He's Leaving Home - by Andy of Newark

I have a son, Tom. He’s recently gone off to University College London to read linguistics. I miss him, because, as irony has it, just as your children become really interesting they leave home.

We navigated all those years when Tom would be a brooding presence in his bedroom only emerging at meal times, or to stand at the open fridge, grazing. What he was doing in his room was a mystery, and needed to remain so. During his adolescence it was sufficient for him that we were in the home available to meet his various needs when he deemed it essential for them to be met, a sort of support system. Conversation with him was stilted by his reluctance to say anything more than "all right" to any opening gambit.

Then something happened about the time of his GCSEs. Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings Trilogy stunned him. This was the first real enthusiasm he was prepared to share with me. It proved to be the springboard into his academic interests. He read all of Tolkein’s Lord of The Rings output, this lead to an interest in Anglo Saxon poetry, Beowulf, to linguistics and so on. When he didn’t get the grades he needed to get onto the ultimate course in linguistics at UCL he simple took a year out to take them again.

With this developing interest he emerged from the bedroom and took to lounging around the place reading things like Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Sartre and Stephen Hawking. He’d disappear off to Nottingham to various concerts, films and expeditions and he has with a certain amount of diligence and application arrived as an intellectual.

I think of myself as opinionated rather than intellectual. From time to time I have a rant which is firmly based on convictions that I consider to be well thought out and sound. Tom’s rants are evidenced based. That’s the difference. His presence in our home in the last year has obliged me to raise my game. He has also developed an understated wit that at times is quite dark, and very funny. I also believe that in some of our more recent conversations he has seen certain aspects of his father that have lain dormant for years. Such that when he found I was able to discuss existentialism with authority, it may have had something to do with my degree in philosophy.

When he left for UCL he invited me to use anything in his room. This was the first idea I had of the extent of his CD and DVD collection, and his library. Now I have a better idea of the influences that has shaped his view of the world. I am astonished by the range of these influences. We also discovering things we had no idea about; the drum machine with the headphones, the missing copies of my George Orwell collection.

Now he’s off doing his own thing. He was more than ready to leave home. Of course he never phones, he never writes, and I envy the time he is obviously having.

The great thing about having kids is their capacity to surprise you, and then you realise your capacity to surprise them. I am mindful of the time when my father enthused about Eleanor Rigby, describing it as poetry. As a youth I was prepared to acknowledge this as a gently condescending interest into my enthusiasms at the time. In his retirement, he studied English and American literature at York University. After he died, I came across a paper he had written for a seminar on the use of syntax in poetry in which he made various references to Lennon and McCartney’s use of syntax to enhance imagery, particularly in Eleanor Rigby.

Free Will or Determinism? Is it that Tom and I are simply acting out a well-rehearsed script that has run like a golden thread through my family? Just as father and son are able to develop an adult understanding of each other, they move away. I do hope not.