Stepping away from the fire

For as long as anyone in the family can remember, the father has stood at the barbecue every Friday in the garden in Rabat.

He does not let anyone else near it. He decides when the coals are ready, how long the lamb stays on, who is served first. The lunch is his, and everyone knows it.

It has also become a strain. His knees are not what they were. He gets short-tempered in the smoke. His sons hover with tongs and are sent away. The lunches still happen, but they have started to feel like something the family gets through for his sake.

The obvious answer is that he should step back, and the obvious objection is that stepping back would mean admitting something. In many families, handing over the thing you have always done reads as defeat, so nobody suggests it, and the strain carries on for years.

But the lunch was never meant to be about him at the grill. It was meant to bring the family round a table every week. If that is what he cares about, the most generous thing he can do may be to teach his eldest how he judges the coals, sit down under the tree with a glass of tea, and let the meal go on without his hands on it.

That is not giving up the lunch. It is making sure it outlives his years at the fire.

Sometimes the person who has held something together the longest improves it most by leaving it, and the leaving is the last thing he builds for it.