I find I have been seeing rather more of my children than I used to. The eldest has decided to camp out at the Hovel for a week, which is great, but a little puzzling, for she is earning money doing some serious babysitting in Chiswick, much nearer to her mother’s home than mine. She says she’s here because it’s easier for her to meet up with her friends but I find this a little unconvincing.
I wonder whether, for one reason or another, Shepherd’s Bush has got a little hot for her. I probe gently and eventually a picture is drawn, by way of explanation, of a house in which conversation more or less shuts down at nine in the evening, the boys retreating to their screens to kill prostitutes (or whatever it is you do in Grand Theft Auto Five) and the mother retreating, exhausted, to bed. She is exhausted because, apart from alternate weekends and occasional other breaks, she has been raising children in situ for the past six years.
The girl, however, with a philosophy degree to prepare for, has much to say on pressing ontological matters and finds no one she can talk with, or, because she has a rather formidable flow, to. The cat listens but does not contribute. I doubt it has even got through the first five pages of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. (It turns out that whether or how the cat thinks is something that has been driving her crazy for the past couple of years and I really do hope she sorts it out soonish.) But no, the daughter’s original explanation holds, as I soon find myself playing host to a string of 18-year-old girls teaching themselves how to make mojitos. For the first time in my life, I find myself in possession of a bottle of triple sec, whatever that is.
The eldest boy has started dropping in, too. He is now going to the girl’s old school in central London, which is a state school but with an official religious bent. I know, I know. But it is good, and it has a proper social mix – that is to say, no toffs. It is also primarily a girls’ school and the boy finds himself one of only ten boys in a school of many hundreds of girls.
Sometimes I wonder what I would have done, at his age, if I’d found myself in such a situation. Something well beyond the confines of the law, of that I am certain.
At my school the girls were few and so much more refined and savvy than we were that they might as well have been of another species. They were also far prettier than us. And they knew it. They twisted us round their little fingers like pipe cleaners. It was like Zuleika Dobson in there. We would run countless errands for them and sometimes one of them would condescend to brush our hair or give us a peck on the cheek. (These girls were in the sixth form. We were in the fifth, so for all practical purposes they were sexy archangels.) Which would we choose, were we so favoured? A peck on the cheek is brief but it is, technically, a kiss; whereas having one’s hair brushed is also intimate and takes up more time.
Anyway, where was I? (The gap between that last paragraph and this one was spent in a 15-minute-long reverie.) Oh, yes, the boy says this gender imbalance is by no means a factor in his choice of school but rather a matter of its being able to teach the subjects he wants to study for A-level. I am inclined to accept this at face value, because, having seen many of his sister’s friends en masse, he knows the terror and humiliation a gang of schoolgirls can wreak. He lives under far fewer illusions than I did.
So it’s funny: six years out of the loop and then you’re back in it. And because I’m the major breadwinner, to use the term in its loosest imaginable sense, I am obliged to perform duties on a more day-to-day basis than I used to. It is true that my children have this in common with the new Boris buses: the more I see of them, the more I love them. But I’d always assumed that when they flew their nest, they’d be settling somewhere else than at mine. It’s a pleasant surprise.
The eldest boy’s visits, I should point out, are more along the lines of impromptu rendezvous, with about the same amount of warning as we had of ICBM strikes in the cold war – in other words, about four minutes – and can be summed up in the phrase “eats, burps and leaves”, but one suspects that in the course of time his stays here will become longer.
Which is, as I say, great, as I love my children inordinately, but this fatherhood business – how does one do it again?
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