ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

We’re heading for that moment all parents will dread – your child leaving home. The clock is ticking. Barring unforeseen hitches I think it’s a matter of weeks. The truth is though, that once I face up to this reality, the more OK I feel about it. Once the subject was out in the open and no longer taboo, we began to discuss it in a relatively civilised manner. Although it probably came out into the open during an argument! (‘If you carry on doing …… then why should I put up with you here!’ ‘You think I want to be here!?’ Fair enough.)

Of course you’ve always got to try and put yourself in your kid’s shoes and try and think back to what it was like for you. I left home at 18 and never looked back. So bearing that in mind I should write a few words about the town we live in, Portishead. Still called a village by old timers and locals it has recently doubled in size with housing development and a new marina. Wealthy people have moved in. While short term economics and the greed of various people and groups have led to a population explosion, there’s been hardly any infrastructure or social facilities added. Kids of all ages get bored out of their minds. There was a march last year through the town that proportionally was bigger than the 2 million on the streets opposed to Blair and his warmongering mates as they eyed up Iraq. So what issue almost led to revolution in Portishead? A set of traffic lights!! The hassle of waiting up to a minute before the lights change! I won’t even bother going into the other hot issues in the last couple of years – from opposition to an asylum seekers interview centre to the current resistance to a kid’s home. It’s like you’re living in a bourgeois prison camp. Reminds me of that old sixties TV series ‘The Prisoner’ starring some bloke who wants to get out or at least make sense of his surroundings. So compare living as a teenager in that kind of place with the bright lights and buzz of Bristol 10 miles away, a city with everything anyone could want. Thinking this I realise it would be crazy if my son didn’t move.

In fact it feels he already has. He works in Bristol. He plays his music and drinks his beer there. There’re various roofs he sleeps under. Sometimes I only know he’s been at home through tell tale signs like lights and electrical appliances left on or the large scale disappearance of plates and cups into his bedroom. There is no greater symbol of ‘apartness’ and a need to move on than this room. It’s basically a no-go area, a war zone. It’s no place of liberation like Free Derry or area of proud resistance like Gaza. It’s more a bombed out building littered with unexploded ordnance. So going in there for any reason is a risky business – whether it’s what’s under foot or whether it’s the smell as you enter. Any sentimental doubts I might have about my son moving out….I’ve just got to look in his room.

There’s one thing I look forward to. Rolling my sleeves up, bucket of water and black bags at the ready, turning the music up and going forth to reclaim. Not sure what it’ll become, that’s part of the fun. It’ll still be his room. He’ll go into his new old room for the first time and he’ll like it. It will symbolise a new relationship between us.