Back home with the family
in later life

So with Robert Frost’s encouragement, I re-occupy my family home. A few things have changed since I left in May for my round-the-world trip, redundancy packet in my back pocket and not a care in the world. After a lifetime of family ignorance, Mother has tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. And the knowledge is that in nice families, the loo seat remains down. So the rest of us - a total of four adult males, one semi-retired, in occasional or continuous habitation - must be re-educated. This leads to some undignified wrangling. I am aroused from journalistic pursuits by Mother's exasperated comments on the state of the family conveniences, or loud regrets about our inadequate upbringing. And like guilty children Father and I trade the blame for our misdemeanour. 

Metabolic differences

At least it takes our mind off the central heating disputes. According to Father, to feel the cold is a kind of moral failure.  The central heating has only two positions, off or too high, and windows must be opened in the winter. The popular explanation for this is that he was a "war child", conditioned by the stoical conditions of country life and rationing - his family skinned their own rabbits and ate their greens with gratitude. But I know better. Simple comparison of hand temperature has shown that his metabolism is different from the rest of us.  

Space Invasion

As I struggle to re-establish a career post-dot-bomb, I begin to realise that October has seen us brought physically closer together by events. Father is an interpreter, working for such organisations as the UN, the G8 and the WHO. Last month's attacks on New York led to the cancellation of the annual meeting in Washington of the IMF International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which Father had been contracted to attend. Now, instead of suffering twice the normal anxiety in his interpreter's booth, he was able to draw his fee from the comfort and inactivity of his own home. Mother was here as usual, returning between tedious bouts of treatment for her ovarian cancer to the ever-vigilant pursuit of order and aesthetic perfection for house and garden.

Younger Brother has finished university and is casting about for a new way to fill his days in the same disconsolate haze that I remember from my own life nine years ago. Now that the fun part of my early mid-life crisis is over, I have invaded and taken up residence in his room.

We jostle uneasily for space, I periodically stemming the invasion into My Half of his proliferating guitars and minidiscs, he angrily pulling the duvet over sunken eyes if I dare open a crack in the curtains before 11 in the morning.

Older Brother, 31, even put in a brief cameo, flying in from Paris with two years' belongings and his half-finished novel. This saw him consigned to the roughly mattress-wide patch of floor sandwiched between the 21-year-old rock star-to-be and me, the 29-year-old freelance journalist and internet producer.

So what did we do? What else do you do after your parents have turned in, leaving you at glorious liberty in your own room? We reverted to infancy and switched on the Sony Playstation. 

More coming soon..