Tim Dowling: I’ve lost a dog sofa but gained a son | Life and style

Tim Dowling: I’ve lost a dog sofa but gained a son | Life and style

The middle one is home from university. He and I drag the two huge bags containing his worldly possessions across the threshold.

“Be prepared,” I say. “You’ll notice a lot of things missing.”

“Like what?” he says.

“Mum threw out a lot of stuff,” I say. “Before the move.” He drags his bag halfway to the kitchen, lets go, and carries on without it.

“Whoa,” he says, his voice ringing with a strange echo. Looking at the kitchen through his eyes, I see what he means: the dog sofa is gone; the free-standing unit is gone; two of eight chairs are missing. He has yet to open a cupboard, where he will find our mug collection decimated. He looks at the stack of unassembled cardboard boxes propped against the wall where the dog sofa used to be.

“Do I still have a bed?” he says.

“It’s worth checking,” I say.

A week on, I am still surprised by the absence of certain items: plugs for particular appliances, a pair of kitchen tongs whose importance to me was obviously insufficiently apparent, the garden bench. Each time I go to look for something and find it not there, I have to swallow my anger. Last week I made an unattractive scene about four missing lamp wicks that I cannot afford to repeat.

An hour later I am sitting at the kitchen table when the middle one wheels my bicycle â€" the last remnant of our two-wheeled transport fleet â€" in from the garden, the flat rear tyre squeaking against the floorboards.

Illustration: Benoit Jacques for the Guardian

“Sorry â€" it needs a new inner tube,” I say. “Until last week I possessed a range of sizes, but no more.” He looks at the bike, and then at me.

“Fix it,” he says. His confidence in my ability to put things right is touching, and normally quite misplaced. But I realise what he is demanding is far from impossible.

“OK,” I say. “Go to the shop and buy a little repair kit.”

My set of bicycle tyre levers is, surprisingly, still in the tool cupboard. I remove the rear wheel from the bike and prise off the tyre. The middle one returns with a repair kit. On my orders, he fills the sink with water. After inflating the inner tube slightly, we hold it under water in sections, until bubbles appear.

“We really need a piece of chalk to mark the hole,” I say. “But a search for chalk will, I guarantee, yield only despair.”

“There’s chalk in the kit,” the boy says.

“Is there?” I say. “How charming.”

The repaired tyre is back on the bike in 20 minutes, and the boy, home for all of half an hour, is on his way somewhere. As I toss the chalk into the drawer where the lamp wicks used to be, something terrible occurs to me.

Eventually, I find it in a box under the potting bench in the shed: my lantern, the one I bought those lamp wicks for. When I ordered it, many years ago, I imagined myself sitting in the garden on summer evenings in the soft glow of its light. Now I can only think about how many times I failed to do this.

I pull out the lantern and examine it. I see that I had the foresight to install a new wick the last time I used it.

There’s no place to sit in the garden, so I take the lantern into the kitchen and light it, adjusting the flame until it glows steadily. The days are long at this time of year; it won’t actually be dark for at least three hours. It doesn’t matter, I think to myself. There’s still plenty of wick left.

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