Suzanne Harrington: Take a tour of my empty nest — it's a place of wonder

'All that empty nest syndrome stuff is, I suspect, a rumour started by men and adult children to keep women poised in sandwich-making mode'

Suzanne Harrington: 'The empty nest is a place of wonder. A fragrant place of freshly brewed coffee, to be enjoyed at leisure; a kitchen filled with nothing but music from the radio.'

You know that little mouse in the shed in Wales, secretly filmed tidying up the same mess every evening, like a tiny Sisyphus dragging objects into a neat pile, only for the same pile of debris to be scattered far and wide again the following day? Parents everywhere — especially lone parents — will be identifying so hard with that mouse.

Yet you may have noticed when people say about children, in that whimsical misty-eyed way, “Oh, they grow up so fast” it’s nearly always men. This is because, generally speaking, they haven’t been the ones doing all the repetitive slog for 20 years straight. Imagine then, if you’re a single parent, just how unfast this growing up process is. It does not go by in a flash, unless by “flash” you mean a three-legged donkey pulling a broken cart over potholes. It takes forever.