We were touched by our son’s reticence to leave our company and go back to school, so reminded him we’d just be across the road. We were speaking literally here, since his school is on our street and, this year, his entrance directly faces our front door. It’s cut our 20-second commute down to a few seconds, but this was still too great a distance for our homesick boy.
‘I used to travel for half an hour to get to primary school!’ I told him, ‘and a full hour for secondary!’ I’d like to think I intended this as a comfort, but now realise it was that inescapable reflex of fatherly one-upmanship I’ve inherited from my own dad. If we grumbled about having to travel the last two miles home from school on foot, he’d say we didn’t know we were born. He, of course, travelled to and from school by clambering into the wooden spokes of a passing horsecart, and happily rotated for the full nine hours it took to reach his destination.
