Playlist 2 - Friday Nights Alone

A playlist for when you're both happy AND sad about being alone on Friday night...

Hello. There are no words for you this month, only music.

I’m very often alone on Friday evenings, partly because I tend to work rather than go out at weekends (that sweet hospitality lyf), but also partly because I am a misanthrope. Weekends out and about in London are an anathema to me. There are just too many people outside, all trying to do the same things that I like doing. These people are usually at work when I am not at work and so I am used to quieter streets, more bookable restaurants and less crowded parks. And so, Fridays and Saturdays have become Quiet Time for me, very much by choice. It wasn’t always a choice I enjoyed, there certainly were times when I felt like such a failure and so almightily left out if I ended up alone at the weekend and I suppose sometimes I still get a pang of FOMO, a sort of nostalgia for when I was twenty-something and continuously at a party. But then, these days, that is very quickly overridden by JOMO.

I wanted to put together a playlist to describe the ever conflicting feelings of spending Friday-Nights-Alone. It is hard to express, but very often Fridays alone are a combination of the joy of being in my own good company, the dread of making the wrong sort of plan (but what if I end up wanting to go out and have no one to do it with?), nostalgia for parties past, loneliness and peacefulness. It’s a short little playlist, but I hope you enjoy it. The next episode (number 14) of the ‘How to eat alone’ podcast will be out at the end of June.

P.S If you don’t feel like listening to my Friday night playlist and feel like dancing round the kitchen alone instead, here’s a playlist for that from Episode 2 of the podcast.