A chilly realisation that the boiler has died

I have a theory that you're not really an adult until you've experienced boiler bereavement. There's denial ("It'll just be the pilot light, I just need to press this button a few times"), anger (as the landlord screens your frantic calls), bargaining (with a succession of plumbers you find in the Yellow Pages whose names all begin with AAAA), depression (no one will come out until next week) and finally acceptance (of call-out charges hovering around £200 per half hour or part thereof). Most importantly, there's the realisation that your home isn't the impregnable fortress you had complacently assumed it was.

My boiler died this week. It isn't my first broken boiler, but it's the first one I'm solely responsible for. I've been half expecting it – there's been some worrying business with the thermostat – but it hits me hard ... waking up to a suspicious chill, running the hot tap in vain, hoping I'm wrong. I try not to panic: first, I go down to the basement to stare at it, hoping for a miracle.

The boiler is gigantic and off-putting, with five enormous pipes emerging from its squat grey body at improbable angles. I open the front door, experimentally, and look for a pilot light button to press, but there's nothing, just a sort of rusty screw, and a butch-looking gauge. I'm lost. The thermostat, with its yellowing card of oblique instructions in my landlady's spiky handwriting, is bad enough. It whirrs and clicks ominously in the evenings. I give up and ring my landlady.

"What have you done to it?" she says, instantly on the offensive.

"Nothing!" I protest. "It just stopped working overnight, honestly."

There's a chilly pause. She has a knack of making me feel guilty when I haven't done anything wrong, which must be useful in her occupation. "Have you touched the thermostat?"

"No!" I lie, palms slightly sweaty.

Grudgingly, she agrees to try to arrange an engineer, but not today, and probably not tomorrow. I hang up feeling furiously impotent and cast around for a solution. I could call my neighbour. He's quite handy – he's fixed my Wi-Fi and put up shelves for me in the past – but he's also a total chancer. There will be some outlandish reason why I need to lend him a hundred quid and if I'm really unlucky, he'll show me his awful drawings of cars again.

Or maybe I should try to get it fixed myself? The thought fills me with gloom (they'll lie to me and take all my money, and my landlady will never pay me back), but at least I'll be taking charge of my own heating destiny. I text a friend to ask if she knows a reliable plumber. "Would you like John to come and have a look?" she texts back. John is her husband. "He's pretty good at that kind of thing."

"Thank you!" I text back, filled with relief. "That would be wonderful."

X is pretty good at this kind of thing too. One of the first things he ever did for me was fix my television and then, as now, I was filled with admiration for his nonchalant techno-brilliance. How do people know this stuff? He called earlier about a forgotten video game, and hearing the edge in my voice, asked what was wrong.

"The boiler's dead."

"Oh no, I'm sorry."

I could feel my composure slipping.

"And my landlady is being evil."

"If you need me ..."

"Thanks." I can't though, can I? It's up to me now.

Actually, it's up to John, who comes round a few hours later with his toolbox, and disappears downstairs, refusing cups of tea. After 20 anxious minutes, he shouts up to tell me to feel the radiator and, sure enough, it's warming, slowly. He comes back upstairs, wiping his hands on a piece of kitchen roll. "Oh, thank you so much, John – you're a lifesaver."

"No problem. I don't know how long it'll last though."

Which is exactly what I expected to hear.

The boys are back in town ...

The children are back from their Christmas holiday with their father, irrepressibly bouncy and laden with plastic tat, an inch taller each. They ripped through their painstakingly assembled stockings in three minutes, then settled on the sofa to bicker and play video games while I stuffed tissue paper and plastic packaging into bin bags and moved their shoes.

X, who dropped them off, looked less buoyant. When I asked him about Christmas with his family he shook his head bleakly, then left with swift efficiency and the look of a man who scents freedom, so close he can almost touch it. He's gone skiing, somewhere Spartan where he can eat sandwiches in blizzards and wear hi-tech fabrics.

The boys move through the house, opening cupboards and shedding socks, leaving a Hansel and Gretel trail of chocolate coin foil, crumbs, used tissues and satsuma peel. "I'm starving!" the youngest announces melodramatically, half an hour after lunch, and fills a tray with the contents of the kitchen cupboards. The dog follows them round at a respectful distance, newly fascinated by all their noise and animation and hoping for leftovers.

I found them quite startling too, at first, after my monastic Christmas. Lulled by those peaceful, orderly days of drinking tea and working in bed, I had forgotten how urgent their needs are: they are always starving, they need to tell me something, they have to get batteries, right now.

It's lovely, though. It wasn't bad, my time alone, but I've felt a bit peculiar: detached, I suppose, from all the celebration. All my friends are still out of town and I've felt almost invisible. It's nice to be needed again and I like how the boys have come back breezily casual, slinging a cheery proprietorial arm around my waist as I bring more snacks, taking me for granted.

We've mainly been mouldering around the house in these short days, dozing and squabbling. Even New Year's Eve was more of the same: we didn't manage to stay up until midnight. The boys flaked out around 10pm and, certain they would be up early, I put in some earplugs and followed them.

I was woken with a start by something moving on the bed. Reaching over to put the light on, befuddled and stupid, I saw the dog, trembling and sheepish, dark eyes anxious in the lamplight. Fireworks – I had forgotten.

"Oh, dog, you are daft. Come here then." I held the duvet up for him and he crawled in speedily and gratefully, curling up neatly on my feet. He used to sleep in my bed when I first moved in and the bed felt very empty, but he hasn't been allowed upstairs since the night I woke to hear him retching, daintily, on my pale oatmeal carpet. I think this counts as an emergency, though.

Wide awake now, with my feet on the warm, gradually calming dog, I remembered the previous New Year's Eve. I spent it in Paris, with my best friend, at a riotously funny house party, with champagne and dancing, haggis, gatecrashers and an ice cube fight. There was even a small fire in the early hours when we accidentally left a box of meringues next to a candle. I woke up the next morning with a stomach ache from laughing so much.

On some level, I reflect, that is how I expected single life to be: parties, and laughter and endless opportunity. It seems chasteningly stupid now after my year of professional disaster, romantic idiocy, money angst, moments of soul-searching unhappiness and implausible amounts of time spent sweeping the kitchen floor. A year later, here I am at home at midnight in my pyjamas with a dog for company, broke, anxious and a bit lonely.

There have been a few moments like that last New Year's Eve, though: stupid and funny and life-affirming – moments I don't think I would have had if X and I were still together. And that was sort of the point of all this. Wasn't it?

I did have some festive cheer, thanks to my Russian friend

The children left with their father early on the 24th. I hugged them hard and waved as they drove away. When I got past the initial mild indignation, and the low-level sadness at the thought of being on my own this year, I amused myself by devising the most depressing fantasy Christmas imaginable.

I pictured myself with gloomy relish, alone in my dark house, with only the indifferent dog for company, eating one of my nasty homemade soups for Christmas dinner.

In my vision, the boiler was on the blink and heavy snow had messed up the television reception, so I was confined to bed for warmth, reading something multi-volumed and improving.

The reality, was nothing like that. My Russian friend Zsuzsana called me on the 23rd, when I was eyeing up a packet of lentils to start preparing my vat of nasty Yuletide soup.

"Hey honey," she said, cheerily. "What you doing for Christmas?"

"Ah, interesting," she said, after I explained. "Because my family are driving me crazy this year so I decide not to go to Russia for holidays. So how about you, me, dog, wine?"

So that's what we did. Zsuzsana came round early evening on Christmas Eve, handed me her pillarbox red motorcycle helmet and starting cooking a lemon sole. I made us each a Kir Royale, lit the fire and put the tree lights on, and we chatted as she cooked. We ate our fish at the table, like grownups, then watched several hours of dreadful TV and ate the contents of a selection box left behind by the boys. Later, Zsuzsana surprised me by heading off to midnight mass, and I went to bed without any of the usual febrile night-before excitement.

In the morning, we got up late and exchanged (tiny) presents. I called the children – beside themselves with excitement – and listened to them list their presents. I wished X and his family (bellowing cheerfully in the background) a Happy Christmas; then did the same with my own family. Zsuzsana walked the dog, and we ate toast, read books and watched TV. It was peaceful, simple, a little anti-climactic. I missed the boys and felt a little empty at times, yes, but not bereft.

If I could change anything about the experience, I suppose it might be our choice of film that evening. Cabin feverish after two days spent almost entirely indoors, we decided – somewhat masochistically – to watch the DVD of Mike Leigh's Another Year, an uplifting tale of ageing, loneliness and disappointment. The film features a hauntingly awful character called Mary, a desperate, lonely and deluded divorcee, who lurches from disaster to self-imposed disaster.

"A spectre of wine-soaked, self-regarding, middle-aged femininity," one review I should probably have read before watching called her. Nothing terribly redemptive happens for Mary in the course of the film: she behaves badly, she suffers, she remains alone. It is not what you would call a "feelgood" movie, and on Christmas Day it was all a bit near the knuckle for comfort.

"Oh God," I hissed to Zsuzsana. "I want to say 'I need a drink after that', but I'm worried I sound like bloody Mary now".

"Screw Mary. We need drink," she said, decidedly. So to shake off our cabin fever, we put on our coats and wandered the dark, slushy streets arm in arm, in search of anywhere open on Christmas night in our sleepy town. Finally, down a side street, we found a bar with the lights on. "Christ. That was the most terrible choice of Christmas film imaginable," I said.

"Awful, honey. Terrible movie". Zsuzsana shook her head, dismissively.

"Please will you kill me if I turn into Mary?"

"Ja. You kill me too. Is a deal."