Regardless of what you might think...

I am not an antisocial person. If I was I’d sit indoors all the time, shunning other human contact.

Which is pretty much what I do do. However, my defence is that if I were antisocial I’d be just that, with emphasis on the anti-. But I’m not against having a good time, I love a decent night out every so often, I even sing – live, in front of an audience, sometimes as big as thirteen people - once a month or so. That’s not the activity of an antisocial man.

What I am is asocial. Disinterested. Separate. People are fine. Some people are decent. Some people are outrageously lovely. And I’ll happily spend a few hours with almost any of them except for the ones I’ve met before and who turned out to be fuckwits or the ones I actively dislike. On the whole, though, I can take ‘em or leave ‘em. If my social activity was limited to a couple of nodding acquaintances and a brief chat about the weather with the Asian fella in the local Spar, I’d be fine with that. Got nothing against them, just don’t particularly need to have them around.

This came about, I think, because I lived on my own for a good five years and found, to my surprise and pleasure, that I liked it. Just as with stilton, good beer and the more obscure edible parts of animals (tripe con pomodoro, anybody?), something that made me cringe when I was a younger man had become something to embrace and savour.

There’s very little I like more than escaping into my own personal splendid isolation.  Mostly that involves just sitting cross-legged on the sofa, eyes closed, just listening to the world go round. Birds sing. Cars pass. After a while, everything becomes indistinct but at the same time pin-sharp, each sound blurring into every other, each being distinct and unique. Time passes in the same way it does during sleep; hours and minutes mean nothing, passing without distinction, skating by without distraction. No radio, no TV, no artificial markers of time’s passage to say “that’s enough sitting about. Go and clean the bathroom.”

Obviously – because you can’t have what you want all the time, because life just isn’t like that - things get in the way. When that happens, I get annoyed. Knock on the door? If I didn’t invite you for a specified time, I’m not answering. Phone call? Leave a message. It took me a good six months to get used to having a cat – again, something I’d not done in years – and for the first four of those I was continually planning to take it back to where it came from because it disrupted my peace, the bastard, with its mewing and yowling and chasing of small objects and bringing in of dead things in the wee small hours. Luckily, it’s turned out that the cat has much the same temperament as I, and will happily spent most of its day asleep in entirely a different part of the house, sometimes in an entirely different building. I like him now.

Does that answer your question?