By “the lot”, I mean roast potatoes and sliced, stringless beans, but it’s all good.  The lamb will be infused with rosemary and garlic and my gravy is legendary, so it’s winner, winner baa lamb dinner for me tonight.

Just me tonight.

We’re currently experiencing a blip in the country’s first summer heatwave for decades (it’s only around 22ºC today) and I’m a bit fed up eating stuff with salad, so I decided to treat myself to a proper Sunday roast dinner. I prefer to cook with others in mind but there’s nobody around at the moment; my sister is on holiday and everybody else is away too.  Not that I have an enormous circle of friends, not that I like having people in my house really.  They’re ok on occasion for short bursts at a time, but I’ve grown so used to my own company that I become very impatient when the peace is disturbed by the breathing of others (little dog excepted, of course).

I’ve found myself becoming very impatient with lots of things recently, constantly grumbling at this or that, losing my temper too quickly, becoming irritated with television and radio to the point that my alone time is generally spent sitting in silence, listening to the ticking of the old Soviet clock that I acquired from eBay.  I declare that I’m fed up several times a day but I don’t know what to do about this, or whether I have the inclination to do anything at all.  There’s a danger that it will be my default state of being from now on.

Maybe that’s always been my default but I’m reverting to type because of a lack of moderating influences.  Being single has many advantages, but it’s very easy to become selfish and inconsiderate: there are no consequences to my poor behaviour and even me at my absolute best has never led to a great deal of success when it comes to holding on to a romantic relationship – complete and utter disaster in fact.  And as those relationships grow ever more distant in time and memory, all that’s left to remind me of the love that I experienced is the pain that consumed me when they ended, pain that I cling on to because I failed to cling on to them.

I’ve convinced myself that I don’t want to get involved in another relationship because I cannot bear (or is it bare?) the consequences of another heartbreak.  While this is true, to some extent at least, it’s probably fair to say that I don’t want to follow that path again because I’m actually still clinging on to that last one (not that one or that one, that one).  I reconciled that there was no going back a long time ago, but there’s no going forward either, and so here I am, slowly turning into Stig of the Dump and rapidly developing the personality of Pauline Campbell-Jones.

I do cook a lovely roast lamb dinner though.