Jane Lovering: They’ve left home and so has half my kitchen

It used to be the month of children bedding-down in new school routines, losing that brand new pencil case filled with all those arcane items you could never see the use for, (does anyone actually use set squares these days?) and coming home wearing one shoe and someone else’s raincoat.

But now I have managed to get three of my four home-dwellers off to university! And, because of that, I have discovered a whole new meaning to “October Blues”... Oh, no, it’s not what you might think, I’ve not become an “empty nester”, after all, I still have one offspring at home, spending hours in the bathroom and slamming doors at inappropriately late hours. No, these blues take a different form – that of finding that the university-goers have cleared the house of all those items I took for granted.

Yes, when once the biggest challenge was finding stationery that didn’t have One Direction printed all over it, sending them to university involves purchasing the contents of a starter home; kettle, cutlery and crockery, bath mats, industrial quantities of shampoo and bleach. And, when I’d managed to stuff this into the back of the car, drive the various offspring to their relevant destinations and then head home to my newly-quiet dwelling with a modicum of pride in a job well done, I discovered that they’d emptied the airing cupboard, taken all the tins of soup I’d been stockpiling for a Winter Emergency and, inexplicably, removed the spice rack. So now I bumble around the house pining for my towels as I try to dry myself on the pathetic, thin flannel that is all that is left in the once-bulging bathroom cupboard, contemplate a depleted food supply that is now comprised solely of food the children didn’t like enough to take with them (and there are only so many meals you can make with lemon curd and butter beans), and stare sadly at that gap on the kitchen work surface that previously held a rather nice spice and herb carousel. I look back on those days when all they took to school was the middle of toilet rolls and packets of macaroni, gaze on my piles of un-cut-up magazines and marvel at the fact that the scissors and sellotape remain where I leave them. I load the washing machine once a week instead of every day, admire my much-reduced food bill, and quietly admit to a small pang of loss. I mostly miss the spice rack though.

Jane Lovering is an award winning romantic comedy writer who is published by Choc Lit.