“I can live without Leonard Cohen playing”

WHEN your squalling, perfect fiends burst into your life demanding years of nurture, you hit the ground running and pretty much maintain that pace — give or take the odd sprint — for a couple of decades.

Raising kids doesn’t allow much time for existential musings; like a bird nudging her fledglings out of a nest and along a branch, I was too busy to mull over why or where I was nudging them.

So when my eldest son reached the end of the branch and took off, it came as a shock. ‘Away,’ I thought dumbly, as I stood in the airport and waved him off to South America for a year, ‘that’s where all the nudging leads’. I felt winded by the realisation, knocked sideways by a sudden ache of missing.