbands would sort out the house business.

Even if I could have afforded it, the idea of buying my own place never occurred to me. Young women shared flats with other young women (or even young men if they were liberated) and had arguments about whose turn it was to buy lavatory paper or take out the rubbish until they got married and graduated to more exciting rows about not putting the top on the toothpaste or having to drive up to Telford to visit your mother again.

The advantage of living on your own is that you don't have rows. The disadvantage of living on your own is that you miss having rows because nothing beats making up after a really good hair-tearing, fist-clenching, plate-throwing, life-threatening spat. That's the kind of row I relish. None of your snide remarks and bad-tempered looks or asides. Nothing sours the milk of human kindness quicker or drags the spirit lower than sharing your space with a grump. Given the choice of living with Bluebeard or Victor Meldrew, I'd go for Bluebeard every time.

When I was sweet and single, the only girls who lived on their own were either loaded or loopy. There was Lizzie the film producer's daughter, who shared her five-storey mansion in Knightsbridge with three cats and occasional lovers. I ran into her the other day on her way, she told me, to Alcoholics Anonymous. She was still in the same house, she said; it had seen the back of two husbands and she was beginning to wish she had lived in a commune.

Then there was Judy who, when the rest of us left Trinity College, Dublin, bought a tumbledown shepherd's cottage in the Wicklow Mountains six miles from the nearest bus stop and dedicated herself to a life surrounded by kids. Not children, goats. Judy wanted to breed the sort of goats that the god Pan had looked after in ancient Greece. When I went down to stay with her she was learning to play the pipes.

Women want nests. Men want somewhere to watch television and sleep. It's the old story, and the fact that marriage has lasted as long as it has is a miracle. Single women increasingly buying their own homes strikes me as ominous.

I can see what's going to happen: men will give up all vestige of responsibility and drop in and out of nests like alley cats. There's an old Burmese proverb about marriage: why buy a cow when milk is cheap. I wish I'd mentioned it to my daughter before she bought her flat. Of course I'm delighted that, barely out of school, she's running her own business with her own flat in London. I just wish sometimes that she were happily settled in Hemel Hempstead with a nice accountant.