Seeing your kid off to university is a joy – but we had some wobbles on the motorway

In October 1994, I loaded a couple of holdalls of clothes, a box of cassettes, a frying pan, three tea mugs and some rolled-up posters into the back of my dad’s car. Then he drove me down to university for the first time. He had come to pick me up from the house I shared with my mum. When I kissed mum goodbye on the doorstep, she wiped a couple of tears from her eyes.

I was the last to fly the nest and now she was all alone. “Don’t worry about the crying,” dad said a few moments later in the car. “Women get like that all the time for no reason whatsoever. Just ignore it.” 

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My old man is not the sentimental type. But I am. I was gutted to be saying goodbye to my mum. I was excited about university, but I was also fretful: I had a tendency towards homesickness, enjoyed my home comforts, and suspected that student life might not be for me. To be honest, I felt like crying that day too, but I didn’t want to worry my mum or irritate my dad, so I kept my upper lip as stiff as possible as we trundled down the A23 to Sussex. 

And then, in what felt like the blink of an eye, it was September 2025, and I was trundling up the M1 in my own car, taking my daughter to university. At times, life seems to move so heartbreakingly fast. I can still feel the lump in my throat and the fluttering in my stomach that accompanied that journey with my dad in 1994. Three years of university still feels like something massive lying ahead, not a distant memory fading in the rear-view mirror. 

All of the same feelings of anxiety, excitement, hope and pain were present as we drove my daughter to university 31 years later. There were four of us in the car: my wife, my daughter, my son and me. At various stages of the drive, we all had our wobbly moments. Tears are not something anyone in our family feels the need to hide. Repressing all of my fear and emotion when I was a kid just made a tough situation worse.  

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So with my kids, we do things differently. If someone is sad, they say it so everyone can help. There were hugs and various pep-talks that punctuated our journey up north. We would occasionally have to dip the volume on the carefully curated road trip playlist to discuss all the worrying stuff. My daughter was excited but overwhelmed. My son had to wrestle with the prospect of being stuck at home with his mum and dad, deprived of sibling company.

And then there was my wife and me, not only scared of losing the permanent presence of our daughter but also confronted by the early warning signs it triggered: a prelude to the disbandment of our family unit, the prospect of old age and the creeping spectre of obsolescence. 

Mind you, we also had a few cracking games of 20 questions and stopped for a nice lunch at a service station, so it wasn’t all doom and gloom.

When we got to the campus and saw her room, there were a few more tears as my daughter contemplated the prospect of being alone for the next 12 months in what initially presented as a bit of a shithole. But once we unpacked, stuck some photos on the wall, lit a diffuser and made the bed, things started to look rosier. Some girls from the rooms up the hall knocked and asked if she wanted a coffee. She seemed torn about abandoning her parents and brother so soon. Holding back any visible signs of sentiment, just as my dad had instructed me to do all those years ago, I told her to go and hang out with her new mates. We would be fine back at the hotel. She could call us in the morning. 

And that was that. It’s been a week now. Every time I speak to her on the phone, she has new friends to tell me about, new adventures to report and new reasons to be happy and optimistic. I have never felt so good and bad at the same time. I miss her, of course. But I’m so proud of her, too. Life moves quickly and change can be terrifying. But seeing your kid build a new life is a beautiful thing. 

His new book Stop Sh**ting Yourself: 15 Life Lessons That Might Help You Calm the F*ck Down is out now (Little, Brown, £22) and is available from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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