The Real Parent Trap

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

As children we subconsciously set it. As single adults we don't realise it. But as parents we suddenly realise the set of traps our children set for us. Those traps that make us realise they are growing up and that we are consequently are both old and less needed than we once were.

Daughter has been to London on a school trip. Her first. A knee injury and a dislocated shoulder being the reasons why she couldn't attend these trips before but here it was the case of third time lucky.

And she loved it.

Amongst other things she and a friend spent time by themselves in Covent Garden where they went to the Transport Museum.

There were no calls permeated by floods of tears. She was just confident and happy.

And of course more grown up.

She even got some gifts. And there were thoughts made for those she got me.

Firstly the bookmark (as she knows I collect them)

A Bookmark Of A Tube Line

Not just any tube line but the Central Line. The line I went to work on for over a decade. For me the great railway journey of the world not for the journey but for what it led me to in the eighties. Not work but the bookshops in the Charing Cross Road. Now largely (and tragically absent).

And she got me this notebook.

She knows me so well

So we as parents weren't needed. She was able to look after herself. Another stepping stone to adulthood was taken whilst me and the wife are further pushed into the descending spiral of senility. Making me feel older than the old man I actually am.

Ah well might as well begin contemplating that zimmer frame sooner than expected.

Until the next time.