My son turns sixteen in a month. He’s just finished his first round of mock-exams and earned some impressive results. His gift is for mathematics which suggests, if nothing else, that skills and talents are not inheritable traits.

This morning I drove him to a nearby college where he is considering taking his A-Levels (his own school has an excellent sixth form in my opinion but he wants to check out all the options and I applaud that). They are having an open day at the college where prospective students can go to check out the facilities and offerings. He asked to go alone. He is also now I think a shade taller than I am if he bothers to stand straight, or if not then the gap is so slight as to be imperceptible, He impresses me daily with his confidence and intelligence. I dropped him off in the car-park and watched him approach the college.

This seems an ideal time to share a wonderful poem that choked me up when I first read it, and still does.

Walking Away

by C Day-Lewis

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go