What a delight to have my 29-year-old son living at home to put me right on absolutely EVERYTHING I believe!

SOME have expressed dismay over this week’s news that because of the ruinous cost of housing, children in Britain today are forced to live with their parents until they are 24.

All I can say is that those who escape so young are the lucky ones. And not only them, but their parents, too.

I write with some feeling, as the father of a 29-year-old — 30 next month — who remains firmly ensconced in the family nest, and shows precious little sign of spreading his wings any time soon.

But though the drawbacks are obvious, for him as much as for us oldies, I try to look on the bright side.

True, it’s embarrassing for the poor boy (poor man, I should say) to have his boring old mum and dad on the premises when he wants to bring friends home. It can’t be much fun, either, to find his parents commandeering the telly to watch some dire costume drama, when his beloved Fulham FC is in action on another channel.

But from his point of view, the arrangement has many upsides, too — not least the free bed and board, Mum’s home cooking, the run of the fridge and no worries about council tax, the TV licence fee, gas or electricity bills.

(Yes, I know, I ought to charge him for all this, if only a token sum to get him used to the trials of adulthood. But as an over-indulgent, comfortably off father, I can’t quite bring myself to ask him to pay out of his sporadic earnings on not much more than the minimum wage.)

Guilty

As for Mrs U and me, well, I suppose we’d be a fair bit richer if we didn’t have that extra mouth to feed. And it would be nice to see our son independently settled — for his sake as much as ours.

Indeed, when I read this week that people who go camping tend to be much happier than those who don’t, the guilty thought flashed across my mind that perhaps I should buy the lad a tent and send him off to live in it until he can afford a proper home.

But I must admit that having him on the premises isn’t all bad for us, either.

For one thing, it’s great to have a free dog-walker on hand, and someone who’s often at home to accept deliveries when my wife and I are out. On rare occasions, our son has also been known to empty the dishwasher, and even to put the bins out on a Wednesday evening.

Oh, and once in a while, he cooks up a mean curry from the leftovers of our Sunday joint.

Call me an old softy, if you will, but I confess that sometimes I like having him around for the sheer pleasure of his company. He is highly intelligent, has a wry sense of humour — and I flatter myself that he quite likes us, in spite of what he clearly sees as our manifest faults and our deeply misguided opinions. Which brings me to the point of this week’s musings: one thing I won’t miss, if he ever flies the nest, is the tension that always arises between us when political matters come up in conversation.

I suspect that other parents in my position will know just what I mean.

I hasten to say that, unlike the most politically minded of his three older brothers, he is not a rabid Corbynista. But his views are certainly to the Left of mine, and he does like to keep his old dad up to date with the correct way of thinking these days.

For example, I’m indebted to him for the information that I was an idiot to vote for Brexit. He’s also let me know that I’m a transphobic bigot for clinging to my antediluvian belief that people with penises are not women, as I understand that word. Nor am I keen enough, he reckons, on crippling the economy in pursuit of Net Zero.

As for the Coronation, which I thought magnificent and moving, it seems that I was quite wrong again. In fact, as my boy has patiently explained, it was an absurdly outdated, Ruritanian ceremony, celebrating an institution that has no place in the modern world.

Oh dear, my mistake — though I draw some comfort from the knowledge that it was a mistake shared by the great majority of my fellow Britons.

Shocking

No, the really big story of that day, if our son is to believed, was not the crowning of a new constitutional monarch, but the arrest by the Metropolitan Police of six activists from the pressure group Republic, who were innocently ‘exercising their democratic right to protest’.

Here was shocking proof, or so my son tells me, that in brutally suppressing civil liberties, the British authorities were behaving no better than the Chinese in Hong Kong.

Now, I can never quite decide whether to rise to the boy’s bait, and engage in a full-blown row with him over such matters as the pros and cons of Brexit, the definition of a woman, the perils of green zealotry or the relative merits of constitutional monarchies and republics.

If only I had the stomach for a fight, I would certainly offer him my thoughts on the magnificent opportunities Brexit would open up, if our Government would seize them.

I would stick to my guns, too, in insisting that only men have penises.

I’d also tell him that our constitutional monarchy is a hugely effective force for unity, stability and continuity in our fast- changing world, and that our liberties and national cohesion would be far less secure under a divisive elected president.

For the sake of domestic harmony, however, I almost always avoid an argument, confining myself to grunting noncommittally, before returning to the crossword.

But oh, how I wish I had taken our son to task over his ludicrous comparison of those six arrests with the behaviour of the Chinese in Hong Kong — a fatuous point that has been echoed by Left-wing cartoonists, politicians, columnists and broadcasters alike.

Take the BBC, which has been up on its high horse all week about this supposed assault on civil liberties. Leave aside how strange it is that the Corporation seems not to care a damn about the right to protest, when its staff happen to disagree with the protesters. (When was the last time, for example, that you heard Auntie stand up for those pro-life activists whose right to pray quietly outside abortion clinics has been ruthlessly curtailed by Parliament?)

Wrecked

But when six anti-monarchists are arrested — any one of whom might have hijacked the Coronation and wrecked it for millions by frightening the horses or spoiling the photographs by chucking eggs at the King’s carriage — we’re told we live in a Chinese-style dictatorship!

Does anyone at the BBC seriously imagine the Chinese authorities would have publicly apologised for arresting six critics of the Beijing regime — as, inexplicably, the Met chose to do in the case of the anti-monarchists?

For that matter, would the Chinese state broadcaster have awarded generous airtime to protesters against the Communist system, allowing them to put their arguments almost unchallenged? More likely they would have been marched off to some grim labour camp to be ‘re-educated’, never to be seen again.

As for the relative merits of constitutional monarchies and republics, may I just point out that the people of Hong Kong were a damn sight freer and happier when they were ruled by the British throne — a touch Ruritanian though it may be — than they are today as citizens of the People’s Republic.

All this I would have told my dear son, if only I’d been up for a row. As it is, the poor lad will just have to put up with me, as so often in the past, moaning in the public prints about the increasingly unbridgeable divide between our generations.

But how’s this for an offer: from the day he moves out, I’ll never write a word against him again. Do we have a deal?