After the pandemic chaos, my house is all too quiet

WE might have borrowed the term from our feathered friends, but in fact, human ‘nests’ don’t empty in the same way that birds’ ones do.

Currently at full capacity and offering squawking room only in trees and hedgerows up and down the country, in a few weeks – or months for some larger birds – almost all these nests will clear out in a single day.

It’s a brutal business: most of the babies will soar while the luckless fledglings who don’t pick up the basics of flying will be nudged out of the nest by parents anxious to have the place to themselves again. It’s a nice analogy but in its finer details – not least the unpalatable avian infanticide – it doesn’t really apply to the human housing situation.

It takes years for human nests with multiple fledglings to empty. My own siblings’ situation was typical. I flew first, at 23, into rented accommodation. Then about a year afterwards, my younger sister went travelling and she never lived in the family home again. My older sister bought her own house about two years later and my brother left, eventually, after a sulky year in the bungalow our parents bought for their retirement. It took about five years for their nest to empty.

I’ll leave to one side the current appalling situation with rents and house prices that will see most of my children’s generation staying at home until they’re well into their thirties or even their forties. Because there is another sort of empty nest syndrome happening now – and it’s every bit as brutal as the avian version.

There were hundreds of thousands of us locked down, effectively for two years, with only our own adult children for company. And like a curate’s egg – boy, do we love a bird metaphor – it was good in parts. We were very lucky in our home because we all rubbed along together pretty well, with the occasional bedroom opt-outs for those sick of the sight of their parents and siblings. But I cannot count now how many evenings we sat together around our big kitchen table or out on the patio, drinking beer and wine, listening to music, talking nonsense and competing to make each other laugh the most. When takeaway pints were a thing, we invented the JIRT – Jar In Rapid Transport – which was basically me and my son driving to the nearest participating pub and collecting two pulled pints for everyone back home. Looking back now, it feels almost festive. In the worst of times, it was the best of times.

In a more sober light, there was a realisation that if it hadn’t been for Covid, most of us parents would never have had that opportunity of spending so much precious time in the company of our grown-up children. It wasn’t natural, but in an unnatural time, it was an undeniable perk.

AND now suddenly, they’re all gone. They might be still sleeping under our roof but they’re back at work or in college during the day, and in the evenings, they’re – quite rightly – making up for lost time by socialising with friends. Suddenly, with indecent haste, our nests have cleared out.

Having put in two years during which I could literally count on one finger the occasions when I was home alone, I am suddenly on my own most of the time. The other evening, I came home from the theatre and discovered the house in darkness and the alarm on. It is so long since I had to either set or disarm our alarm that I struggled to remember the code. I have gone from cooking for five people to just catering for myself; the flown inhabitants’ meal times are now utterly unreliable. Even when we make an effort to eat together – a Saturday night or a Sunday evening – we are usually down a body or two, and it’s just not the same as the intense, elbows-out, fighting-overcontrol-of-the-music evenings we all came to rely on as normal.

I don’t know how other parents are managing, but I’m struggling with this post-pandemic SENS (Sudden Empty

Next Syndrome. And unlike the JIRT, I’ve nobody to share my latest acronym with.) I miss the chatter, the bickering, the madness of having five adults who shouldn’t really have all been there at the same time captured under the same roof. I am lonely and I am under-employed in my own home.

I know that children leaving home is part of the natural order, and in time, I hope they all properly leave for their own exciting new lives. But nobody prepared us for the shock of our children all leaving together, flying away as quickly as the birds. The house has never been quieter or tidier. And in space, no one can hear you sigh.