My kids think my move into the garden shed means divorce

I’ve moved out of my home. No, Caroline and I haven’t broken up. It’s just that we’re having the house rewired, which means we have to be out of our bedroom by 8 a.m. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t matter but about eight months ago I started a blog about lockdown and I’m usually up until 4 a.m. working on it. We have almost 7,000 subscribers to our daily newsletter and I want it to be waiting for them when they wake up. And superhuman though I am, I can’t survive on four hours’ sleep a night.

I haven’t gone very far. I’ve stuck a blow-up mattress in the garden shed that doubles as my office. But, weirdly, the children seem to think this is a prelude to divorce. Given how many of their friends’ parents have separated — the divorce rate in England and Wales is 42 per cent — they’ve become experts in the telltale signs, and apparently Mum and Dad sleeping in different bedrooms is one of them. My efforts to reassure them have been in vain. Earlier this week, I explained to 13-year-old Freddie that it was only a temporary measure, but he just stared at me anxiously. ‘Don’t you and Mum love each other any more?’ he asked.

Perhaps the children can sense that I’m secretly rather enjoying this arrangement. Living with three teenagers and a 12-year-old — and with the bathroom across the hall from the main bedroom — I rarely experience a night of uninterrupted sleep. Teenage boys, in particular, seem to be incapable of treading lightly when they get up in the night. That part of the brain which tells you how your behaviour is affecting others hasn’t been activated in their case, and no amount of shouting and screaming on my part will switch it on.