Visitng the Student

It's half term, which seems to be when most parents feel that an acceptable amount of time has passed for them to visit their child (yes I do mean child - they will always be a child to the parent) at university. All my friends have managed to squeeze in a visit to their studying offspring and I am no exception.

In the first year the visit is all about putting your mind at rest.  As a parent, you have missed your child like crazy, you've had a cold that just won't shift and you've worried.  You've worried about whether they are doing their work, whether they are living with nice people, whether they are drinking too much, whether they are eating properly, whether they are managing to cook without burning the halls down.  You don't relax very much on the visit.  You go out to lunch and take them to the supermarket for a big shop.  You clean their toilet or kitchen because other people are just disgusting. You try not to cry as you leave them again. You think that you are being silly and should really try to pull yourself together and you do.  It's a good job that you do because when they come home at Christmas they are foul.

In the second year the first half term visit is still focused around food and mopping up tears.  This time it's their tears, as they admit that the quick decicion of who to live with made last October may not have been such a good one.  You take them out to lunch so that you can spend as much time out of the house as possible.  Besides, it smells odd with a curious mix of damp and stale deep fat frying oil that you remember from your own student days.  You take them to the supermarket and show them how to label or hide their food, luckily you remember your student days well enough. You clean their bathroom (but only when no one is looking so you don't seem like too much of a fussy mum).  The good news is that they will be much nicer this Christmas.

I have just come back from the third year visit and if you are a parent in one of the first two please be encouraged.  This visit is a delight.  It's like visiting some really nice friends.  Their flat is cleaner than your house and you get told off for not switching the plug off at the wall after you've unplugged your iphone.  You have really good conversations.  For me, this visit was still food based (although I didn't clean anything).  We had a fantastic curry, soup and cake and she even tried to pay.

As this could be her last year in Leicester I insisted that we went to Melton Mowbray to get a pork pie.  As a vegetarian, she wasn't too thrilled with the idea but we had such a brilliant day out.

Melton is a town a bit like home; the ratio of old men to everyone else is quite high, their 6th form college has a good performing arts course, so that student who have snuck out at lunch time for a Costa fix, serenade you at traffic lights, with a version of Don't Stop Believing by Journey, where they have changed the words so that you know exactly what they have done and are going to do today.  Melton Mowbray is the place where stilton comes from and so I also managed to buy and obscene amount of cheese.

 It has a beautiful Art Decco cinema and very clean public toilets, although a wee does cost 30p.

Toy soldiers in Melton Mowbray are very special.  You might imagine that they are magic, coming to life on a Wednesday night for band practice.  There must be lots of them and they must be quite good too.  Why else would they need their own band room?

Maybe this is the start of an adult relationship with my daughter. Even if we don't see each other too often we will always share a love of the bizzarre and cake.