Eliza and I are travelling North up the A1 to the next stage in her life. She’s excited and a little fearful to be going to university and, though I’m delighted that she’s going somewhere that will suit her, I’m fighting back the desolation I feel that she’s leaving home. Car journeys with your child are such precious time together. They can elicit the most meaningful, heartfelt, silliest, deepest conversations you’ve ever had and I can’t help silently mulling over all the memorable times we’ve spent together like this. It’s the longest car journey we’ve ever taken together and we’re both willing ourselves to enjoy this precious time with an unspoken, subtle yet almost tangible intensity.  And I’m trying so incredibly hard to remember every word of this long conversation as a gem to cherish in my heart until I see her next, knowing full well that some precious words will fall by the wayside and be lost forever.

 

Junction after junction, through each monotonous set of 50mph limit roadworks. We’re listening to Mozart and singing along raucously at top volume with a Rossini overture. We examine, analyse, pick apart the architecture of Bath; my love of Handel; her love of bananas and plums; the dogs we know and love; the tailgating Audi moron in front of us; whether she’s packed enough clarinet reeds.

I’m reminding her that she finds it difficult to remember multi-stage chores, so perhaps she can just write herself a Post-it note; that I’ll order her a lipstick in the scarlet shade that suited her so well when she borrowed it for our celebratory dinner at the Skylon on Wednesday – I could have it delivered to her local John Lewis if she likes. I point out that she should wrap up warm and change her sheets regularly; that if she’s sad she can just hop on a plane and go home to her brother; that her brother Skyped every week from Montreal. All of this is received in good part with no trace of resentment, because she knows that I’m trying to squeeze every last drop of motherly love out of myself before I hand her over to who she’ll be next.

We are both pretending not to be terrified: her of her new life and me of my Hong Kong empty nest, and our forced jollity reflects how we don’t want our true feelings to spoil this silly, funny, loving conversation. I’m trying desperately not to show my sadness and she’s trying equally desperately to reassure me.

It’s just the most grown-up of our car games to date.

And I’m remembering the traffic jam games of the past: the first person to see a Mini bashes the other; and Yellow Car and Twingo. The time when, furious with a school mate, we worked out that singing “Slap him, slap him, slap him in the face,” fitted beautifully to the tune of Funiculi funicula and instantly cured everything that had rained down on her that day. Try it. It works.

I recall the times tables recited ad nauseum on the Croissy Bridge; the translations of Cherie FM horoscopes; the later feminist diatribes; the woke explanations of cultural appropriation; the rage at reactionaries. How that song about lions and mice morphed into the latest passion for Rammstein or Vulfpeck or De Staat “Listen to this mum. What do you think of it?” We amuse ourselves with the funny-sounding place names of rural England.

“Face walks into a bar. Bartender says, ‘Why the Longhorsely?’“

How precious to any parent is this quality time with a beloved child; how mundane it is to the child anxious to be somewhere else with someone else.

Then, arriving in Edinburgh and dropping my beautiful, clever, funny, fierce child at her shared room in Halls, unpacking the STUFF that will constitute her next few years, I can no longer hold back the tears that I shed alone last night. We share a final coffee and a chocolate brownie as her belated birthday cake. Which seems quite fitting, really, since it’s the first sugary cake that I weakened and let her have, in Starbucks about 17 years ago.

This is her new life and it’s mine too. And I’m bereft, eviscerated, without my travelling companion. A good friend summed it up for me, and I paraphrase with apologies “Your tears are not because you’re moving so far away, but because she is.”