WE couldn’t see out the back windows of the car on Saturday for pillows and bedding, boxes of groceries, pots and pans, laptop and docking station, suitcases and bags full of clothes, shoes and sports gear. There was just about enough room to fit in a 6ft 4-and-a-bit inch student too.

We should be old hands at this now. This is the third time we’ve driven a son, along with his assorted possessions, off to university, only to return home with an empty car, to look in on an empty bedroom, and sigh.

It’s a wonderful thing, of course, to see your child grow and develop and begin to make their away in the world without you. “It’s not as if they’re going off to serve in Afghanistan.

We’re the lucky ones,”

I’ve told myself each time.

And what you don’t realise when you do it first time is that they’re not gone for long. University terms are so short and, what with reading weeks on top of extended holidays, it sometimes feels like they’re at home more often than they’re away.

But still, the ties are loosening.

This is the moment, when your child leaves home, the moment poet Seamus Heaney described as the “uncoupling from the parents”.

And there were thousands of us descending on Manchester with our children at the weekend. Thousands of us slowly uncoupling as we removed boxes bulging with essentials for survival, like baked beans and noodles, from our cars.

Parents were lingering in the background, not sure what to do with themselves as their children met their new flatmates for the first time. This uncoupling business is harder than you might think.

Patrick made it plain he didn’t want us to hang around. His functional, bare, slightly tatty and overheated room, 14 floors up in a grimlooking 1960s tower block, is his new home now.

The shared kitchen may be tiny and basic, with no table or chairs.

The austere shower and bathroom might seem cold and dreary. It’s a world away from the home comforts Patrick has enjoyed, growing up in the attractive rural surroundings of North Yorkshire.

But the moment he pushed open the door, and looked out on the urban sprawl beneath him, it was as if he had hit the jackpot.

“This is my home now,” he said, his face beaming. He may as well have been moving into a multi-million pound penthouse suite.

Knowing that he never refuses an offer of free food, we bought some extra time by inviting him to join us for lunch in the city centre, after calling in at the supermarket.

Lunch over, he was keen to get back. We dropped him in the car park, said goodbye and he was off.

He didn’t even look back.

I suddenly pictured him, when he was about three, chasing after his big brothers, desperate not to be left out of their games. “What about me? What about me?” and “Me too!

Me too!” he used to shout. It seems like the day before yesterday.

Now, like them, he’s off. The uncoupling has well and truly begun.

WE weren’t home long before Patrick called to say he’d met a second year student from our village in the supermarket: “But didn’t we buy you all you needed? What were you in the supermarket for?” I asked him. “Vodka, Mum. Vodka,” he replied. “That’s student life for you,” said his dad.

AT 4.30am I got another call from him, but all I could hear was people talking in the background.

He’d phoned me by mistake: “Sorry about that,” he explained the next day. He had been woken in the early hours when the fire alarm went off and his tower block had to be evacuated. “Apparently people are always setting it off,” he said. “I was so tired and disorientated I didn’t know what I was doing. Then I lost my key and couldn’t get back into my room,” he moaned. “That’s student life for you.” I said.

I BUMPED into a friend a few days after we got home and was lamenting the fact that the house is so eerily quiet now, with just two boys at home. I have become accustomed to t chaos of five being here over the summer: “You’ll just have to get used to being a normal-sized family now,” she said.

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