He's at home and all alone

Lodgers are easier to get rid of and leave fewer tangled emotional skei ns

The fastest-growing category of home-owners is, apparently, young men living alone. In the week when my son is moving to live by himself in a flat he has bought in east London, this fact strikes home to the maternal heart. It would seem to prove, yet again, the polarisation of our society into the haves and have-nots.

Every day I pass young men crouching in boxes and doorways, bundled up in a filthy duvet or blanket against the freezing weather. I spoke to one the other day - a polite, fresh-faced youth who can't have been more than 17 - and asked if his "pitch" (a cramped space next door to the modish luxury of Emporio Armani on Knightsbridge) was a good one.

"Not bad," he said, "it's really my mate's, but he's been away over Christmas. If he comes back, I'll be turfed out."

I'm sorry," I said futilely.

He smiled. "Not your fault."

Inside the store, other fresh-faced young men were fingering the opulent pile of Armani overcoats, reduced to £289 or £350 from £495. "But you've got two coats already!" I heard a young woman object. "So?" was the reply.

My son, a focus-puller for film and television, is 30. He was able to buy a two-bedroomed flat for £70,000 - finance arranged within a fortnight. One result of the stagnant housing market is that those few who are in a position to buy find obstacles disappear magically from their path.

So Johnnie now has a flat in a brand-new development, whose value can only increase, on which his monthly repayments are £480: cheaper than renting. That simple arithmetic has to be the main reason why young men are buying their own homes if they possibly can. It makes good economic sense.

There are other, more complicated, reasons. Since 1989, when the Chancellor repealed the rule that allowed two people to claim tax relief on the same mortgage, the advantages of a joint mortgage have been outweighed by the difficulties created when one person wants to move on. Young couples find themselves stranded in a flat they can't sell, in a relationship that has cooled from ardour to at best tolerance, at worst, hostility.

Rather than risk this, people now prefer to buy singly, perhaps taking a lodger to help with the mortgage payments. Lodgers are easier to get rid of and leave fewer tangled emotional and financial skeins.

Another reason springs, I think, directly from the first generation of feminist mothers. We did not assume it was our privilege to wait on our sons hand and foot; on the contrary, we taught them (it was an uphill struggle) to make their own beds, iron their own shirts and do their own cooking. It has worked. Our sons are not helpless as turtles on their backs in the absence of a nurturing female.

I have discovered, in the 10 weeks since my son arrived to take up temporary residence, that he cooks better than I do and clears up the kitchen after himself. He does his own laundry, makes his bed, keeps his room tidy. To those who mutter indignantly, "So I should hope!" I can only reply that 30 years ago his father would not have done any of these things, and his grandfathers would have been thunderstruck at the very idea.

So basic domestic competence is another reason for the new independence of young men. Johnnie would not dream of living on baked beans, frozen meals-for-one and Chinese takeaways, coming back to mother on Sundays for a home-cooked lunch. He will cook properly for himself and his friends - vegetarian and pasta dishes, mostly - and run a perfectly civilised bachelor home.

There is one final category of young males living alone, and I suspect it is the largest of all. Parents, not unreasonably, no longer expect their adult children, of either sex, to stay at home until they marry and set up their own households. As soon a

s they get a first job or go to university, the young move into shared flats of jolly squalor, which gradually become more salubrious - I speak of the haves; for the have-nots, the homeless, the squalor becomes less and less jolly - until, in their mid-tw enties, they are fully house-trained and keen to get their own place.

By this time they may well have a partner. Often they already have or are expecting, a child, and the obvious next step is to set up house together, with or without the sanction of marriage.

Now comes the sad part. At every level of society (for single parenthood is not just the province of the underclass, whatever politicians may think), these early liaisons very often break down. Nobody can imagine, until they experience it for themselves,the pressure that small children impose on even the most loving relationship. What started out so joyfully all too often ends in anger and bitterness.

Nine times out of 10 the children stay with their mother and the father is thrown out. Within 18 months of leaving, 50 per cent of fathers will have lost all contact with their children. It is these breakdowns, I suspect, that largely account for the statistics of single male households. This is no yuppie paradise, but a desperately sad waste of young men who are badly missed by their children. Young families and young fathers need each other. Young men should not be living alone.