A work trip, and I've been booked into a motel somewhere in the middle of England's flattest county. The rooms are built around the car park, while the centre of operations is a Tudorbethan pub that smells vaguely of Britvic orange and thwarted ambition. It's one of those places, small-minded and slightly sinister, that makes the single traveller – especially the single female traveller – feel more than usually alone, and when the man at the front desk asks if I would like to make a dinner reservation in what I shall call the Geoffrey Chaucer Carvery, I lose my nerve, for all that I'm hungry, have no transport of my own, and know very well there's nowhere else to eat within easy walking distance. "No, I'm fine, thank you," I tell him. I then repair to my cabin to eat the biscuits on my tea tray.

Dawn arrives, and I lie awake listening both to the rumble of the road and of my stomach. Two hours later, I break cover, and head for breakfast. "Just yourself, is it?" says the maître d', an oleaginous smile smeared across his face like cheap jam. There's something about this question – the graceless, unkind way it is framed; the hint of snideness in the word "yourself" – that makes me shrink inwardly. But if this chap notices my embarrassment, he gives no sign. He simply turns on his heel and leads me rather briskly to my table. Perhaps you know what's coming next. In this situation, there are only two possible outcomes. Either I will be stuck in a corridor close to a flapping kitchen door, friendless and forgotten. Or I will be carefully placed, in the manner of the class dunce, bang smack in the middle of the room, the better to take in all the couples, families and wedding parties. Either way, my breakfast, however hearty, will feel more like an admonishment than a treat. I loiter for a moment, wondering which it is to be today. Oh, right. It's the latter. Hello, everyone! Yes, do have a good gander. This sunny Sunday morning, I am very much going solo.

I've lost count of the number of occasions I've had a miserable time eating alone. So I was consoled – though only mildly – by a recent report which noted that, elsewhere, restaurants are finally waking up to the fact that they must be more welcoming to single diners, this demographic now being too economically powerful to ignore. A restaurateur in Ottawa, Stephen Beckta, told a journalist from the BBC that single diners "are the greatest compliment a restaurant can receive" and in order to accommodate them, he has instituted all kinds of loving practices, from instructing his staff to ask customers where they would prefer to sit, to offering a free lunch to those who book for two only to find they've been stood up (he doesn't advertise this, but he also trusts people not to take advantage). In Amsterdam, meanwhile, a pop-up called Eenmaal which caters only for tables for one has been so successful that its owner, Marina van Goor, now plans on opening branches in Antwerp, New York, Berlin and, yes, London.

I hope Ms van Goor has a hit here and perhaps, in time, in Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow, too. But I fear we've a long way to go before we make eating out alone as painless as it is abroad (I never feel remotely self-conscious in the US). For change to happen, prissy maître d's everywhere are going to have to learn that working in the hospitality industry involves – just imagine it! – being hospitable, even to those whose bills might be on the small side. It should be obvious, but let me say it anyway: no one who's dining alone wants to be put next to a party of eight who are loudly celebrating a birthday. Proprietors are also going to have to start thinking very differently about their rooms. A wide, comfortable bar as standard would be a start: when I'm alone I like to eat on a high stool, and doubtless this is cost-effective for the restaurant, too, space being at a premium. But they also need to ponder such factors as lighting. I want to be able to read at my table. I don't want to spend my evening staring mournfully out into the gloom. Waiters, of course, are going to have to become vastly more empathetic, learning to work out which single diners would like them to strike up a conversation, and which would not (I would prefer to be treated the same way as everyone else). Such relatively simple things, and yet what a difference their institution would make to those of us currently destined to spend long and rather desperate evenings eating dusty shortbread in places like Ye Olde Churle.