tim's experiment

My son called the other day to say that he was engaged. This was not, I gathered, a request for advice. A relief. As President De Gaulle said about the Cuba Missile Crisis, “I was glad to be informed; I did not wish to be consulted.” As filial phone calls go this could have been worse. Some parents whose children are overseas only get the phone call after the wedding. Still this is one of those moments when you realise that parenthood is a state of gradually increasing helplessness. The right to control dwindles gradually away, as Lord Denning put it, until it amounts to nothing more than the right to be consulted, and even that… I now understand the rather strained approval which greeted some of my own early errors in the matter of marriage and such like. Whatever you parentally think, you have to keep to yourself. Then if it all ends in tears at least they are not your fault.

These are not cheering thoughts. My first reaction was, as one of my former Standard colleagues put it on Facebook, that “we chicks are too young for this sort of thing”. But we chicks aren’t. This is one of those moments when you hear the distant roar of that waterfall over which time’s inexorable river is going to waft us all, sooner or later.

But we must look on the bright side. The wedding will be here. The prospective bride is beautiful. And I always thought it would be nice to have a daughter…