Why I'm extra reflective this Rosh Hashanah - The Jewish Chronicle

Although I am not a religious person — God and I parted ways a very long time ago and I fear we are now well beyond the reach of couples counselling — there is something about Rosh Hashanah that prompts me to be, if not spiritual, then at least deeply reflective.

My natural tendency is usually to look backwards, to the year gone by, rather than towards the future, but this year our lives are on the cusp of changing irrevocably, so even I can’t avoid thinking about what’s just ahead: our son is about to leave home to start university.
Surely it’s only a few blinks of an eye ago that the darling boy was uttering his first word? “Duck”, if you’re wondering. “Mummy” didn’t even scrape into his first ten words, falling some way behind the tricky to enunciate but more important “tractor”. Now, he seems to be 19, and, although he is still only a teeny-tiny boy in my head, he is no longer looking up to me, but prone to leaning his elbow on my head to show off how tall he is.

Although I had always presumed he would go to uni at some point, it was one of those things, like my next knee operation, some way off in that vague, misty land of the future. I knew it would happen theoretically but I didn’t need to get anxious about it for ages; I could save the fretting for later and have it to look forward to.

But now, it is happening. When asked if the university had sent a reading list (he’ll be studying Philosophy and Politics), he scoffed as if the very idea were preposterous.
“They don’t even do that anymore,” he insisted, as if I’d suggested he might have to write his essays using a quill pen.

His chief concerns are: a) how much money can he wrestle out of us for his weekly budget for food, drink etc, and b) what kitchen equipment can he acquire as his accommodation is self-catering? Never mind the books, can he have a couple of good saucepans and a decent, sharp knife?

In spring, he went travelling to south-east Asia for ten weeks. Usually, I start worrying about him once he goes beyond Hampstead (well, it is over a mile away), but I just about survived his absence because it happily coincided with a period when I was working on my next book. I am usually unrivalled in my work-avoidance capabilities, but for once, instead of making more tea and shifting piles of paperwork from one surface to another, I got my head down and worked, worked, worked. Each academic term will be about the same length as those travels, so I’m planning to adopt the same strategy while he’s away.

As if this change weren’t enough to contend with, another upheaval is also suddenly slap bang in front of me: The Husband is retiring. After 40 years at the same company, at the age of 63, he is stepping down. Given how hard he has worked for so long, he is so exhausted that he might well spend the first three months asleep — I will have to creep into the darkened bedroom once a day to roll him over and give him a quick wipe with a damp flannel, but otherwise I think I should leave him be and let him have the rest. But after that? I bossily tell him that he must have a strategic plan; he can’t wing it or decide at the last minute as he usually does.

‘You’re going to need some proper hobbies!’ I bark at him. After all, I’m not retiring. No-one in my family retires because we don’t have normal jobs to retire from: when I die, they will have to squash down my cold, dead writing hand, still clawed round a pen, into the coffin and cart me off.

I am panicking that I won’t be able to step outside my study for my usual programme of work-avoidance activities in case The Husband is prowling around with not enough to worry about. “Learn a language! Take up the clarinet! Join a gym!”

“I’m going to get super-fit,” he promises, patting his slight paunch.
“But not my gym,” I add.

“But it might be fun — we can exercise together!” he says, full of his usual, annoying enthusiasm. I don’t want him butting in, telling me to go for the burn when I’m quite content exercising at my usual gentle pace.

I need to come up with a place where he’s unlikely to keep bothering me.
Is it too late for me to take up religion again?

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Family