9.30 am This is where we are sitting, this is how my desk looks this morning; welcome to my world. It's Sunday morning, but not feeling like one - Sunday morning has been for sitting in pyjamas with J (daughter) eating Readybrek and watching catch-up trash telly ... Strictly, X Factor, Come Dine With Me, Don't Tell The Bride (her choice, that last one, I am often too squeamish to watch the ending in case it goes wrong). This morning, this is not happening, because yesterday, we took J to start her university course, so she is in her new room - or having breakfast in hall, or out for a walk, or who knows - and so she is not here and the house is empty, as Husband and Dog have gone out to the woods, and the Next Stage, the empty nest, begins.

I go out in the garden barefoot, because she is not here to stop me (she despairs of the state of my feet); there is no bright sun this morning to illuminate the red leaves of the climber whose name I've forgotten - it begins with Q to denote the five-ness of its leaves, which doesn't seem to me to be its most striking characteristic - but the dew gives them a soft gloss.

The sunflowers are putting on a brave show. I like their mixture of mathematical precision and blowsy untidiness.

Today's main task is to write obituaries and deal with students' personal statements. The endings of lives, and the beginnings of adulthood, summarised and distilled in three or four succinct paragraphs, highlighting the successes (whatever that might mean to that person) and glossing over the weaknesses and the failures, trying to find a coherent narrative through the chaos of a human life. T talks in his personal statement about trying to make sense of the mess of his existence, trying to tie up loose ends - he is reading Frank Kermode at the moment, we've been talking about A Sense of an Ending, both Kermode and Julian Barnes.