My kids' school just had
a talk about university applications. It was all about this course and that
course and all I could think was, How can this be? That my boys will soon be
applying for college or uni and washing their own pants?
It only seems like last
week that I was shepherding them home from the park, dripping and filthy and
attracting those 'Look at those poor, sodden children!' type looks. I walked
through the park yesterday for the first time in about eight years. It's been completely
gentrified with a renovated paddling pool and loads of shiny new play
equipment. In our day there'd been a burnt-out climbing frame and a stinky
little hut full of fag butts.
But actually, I'm
enjoying the fact that they're older. The whole uni/college thing is thrilling
to me because I didn't go. I left school at seventeen - the age my
boys are now - and, thanks to my dad spotting a tiny recruitment ad in our
local paper, applied for a job as a trainee journalist at DC Thomson in Dundee,
publishers of Jackie magazine.
Is anything more
thrilling than leaving home? I was desperate to get the hell
out. Having applied for art school, and failed to gain a place due to being
pretty crappy at drawing, I realised how lucky I was to get a job of any
description, let alone one on the magazine I'd loved since I was thirteen. The
next three years were spent writing about blusher and how to make
'Dave' notice you. I lived in a bedsit, then flatshares, surviving on toast and
beer, mostly. It was like being a student, without the lectures - the average
age in the Jackie office was about nineteen.
Jimmy and I gave our
boys a taste of independent living recently, and left them home alone for a week. We'd asked them if they wanted to come on holiday with us (our
daughter had been whisked off to Spain by her friend's family) and they replied with a resounding 'NO THANKS.' Then they proceeded to organise a 'gathering'. Yes, I was
worried about returning home to be greeted by inebriated teenagers and scowling
police. But, desperate for a break, we set off.
Friends moan about not
being 'needed' any more, and feeling redundant, but these days I think, what
are you on about? Who wants to be needed every minute of the day? I've had
seventeen years of being on hand, attending to my offspring's every needs, and
my reserves of patience and dutifulness have all run out - peeling the top off a
pot of Petit Filous would break me now. Anyway, Jimmy and I had a marvellous time,
doing the stuff we love to do - chatting, eating, looking at art, quaffing a
bottle of rose over a salad nicoise at lunchtime. And we came home to a tidy
house and no evidence of excessive partying.
My chilli plants had
been watered. There was milk in the fridge. One of my boys reported that he'd
made a Caesar salad - yes, an actual salad, with leaves. 'Next time,' he said,
'you might as well go away for two weeks.'
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