It was 9pm when I went in to kiss my son goodnight. It's a habit I've only half-heartedly tried to break.
He's too old to be tucked in and kissed goodnight, in truth. He's 11 years old. I sometimes wonder if I'll still be doing this when he's doing his A-levels.
I should think not, and yet while he's still happy for me to do it, so am I.
He won't volunteer much to you, my lad, at any time, on any subject.
It's not that he doesn't say much. He's not monosyllabic, like some boys are at that age. He talks constantly, but it's usually just bluster and jabber.
The important things – what he did at school/ did he get his homework back / has he made the school team – you almost have to drag out of him.
It seems especially true with me. He reveals a bit more to his mum but, in truth, there are huge areas of his life we know next to nothing about.
And yet, for all of that, he's a happy little chap, really. He exists in his own little world, a world unfettered by responsibility.
I'm sure I've said this before, but I'm one-part jealous of his privileged existence and one-part annoyed.
But that night he was worried.
"I'm worried, Dad," he said, uncharacteristically.
I lay down with him.
"What are you worried about, son?"
They'd been talking at school about what they'd like to be when they left school. They all knew what they were going to do, he said. Everyone, that is, except him.
"It's not long, is it?" he said. "I'm 11 now. So that's (counts on fingers, to the age of 18 when he is able to leave school) only another seven years if I don't go to university, and then I've got to be something.
"And I don't know what I want to be. I just want it to be like this all the time."
And if I was him, I'd want it to be like this, too.
He wants for nothing. He has a TV in his room, linked up to his PS3. He has a garishly-coloured BMX, a ridiculously over-priced scooter.
He has more Nike trainers than Magic Johnson.
He launched a lackadaisical campaign, a few months ago, for pocket money. His friends had pocket money, he said. It wasn't fair that he didn't.
When it was suggested he might have to do a bit more around the house to earn that money, his campaign crumbled to a halt.
And yet I know how he feels. I also felt like this from the age of 11 until I left school at 18. I had no idea what I wanted to be.
At his age, I thought I might be a stuntman. My favourite show was The Fall Guy. I fancied a life of hot tubs and fast cars and falling out of windows into the arms of pretty blondes.
I had a leather jacket. I could do a forward roll. I was pretty sure I could make a decent fist of it.
And then I hit the age of 15, and adolescent inertia set in, and football stopped, biking stopped, any kind of exercise stopped, I couldn't do a forward roll and I developed a fondness for lie-ins.
The stuntman dream died a quiet death.
A few years later I left school and applied for all sorts of ill-suited jobs, jobs I could never have done.
Trainee accountant. Trainee environmental health officer. Rubber technology trainee. Junior architect. I didn't get any of these jobs, which was entirely right.
Instead, I became a trainee surveyor, a job I was also spectacularly ill-suited to do.
But I did it, and I liked the people I worked with, if not the work, until the recession kicked in the early 1990s and they made me redundant and that was that.
I fell into this job, a few months later; a happy series of coincidences which sent me from one newspaper to another, picking up a wife along the way, to where I am today.
For all of its long hours and poor pay, I still enjoy it.
You may think I'm bad at this and some weeks I might secretly agree with you, but you should know I'd have been much worse as an accountant, an environmental health officer or a surveyor.
"But Dad," he said. "What can I do?"
The truth, I tried to tell him, was that no-one knows what they want to do at the age of 11.
"Oh but they do, Dad," he said. Ewen knows. Jake knows.
"Even Sam knows, Dad, and he's so thick he can barely spell his own name."
What are they going to be?
"Ewen likes Masterchef, so he's going to be a cook. Jake wants to be in the Army." Jake seems to think being in the Army will be a real life version of Call Of Duty Ghosts. I think he's in for a shock.
What about Thick Sam?
"He wants to play for Forest."
That figures, I thought.
It seems everyone had a plan. Everyone but my lad.
"I feel like they're all leaving me behind, Dad. Maybe I could do what you do?" he said.
You don't want to do that, I said.
I told him about the long hours and the poor pay, and how people expect to read it all for free online, as if the news just magically appears, like it's been made by the shoemaker's night- time elves, rather than people with families and bills to pay, and how that means that one day, probably around the same he's looking for a job and wondering what to do, Dad will probably be doing the same.
"What about a stuntman?" I said.
"I could do that," he said.
"It would be good," I said.
"You'd be able to go to America. (He wants to go to America). You'd be able to ride fast motorbikes over ramps. (He likes this, too) and you'd be paid lots of money, and you could spend it however you liked."
"On anything I liked?"
Yep. Anything. Anything at all.
"More trainers?"
"Yep, even more trainers," I said. "Imagine that."
"That sounds all right, Dad."
"That's that, then," I said. "A stuntman."
All boys should want to be stuntmen or footballers or monster truck drivers at the age of 11.
They should be untroubled by homework, girlfriends – it's too early for girlfriends – responsibility and troubling thoughts of what they might be in seven or 10 years' time. There's time for that later.
They need to be kids first.
* fredleicester@leicestermercury.co.uk
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