People think I’m joking when I say I have no mates but it’s the truth. I just work hard and come home – I never socialise. I’ve been thinking a lot about solitude recently. And not just because of the interminable Easter holidays, which seem to last this year from around mid-March through to the day of the Coronation in May, unhappily augmented by those teachers’ strikes that show no sign of disappearing. It was my decision, sort of, to have three children, and I accept that means an endlessly busy house: my eldest a teenager who seldom leaves either her phone or the sofa; my middle one,...…People think I’m joking when I say I have no mates but it’s the truth. I just work hard and come home – I never socialise. I’ve been thinking a lot about solitude recently. And not just because of the interminable Easter holidays, which seem to last this year from around mid-March through to the day of the Coronation in May, unhappily augmented by those teachers’ strikes that show no sign of disappearing. It was my decision, sort of, to have three children, and I accept that means an endlessly busy house: my eldest a teenager who seldom leaves either her phone or the sofa; my middle one,...WW…