What my mother did in January

Sue Bennett rang to say the boiler has gone in Greenfield and they are getting it replaced, and that they have the money for it, and she said that last part before I had asked, which is a thing she has done my whole life. When we were young there was a January ritual I did not understand at the time. She would sit at the kitchen table after dinner with a bank book, a calculator and a pencil, for about an hour, and the rule — never stated, completely understood — was that you did not interrupt it and you did not ask about it. And then she would put it away and that was the end of it until the following January, and nobody in that house ever said a word about money in between. I thought that was what competence looked like. I thought it for about thirty years. What I notice now is that it worked. We were never short in any way I knew about, and my father never carried it, and I had no idea until I was in my twenties that there had been two years in the nineties when it was genuinely bad. And also: I did the same thing at eleven at night in September with a laptop instead of a bank book, and told nobody, and felt competent.

That it is handled, that handling it is a private activity, and that saying it out loud would make it everybody's. I have never written that down before. It is almost word for word what I would say about my own behaviour this year.