The nest empties

If you're sending your only (step)child off to university, you ought to make an occasion of it. There's no reason you can't spin the weekend out a bit, so we did.

Departure time was set by mutual pre-arrangement for 10.00, Saturday morning. At 05.00 he finally rolled in from saying goodbye to his friends. At 09.20 he was finally persuaded that if he wanted to make the journey washed and fed, now would be a good time to get up. At 09.45 he was saying, "look, can we speed this up a bit?"

An uneventual journey, apart from learning that Pease Pottage actually exists - or at least, motorway services of that name do. Luggage unloaded, new housemates met, and his mother allowed to make his bed, after which we were politely but firmly shown the door. And quite right too. I think I went through similar with my own mother in October 1984, apart from the making the bed thing.

So. Beloved had never been to Brighton before, so into town we went, me pointing out the church that actually features (though not by name) in The New World Order. Parking charges and crowds of no less than a couple of thousand put us off cultural activities like looking around the Pavilion. We edged our way along the sea front for a bit, then retrieved the car and drove along the coast from Brighton to Eastbourne - not least because Sandi Toksvig did exactly the same journey in a bus on Excess Baggage a couple of weeks ago and it sounded nice. Every now and then we would utter something wistful, like "I am so glad he got a house in Brighton and not Eastbourne, like the university were advising him to." It's a beautiful 20-mile trip, but a very long 20 miles.

More positively: a beautiful landscape of rolling downs, sparking sea, quaint villages, Roedean looking like a cross between Hogwarts and an HM penitentiary clinging to a cliff, Beachy Head, and just one man urinating at a bus stop while his fellow future passengers showed resolute Englishness by queuing in the opposite direction and ignoring him. Cream tea in the Victorian Tearooms on Eastbourne pier, then a cross-country trip through more lovely rolling downs bathed in sunlight to stay the night with an old school friend who lives in the vicinity.

Sunday morning: exploration of Horsham and then, finding it unexpectedly close, Guildford Cathedral. We wanted to go somewhere to kneel and say a brief prayer of thanks for the boy finally entering higher education, and where better than a place firmly associated with the Antichrist?

So it was perhaps ironic that the place was full of several hundred Masons, all in full aprons, medals and other forms of togs, gathered together for an annual service of thanksgiving. Seats were reserved for men with titles like "Provincial Grand Steward", which frankly I think is setting your sights too low. If I was going to be a Grand Steward, no way would I settle for being merely Provincial. Fortunately we still had about an hour before the service began so could explore in relative peace, if not quite the quiet we were hoping for. I stood next to one of the gents in the Gents, and found jokes about funny handshakes filling my mind. I'm quite glad none of them slipped out.

Then home, finally, to a strangely empty flat. You'd think that if we just shut his door and drew his curtains then for the rest of the flat it would be just like him still being there, but no, apparently not. I took the opportunity to hoover his room and could have sworn the carpet screamed: "stop! What is this strange thing you are doing to me?"

Followed by: "Hmm, actually that's quite nice."

And then: "Oh yeah, baby, more."

At which point I stopped.

Five years ago he couldn't wait to move in. Five years later he couldn't wait to move out. The mind and the spirit left some time before the body. This is life, and it is good. And now we see with no small level of interest what happens next.

Clearly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty

Dropped Bonusbarn off at the station this morning so he could head off to $Welsh_city_where_they_film_Torchwood for an interview. For peace of mind I’m trying to forget that last night we had a conversation which included the words, "oh, is it by the sea?"

And of course it makes me remember my own experiences all those years ago ... 1983 to be precise. Philosophy & Politics at Warwick. I stayed overnight in Coventry at a b&b, watched Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence at the cinema (I was the only one in the auditorium; staff kept trying to sell me the benefits of the other movies available) and arrived for my interview half an hour late, though it was the correct time as shown on the letter they had sent me. Thus I got the interview but missed out on the campus tour offered to other applicants, so afterwards I wandered around for a couple of hours on my own, on a drizzly grey November day.

While I was a-wandering, they were considering my answers to the test questions they set to check to confirm that the candidate is suitably philosophically minded. Apparently they used to set questions based on Bertrand Russell but no one dared contradict him, so the questions were now more general. There were at least two, which I can remember.

1. You are walking in the woods and you come across a dead animal in a trap. It obviously died slowly and in much pain. You think what a bad thing this was. Would it have been a bad thing if you hadn’t come along and found it?
   
   
2. Person A says, "birds can fly, you cannot fly, therefore you are not a bird." Person B replies, "birds cannot understand logic, I cannot understand logic, therefore I am a bird." Discuss.

And all he had to look forward to was a team-building exercise. Hah, kids today.

Must ask if he learned how to pronounce Cyncoed.

Bringing it one step closer

And so it came to pass that a sleepy teenager was crowbarred into the car at 8am on a Saturday morning and driven by his equally sleepy stepfather to the University of the West of England for an open day. The teenager was able to sleep for most of the way down the M4.

"I've read it all on the web, I don't need to see it ..."

Though even he ultimately admitted he was glad he went.

Accommodation Lady couldn't handle the complexities of interrupting a Powerpoint presentation to show a filmclip off a DVD. Eventually a parent in the audience had to show her how. She got the filmclip running and immediately (for some reason) clicked on the Powerpoint in the background, which of course came to the front and blanked out the filmclip. I have never before heard such tragic two syllable desolation as her squeaked "oh no!"

I fancied I detected a stirring of interest next to me when she got to the university's Student Village: "en suite and wireless internet." I was not wrong.

The course of interest is joint honours in Criminology and Media & Cultural Studies (i.e. watching lots of CSI). Criminology Lady was faced with a roomful of about 100 assorted parents and would-be students. She would wander vaguely around with a pile of about five brochures to hand out, get rid of them all, notice with a start of surprise that there were still some other people who didn't have one, and get another five out of the box at the back of the room. I got hold of one before my pension became due by standing in front of her and not moving until she pressed one into my hands.

The Media Dudes scored the most points with a bit of two-way banter, an interesting presentation and just giving the impression of being guys you could get on with. One had a pigtail and had to be gently coaxed away from getting into a Mac vs Windows dialogue with a parent in a public meeting. (Perhaps he could have a useful word or two with Accommodation Lady?) Definitely a score, anyway.

The course would be at UWE's St Matthias campus, a pleasantly period (I'm guessing Victorian or early C20) place with sixties add-ons, apparently known as the Harry Potter Campus. Across the valley and the other side of the M32 is UWE's main Frenchay campus, sitting gleaming at the top of its hill like mighty Diaspar. That's where the Student Village is, and at some time in the next three years the course will move over there so that's where Bonusbarn will end up. So I took him on a drive around it, also showing him the offices of my ultimate masters, HEFCE (who provide the dosh) and JISC (who pass it on to us).

"They're on a university campus. You're in a science park. Why aren't you in charge of them?"

We tried to drive into the city centre. On a Saturday? I hear distant laughter from any readers who have actually met Bristol. Quite why someone decided to build the M32 on stilts through some quite pleasant pre-war suburbs, injecting traffic directly into the heart of the city, I don't know. He had to take my word for it that once you're through the tangled spaghetti of traffic lanes winding past the feet of concrete monstrosities, it's quite pleasant in there. He's probably taking a year out and he has friends who will be there next year, so they can show him round in due course.

It's quite possible I was present at the precise moment when Bonusbarn began to think seriously about being a student. Cor.