Our boy is about to fly the nest.
Not in the way that they do for university - like migratory birds always coming and going; hoovering up the contents of the fridge; stuffing the washing machine.
This is a more permanent arrangement.
He has bought his own place.
“Chill. At least you’ll get a column out of it,” says my best friend.
Her two chicks have up and left for foreign shores.
They return like the birds every so often and one of them has had powerful experience as a barman in his university years. Forget the degree, he does a mean espresso martini.
She has got used to this flitting.
But this is new to us. Our fella leaving the nest has floored me.
It isn’t is as if he’s not big and bold; able of wing and large of foot.
He knows his mind.
But when the estate agent rang to say his offer was accepted, I was surprised.
“But you’ve hardly seen any, you’ve hardly looked,” I told him. “I thought you’d have to view at least 30 places before you bought.”
This was the second place he had viewed.
I’m forgetting, as our boy’s dad points out, that I bought the paper plan for my first apartment on a whim after a lunch with a dear friend many years ago.
“Look I saw this ad, they’re building apartments on the Ormeau,” I told her, flourishing a newspaper ad.
“That’s interesting,” she said.
She took the paper I’d been carrying around for weeks, finished her lunch, returned to her job in this very paper and rang me from her desk at 3pm.
“You better be quick. I’ve just put a deposit on the top flat,” she told me.
“But you haven’t even seen where it is,” I said.
“So?” she said.
Galvanised. I lifted the phone, rang the estate agent and bought the middle flat.
When my best friend whose son makes the mean martini was gazumped over a house in the Holyland, I got her to buy the bottom flat.
The years that followed were happy.
“So you see,” said my other half, “You bought very quickly and you bought what was an empty space… Pot, kettle; black”.
Our boy saw it; he liked it; he bought it. Simples.
In the wisdom that comes with age and that I’m always keen to share with others, I’d do it differently now.
I’d have driven around to said apartment at all times of day and night and treated all the neighbours to the Spanish inquisition.
“Mortgages! Interest rates! Management fees! Ground rent! Noisy neighbours,” I’d have told our boy.
I could fire out 100 reasons why not to buy a home – a barrage of arrows worthy of a panel in the Bayeux tapestry.
And secretly perhaps I’d be hoping that one might have got him in the eye like King Harold.
Only not really.
Why bamboozle him with all the pain of home ownership when there is so much joy.
I overhear him on the phone chatting about his new base: “It’s not too far from the mothership,” he says over loudly.
He knows I’m ear wigging.
But the truth is I’d grown used to his razor beside his dad’s on the bathroom shelf, his chat as he washes the dishes: “How can the Italians love lasagne when they have to deal with a baked oven dish like that?” he asks.
The years have flown by since we first took him home and his father paced the floors with this wide-eyed bundle on his shoulder.
We’ve had plenty of laughs on the journey and weathered a few storms.
He has his father’s wry humour. He can raise a Paxman eyebrow and make me laugh out loud.
I love that, like his dad, he has grown accustomed to my siestas on our old sofa; how he’ll put the blanket over me; how we have mastered changing the beds together as a team; how he’ll put his hand on my shoulder when he knows I’m feeling low.
How they’ll gang up on me; father and son; two to one and I wonder how this one-to-one will be, once he has gone.
What I’ll miss is the lovely man he has become and the joy of his company.
It’s time for him to move on.
I’d hate to think of myself as a helicopter mum. But hark is that the whirr of a distant chopper?
