Joyce Vincent had been dead for more than two years when her body was eventually discovered in January this year. She was surrounded by unopened Christmas presents. The television was still on and so was the heating.

Housing officers came to her north London bedsit only to repossess it because the rent was thousands of pounds in arrears. A locksmith drilled the door open. A giant pile of unopened post, the earliest dated November 2003, lay on the doormat.

Vincent lay on the sitting room floor. Her body was so badly decomposed — her remains were “largely skeletal”, the pathologist said — that she had to be identified by dental records. Detectives told the inquest last week that, inasmuch as it was possible to tell, there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the death. The coroner recorded an open verdict. Vincent was 40 years old.

We are used to hearing horrible stories like this about elderly people, who are found only because the milkman finally notices that the pints are accumulating outside the front door. And this, of course, is bad and shaming enough. However, Vincent was not an old lady whose friends and family were dead but a woman in the prime of life. And the day after her tragic story was revealed came news of another lonely end, this time of 52-year-old Sally Shearing who was found in the cellar of a house in Cornwall by burglars and had been dead for three years.

We know little about Vincent, except that she once worked for Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising agency and, according to a source involved in the investigation, “she had detached herself from her family, but there was no bust-up. They are a very nice family”; and that she had had a relationship in which “there was a history of domestic violence”.

Hmm. You can’t help but wonder where her very nice family were for the two and a bit years during which their child or sister or cousin or niece was lying dead on the floor. And I can’t quite believe that a human being could slip through the net in this way and die alone, unmourned, unmissed, not arousing anyone’s curiosity, interest or suspicion — and for so long. Some neighbours in the block of 200 or so flats where Vincent lived had noticed “a foul smell” emanating from her bedsit, but nobody did anything about it.

I find this story unusually depressing. It’s the details: had the Christmas presents that surrounded her corpse been given to her — in which case, why didn’t any of the present givers care enough to check up on her? Or had she painstakingly shopped for the presents and wrapped them herself to give to people whom she presumably cared about and who didn’t love her back enough to notice her death? What did she do at Saatchi & Saatchi? Was she one of those girls running around Soho, going out for drinks on a Friday night, eating lunch on the grass in Soho Square on sunny days, stopping off in Old Compton Street to buy dinner from the Italian deli? There is no way of knowing. But she feels very close; I feel I know many women like her.

Vincent’s death illustrates, with horrible clarity, that intense loneliness is no longer the preserve of the old. There is an element of “there but for the grace of God” about her story. I remember a single girlfriend once telling me that if she didn’t make a monumental effort to go out at weekends — even though all she really felt like doing was lying around watching TV — she would not speak to a single other living soul from Friday to Monday morning.

At the time I thought this a ludicrous exaggeration and besides, what with squalling children, the idea of two days of peace and quiet sounded like nirvana.

Several years on I understand her alarm, just as I now understand why women I’d have considered unbelievably wet 10 years ago stay in unsuitable relationships, or hook up with dreadful men, no matter how disastrous or humiliating the consequences might be. It is to stave off loneliness, the modern disease.

These days we are atomised, cut off from each other, more isolated than we ever were before and often starved of real flesh-and-blood human contact. Millions of people carry out their love life online, e-mailing intimacies to strangers. Millions of people, some of them children, also carry out their friendships in cyberspace. And while the former can and do result in successful relationships and the latter can result in genuine real-life friendships (if long distances aren’t an issue), I do find it sad that so many people rely on a piece of machinery to interact.

We all live in isolated little bubbles. And as the lonely deaths of these two women show, suddenly the old Bridget Jones joke about being single for ever and dying alone in her flat, with nobody noticing, doesn’t sound like satire any more but like an unpleasantly hard-hitting piece of social realism.

• I’m in the process of shedding my last stone and a half (out of five) — I got monstrously fat by accident — and now that I can shop anywhere I like again, I have been thinking about dress sizes. When I was a teenager, being a size 8 meant you were borderline anorexic. A 10 was considered skinny. A 12 was normal, a 14 acceptable. A 16 was pleasantly curvy.

  But something really weird happened when I wasn’t looking (too busy eating cakes for a decade): a size 10 is no longer considered a satisfactory indicator of slimness. Nor is an 8. A 6 is better. But if you really want to go all-out thin, you need to be a 0 or a 2. This is like an insane joke, no? Why not just buy your clothes at Mothercare, or pop on a Babygro and be done with it? And yet, out shopping last weekend, the 0s and 2s kept popping up — heaps of them while, of course, the 14s were sold out.

  We all know that the fashion industry is mad. But surely this is an insanity too far? No normal woman could ever be a size 0, unless she is one of those brittle-looking anorexic cokeheads with giant skulls.

  Why do manufacturers produce clothes in these sizes, except to make perfectly normal, attractive women feel even more insecure than they do already? My sister-in-law, a perfect 10, has taken to saying that she feels “fat”.

  I can guarantee that she wouldn’t be saying this if size 2s didn’t exist to torture her. Barmy male designers who wish that bosoms and bottoms didn’t exist are one (tiresome) thing. But women designers manufacturing size 0 garments (for whom there obviously isn’t a market) are an unsisterly and opportunistic disgrace, and should be force-fed chocolate and lard until they explode.

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