I’m driving my daughter to Canterbury for her first Fresher’s event. She’s doing her makeup in the passenger seat and I’m wondering why I agreed to collect her again later when the club ends, at 2 am tomorrow morning.
“How are you feeling?” I ask
“I’m fine. I’m a bit..”
“Trepidatious?” I offer.
She grunts what I take as an agreement but continues applying mascara, while I try to avoid bumps in the road.
As we approach the station I ask her why she didn’t take the train with her new, as yet unmet, uni friend who she’s been chatting with on social media all week.
“She comes from Sittingbourne,” she says.
“Yes, but it would have been much easier for me to drive you to Sittingbourne station than..oh never mind.”
She gets out of the car having offered me her forehead to kiss, and greets a girl wearing as little as she is, but I resist the temptation to yell, “Won’t you be cold later?” as they disappear off into the city.
Weaving my way home I replay a conversation we’d had on our journey down about homesickness.
I tell her that I feel sad for the students who had arrived today who weren’t going clubbing with their fellow evacuees.
“All the coffee bars and the uni night club are open so that people can meet up and introduce themselves wherever they want”. she tells me.
“I still feel sad for them. Being away from home for the first time and on their own.” I say, resistant to her solid logic.
Watching the painted chevrons scoot under my car along the largely empty motorway I remember being offered a place at a very good catering college when I left school wanting to be a chef and turning it down because I just didn’t want to live away from home.
I remember too being given a sales job at the company where I’d been a trainee which meant running my own territory in North London, meaning I’d need to find a flat to rent, and how I’d had my first real bout of depression soon afterward which had forced me to leave the job after an extended absence signed off sick.
Wondering what I’m going to do to keep myself amused until the 2 am pick up I get a text from my son who is at a friends 21st birthday BBQ out in the middle of nowhere.
“What time are you driving to Canterbury?” it reads.
“2 am” I reply, knowing what’s coming.
“Could you pick us up on your way back through?” he writes.
Firstly I marvel at my son’s loose interpretation of “on your way”.
Instead of calmly texting back to say that it isn’t convenient I moan about how he should be more considerate than to ask me if I’m willing to do something I want to say “No” to but will then feel guilty about.
At home, after Googling a routed round trip to pick everyone up I abandon the project and tell myself not to be so ridiculous. He’s twenty and perfectly capable of getting himself home.
I immediately feel much better at encouraging his independence and text him.
“Sorry I can’t collect you.” Then I add, “Get a cab. I’ll pay.”
My father comes into my mind. He would always come and collect me and my friends from gigs at the Hammersmith Odeon. The exchange would always be the same.
“Dad, can you collect us from a gig on Saturday night?”
He would scrunch up his face and run his hand through his straggly grey hair and make a frustrated sound through exhaled breath before replying;
“Oh, I suppose so. What time?”
It always took something away from the kindness of the gesture. I wondered why if it wasn’t convenient, he didn’t just say “No”.
I arrive to collect my daughter at 2 am when the clubs are beginning to thin out.
She has a new friend with her who we drop off on campus.
“She seems nice,” I say after she’s walked off into the darkness.
“She is. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t made a few contacts before the term started” she tells me, already on her phone reassuring he boyfriend that she’s safely on her way home.
“Are you glad you chose a uni so close to home so that you didn’t have to live there?” I say.
“I chose it because it has a good course and a placement year. We really liked it at the open day too, remember? I also get to keep the rest of my life in shape.” she tells me firmly.
As if she knew what I was thinking all along she smiles and follows up with, “I don’t do things just because other people do them, dad.”
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