Deserted island discs

Where do I begin?

During the morning I mentioned University to Mum, which nowadays is enough to send her into one of her bouts of neurotic pessimism. I said I want to take all my books and records down with me when I go to Watermouth but she and Dad refused point blank and won't even take me down, saying the journey will ruin the car, even though they took Andrew to college in 1979!

The ‘generation gap’ is a cliché but it's all-too true, and I should have known this would prevent Mum from understanding why my records and books are important, that they'll, help me overcome my inevitable homesickness. She can't—won't ever—grasp this. It's just impossible, because my mind and hers operates on different criteria.

I found it all unbearable and retreated upstairs to lie on my bed with my eyes shut while angry whining voices battled it out below. Horrifying.

Mum and Dad left for a walk on Moxthorpe Common and when Andrew came upstairs I was reading. “It's as if they’re . . . [long pregnant pause] . . . deserting you somehow . . . I bet you’ll be the only person down there without your parents.” Maybe I can ask Robert if he’d contemplate taking me? I could pay his petrol. Why is Mum like this? She argues it’s her age and so on but if I even try to discuss Uni. with her she ends up in a foul mood and says “you’ll end up doing what you want to anyway.”

Andrew and I passed the rest of the afternoon in my bedroom looking at some of the designs he’s done for the Copenhagen jazz festival programme and a poster entry he's done for a car show. He played me a tape he recorded of Charles Lloyd’s “Night Blooming Jasmine” which is excellent, the music difficult to describe, producing moments that pulsed and gushed like breaking waves.