Not a cheep in our empty nest

FIRST, make sure there is nobody around, otherwise you might be carted off to Carstairs. Now, place your ear to this page and listen very carefully. What do you hear? Nothing, I hope, just the sweet, seductive, gorgeous sound of silence. I can hear it too and it is sublime, like one of those brief, empty moments on the radio when a presenter loses contact with an interviewee. Occasionally, I can hear a car drive past or the raucous squawk of a seagull in search of a discarded fish supper. Other than that, though, nothing registers on the noise-ometer, not a bang or a whimper, a splutter or a cough.

You can't buy silence but I could, if pressed, put a price on it. I estimate it costs around (pounds) 300,000. That's if you have two children, at a price per child of (pounds) 150,000. From the moment they're born to the moment they're allowed to vote for Iain Duncan Smith, children are like taxi meters, constantly clocking up a tariff. Sometimes the meter ticks slowly (when they're asleep), sometimes (Saturday nights, the last shopping weekend before Christmas, school holidays, birthdays, the January sales) it races along, like the Dow Jones after a goldrush. After 18 years you will have spent about (pounds) 150,000, which insensitive, childless friends take delight in pointing out could have bought you a chateau in the Dordogne or a pied--terre in Paris.

This is not a point I like to ponder too much, lest it tip the mental balance. Nor is at the front of my mind this morning, as our first-born prepares to return to university, his sister having blazed a trail a week ago. He is a hardened student and she is a fresher but irrespective of age or experience the result is the same; today, for the first time in some 20 years, the house will be eerily child- free.

Her going caused the most upheaval, however, as she unscrewed the kitchen sink, rolled up the carpets and peeled off the wallpaper. Not since she went to Tenerife in the summer has so much been packed. Bags and suitcases overflowed with clothes for every occasion, a reminder that university is above all else - as their glossy brochures gleefully remind us - "an opportunity to meet people".

She had been accepted for Edinburgh University but, without any prompting from me, decided that she would rather study away from home.

Silently applauding her independence, I asked what had tipped the balance. What had Strathclyde got that Edinburgh hadn't? "There are better clubs in Glasgow," she said, discussing a subject for which she already has done enough research to be awarded a PhD. In this respect she is one step ahead of Prince William, who although he has gone to St Andrews, is suffering from the delusion that Edinburgh's nightlife is incomparable.

So off she went, driven west by her pal Johnny, who had to ease himself like Schumacher into a car that was packed as if for an expedition to the Himalayas. Her room, which normally looks as if it has been burgled, is empty, incongruously, melancholically tidy, save for a few carrier bags of clothes borrowed from friends. But most insistent of all is the silence.

No music, no television, no telephone. Especially no telephone. Normally, round about midday, the telephone begins to ring and - like a Chinese torture - never stops until she goes out and the word somehow spreads that she's not at home. What did they find to talk about? "You know - things," I was told, "this and that."

Monitoring her telephone use was a full-time job with a generous allocation of overtime, which had all the perks of a traffic warden. Once when I told her to get off the phone, she said: "Dad, I'll only be a minute. I'm making arrangements." I felt as if I'd interrupted a priest administering last rites.

So complicated, so time-consuming were these "arrangements" that it would surely be easier to swap rockets in outer space. What it took me a while to realise, of course, was that she operated in a different time zone from us. While we observed religiously the timetable of the television schedules, she operated by New York time, getting up five hours after us and going out when we were calling it a day.

To her, the hours between 7am and noon were an eventless void, best spent sheltering under a duvet. When eventually she did get up she would do her best to reduce water levels by showering endlessly, then she'd eat. For the past few months she seems to have survived on bran flakes soaked in copious amounts of milk. Her departure for Glasgow, says her brother, is going to have a disastrous effect on East Lothian's already beleaguered dairy industry.

Gradually, you get accustomed to anything, and in the mornings you go around on tiptoe and keep conversation to a whisper, in case you waken the comatose. It's like running a B&B. Thus two decades have drifted by, the years of Thatcher and Major and Blair, of yuppies, laptops and the Beckhams, of pierced belly buttons and tattooed buttocks.

What it was to be young in the 1990s and in awe of the Spice Girls and Leonardo DiCaprio! No fad or fashion was too naff to be embraced, which is as it should be, though perhaps a line should be drawn at Robbie Williams.

Memory is brutally selective as I recall past family holidays, particularly one on Loch Ness when I managed to steer our hired cruiser into a passenger pleasure boat. I doubt if life aboard the Titanic was more traumatic than that.

When eventually we reached dry land the kids begged me to stay put, as if any encouragement were needed. We sweltered in Crete and got drenched in Dublin. In Italy, minding a friend's house, we managed to flood it, and spent much of our stay whitewashing walls which looked as if they'd been stained with nicotine. Our son found his way into a disused cesspit and then, going barefoot, picked up an infection, which required regular injections in his backside. That's not something you forget easily.

In New York, we stayed in another friend's tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, a few blocks away from the twin towers, which we went up, a giddy height from which to survey Manhattan, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, and the Staten Island ferry, something our kids won't be able to do with their kids, if they have any.

Our daughter, then 12 years old, begged me to buy her roller blades at a shop on the boardwalk at the South Street Seaport near the old Fulton fish market and insisted on blading uncertainly all the way back through Chinatown, Little Italy and across Broadway to the bohemian Village, an international odyssey.

Inevitably, you make comparisons, between your childhood and theirs. For holidays we never went further than Scarborough, though North Berwick or St Andrews were more likely destinations, where we stayed in a caravan and played on the sands and tyrannised crabs in the rockpools. We used to go to St Andrews, too, when the kids were younger, and it remains a talismanic place.

But at some point the world encroached and it was no longer enough to hop on a bus and wend your way up the Fife coast for a fortnight. I blame it on Judith Chalmers. Once we took a train from Edinburgh to Florence, arriving early in the morning at Santa Maria Novella where an old woman was vigorously sluicing her breasts at a fountain. That didn't happen in St Andrews, at least as far as I'm aware.

Now the 1980s, into which our children were born, seem almost as distant as the 1950s, into which I was born. My generation's landmarks - the Coronation and the conquest of Everest, the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of JFK, the three-day week and the Beatles' first LP - have been supplanted by theirs - the Gulf and Falklands wars, the death of Princess Diana and the murder of the children in Dunblane, the razing of the World Trade Centre and the rise of Friends and Frasier.

Like leaving home and going to university they are rites of passage, for parents as well as children, though for the moment the former are still footing the bill. "Look on the bright side, dad," says my son, a young man with a good grasp of economics. "At least neither of us took a gap year." For that I must say I am truly grateful.

Copyright 2001
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