A couple of weeks ago some toerag broke into our garage and stole the family bike. Eventually its loss began to be felt and I was sent to Halfords to buy another one.
Having dashed his hopes of selling me a £1,000 model, the young sales assistant and I fell to discussing the cheapest and second cheapest instead. Pressed about the difference, he said, "Well this one's got 21 gears, whereas that one's only got 18". I had to laugh. "When I was your age", I said, "we had Sturmey and Archer three-speed and thought we were lucky", shocked to find myself sounding, and not for the first time, exactly like one of the Four Yorkshiremen.
The shop assistant wouldn't have been thinking this, because he was far too young to know who the Four Yorkshiremen were.
The other day my son went away to University. I don't remember much about my first experience of going away to school, aged 11, except there were many moments when having to hold it together was almost overwhelming; and some when it actually was. But I do remember going away to University, less traumatic for the experience of boarding school, and I am therefore all the more bemused to be in the same situation thirty five years later, except this time playing the role of Father instead of Son.
Truly I have become my Dad.
What to make of this? Life is not exactly a circle. If it were, I'd be the Son still. Perhaps more like a shallow spiral, where, having come all the way round, you find yourself tantalisingly close, unreachably close, to where you were decades previously.
No doubt these thoughts, perhaps true, are cliches. But being cliches none the less true.
