Trigger warning: if you don’t like people talking about their feelings, this post is probably not for you and it might be best if you scrolled on down.

I spend a deal of my time asking people how they feel, partly because I am truly interested in listening to peoples’ stories and partly because it diverts me from the task in hand, and also from addressing how I am feeling.

I think it’s called pathetic fallacy, isn’t it, that literary device whereby the weather reflects the mood of the piece of the protagonists: the blood-red moon followed by the storm in Jane Eyre? Lots of examples in Wuthering Heights and Dickens but that’s the one that sticks in my head. Funny the things one remembers from O level English Literature.

Today’s feelings have been reflected in the weather. I started off sunny as the morning, despite being woken early by a pitifully yipping Oscar. That’s unusual for him but perhaps he had woken from a bad dream or maybe he was missing his young master.

Nonetheless a new day had dawned and I felt sure that gangs of workmen would come and toil industriously on our kitchen and make everything right again. By mid morning it had clouded over as it became clear that one solitary Romanian labourer was here and no-one else was picking up the phone. I did manage a huge phone rant to the kitchen company which, in the circumstances, was at least doing SOMETHING.

It was later, on the way back from being somewhere else that I drove home in the rain and gave way at a roundabout to a little silver car, very like the Boywonder’s. Not the same make or model but little and silver. Great, hot tears started to roll down my face as I realised that I am suffering the beginning of empty nest syndrome. It is a process of adapting to someone being missing, of things never being the same again.

MsDD has been valiant in her efforts to pep up but my grief is undeniable and fortified by my annoyance and frustration at the lack of my kitchen which, in my mind, should have been there by now. It’s hard to explain but to me the kitchen is the heart of the house. I spend most of my waking hours in there and having to put up with its loss, albeit temporary, is unnerving. Silly, isn’t it, how we invest so much of ourselves in our surroundings?

Anyway, enough of that. The BW Facetimed. He’s settling into his room in halls and off to a new students’ gathering tonight. And me? I cried a bit but I’ll get used to it. Was that suitably incoherent?