I literally can’t remember the last time I was this content. I am experiencing a bone-deep bliss while wrapped in a further cocoon of happiness. Or, to put it another way – I have the house to myself.

My husband is away on a work thing. For three whole days. Don’t know where, exactly. Don’t care. Just not here.

It’s unspeakably wonderful. It feels like being a teenager again when your parents left you home alone for the first time, mixed with a little of the heady excitement of the first time you pulled the front door closed on the first flat you ever lived in without housemates.

Now, I realise I am something of an extreme case because I hate being with people at the best of times. I always saw living with someone as the price you had to pay for loving them and wanting them to stay in your life. I tried to persuade my husband to move in down the road, but he insisted that coupledom meant sharing a home, and not just because we are neither of us Vanderbilts who can buy extra houses out of our chump change.

“Pure bliss is having the house to yourself”: Lucy Mangan on the pleasure of being home alone