Seeing your children off to university isn’t easy, but it was worth dragging the dog across a crowded dancefloor to say some goodbyes
This child-leaving-home business seems to get harder every time. My first experience of it was as the child, albeit a 19-year-old one. Very upsetting it was, too. My parents went away for the weekend so as to avoid any doorstep melodramas. But my younger brother, who hitherto had only ever cried after coming off his skateboard, horrified me by shedding a tear as I left. A mate of mine was starting college in London the same day, so we’d hired a van for a friend of ours to drive us down from the West Midlands. “I couldn’t believe your brother was crying,” said the driver, as we left the place the three of us had called home all our lives. This was September 1986. You Can Call Me Al by Paul Simon was on the radio. To this day, that song tightens something in my stomach.
Accordingly, three years ago when I took my older daughter off to college, I was braced for the blubbing. It didn’t quite happen as I expected. I was fine until I drove away from her halls of residence but then, almost without warning, I found myself sobbing so hard that a contact lens popped out. I found it, re-inserted, and carried on bawling for a good bit more. Then I felt kind of, sort of, OK, and drove home.