University exams are over, so our sons will be home soon. That means we have spent a full academic year as empty-nesters and I’m apprehensive about what they will find on their return – and not just the brown, crispy corpses of the elder’s houseplants. We haven’t fallen apart, split up or sunk into desperate sadness. We missed them, but they seemed happy enough, so we were happy for them. However, their absence has made us … what? Odd? I think that’s it: odd.
For a start, they haven’t been back since we installed two chairs in front of the glass door to the garden, where we now spend all our free time, like Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets, commenting, usually unfavourably, on the local birds. I’m uncomfortable at the thought of our sons overhearing this stuff (“Here comes double-chin magpie”; “Starlings are real assholes”). We each have our own eccentric refinements of armchair time: I have identified a specific pigeon nemesis to rage against, while my husband has installed one of his numerous gadgets for monitoring and complaining about household electricity consumption in his eyeline. He even calls it “my pigeon”.
Domestically, things have deteriorated dramatically. We do one load of washing a week, if that – the “not dirty enough to wash” floordrobe situation is intense – and I have largely kept my promise never to cook again. Unlike the groaning bird food shed, the human cupboards are as bare and austere as my father’s were when I would visit him in my university days – the only treat he could offer was a two-pack of shortbread fingers pilfered from some Great Western train. I’m not sure how to reconcile this with the two hours of vintage MasterChef Australia we watch every night, but I can now judge the “cuisson” on a mud crab at 20 paces and know how to use lemon myrtle or add macadamia crumb for a “crunchy element”, skills I have no intention of ever using. Basically, we need a dose of vigorous filial scorn to drag us back in the vague direction of civilisation. I hope we’re not already too far gone.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
