A son who has left home

Dear Connor, Do you remember we used to watch that documentary on television, back in the days when it was OK to stay in and watch trash television with your ma and pa, before you became so very grown up, so handsome, so funny, so cool and such a social butterfly?

Can you remember it? I Shouldn’t Be Alive it was called, We used to laugh at the impossibilities of the situations and discuss how we’d fare in similar situations – you were always going to survive, dad maybe, but not me. I’d be a blubbering mess and give up at the first hurdle!

We’d moan the whole way through the programme and say it was 15 minutes of factual events stretched out over 90 minutes of television sandwiched with those terrible home shopping adverts (always a ladder, a steam mop, some hair device and of course an ab-circle pro – you shouldn’t be alive if you were ever crazy enough to buy one of these items).

And then we’d swear we would never watch it again. A week would go rolling by and sure enough same time, same place, we’d all take our place on the sofas and watch it.

We’d book that annual camping trip in the same way. It was supposedly a way to celebrate both of our birthdays that were days away from each other, although we all knew I hated camping so why I had to endure it for my birthday was an injustice that I never got to the bottom of. But every November the trip would be booked and off we’d go for a couple of days.

Can you remember just sitting in our camp chairs watching the stars and feeling that you could just reach out and touch the Milky Way? Remember falling into our beds and it would take a while to get to sleep because of giggling about the day’s events but everyone keen to get to sleep as soon as, before the snore fest began. We’d like to think you are blessed with great parents, but what we definitely know is that you are blessed with two of the finest snorers in the southern hemisphere.

So now, we’ve just come back from our first annual trip without you. We knew it would happen eventually, but just like the time we forgot to pack the sleeping bags, we just weren’t prepared.

All the years we thought you were our little boy when in fact you were the one putting up the tent and making sure we brought the sleeping bags.

Anyway, I suppose what I’m writing to tell you is that we miss you. We are so proud of you going off to university, the first in our family, and that while we were all so worried about you going off into the big, wide world, what we really worried about was us being left behind.

Your first year at uni is almost done.

We both knew the day we first held you, that we were in for an adventure, and now it’s your adventure, not ours. And the next adventures may even involve a