Daddy Cool: 'Let the children suffer the pain and distress'

I'M told it's a painful experience that doesn't always get as much sympathy as it should. It's a mix of pleasure and pain that leaves sufferers feeling paralysed and listless. Sometimes, it is accompanied by "seeking" behaviour where the unfortunate victim wanders from room to room, searching out past memories.

I'm talking, of course, about empty nest syndrome, that appalling period when the children finally throw off their shackles and leave home to make their way in the turbulent world unfettered by parental concerns.

But it doesn't have to be this way. What if it were parents, who have exhausted themselves and emptied their piggy banks to give their - sometimes - undeserving offspring the best start in life, who were the ones to simply take off? Let's face it, who really needs a gap year? Bright young things with their whole lives ahead of them? Or tired, jaded, curmudgeonly old gits, whose only ambition left in life is to get a good night's kip, preferably in a hammock under the stars, after downing a rum punch or two?

I first came across this phenomenon when interviewing a conservationist in the Borders, who had decided to conserve the sanity of himself and his wife by fleeing the city for a countryside idyll, while leaving his teenage children behind in the family home.

Last weekend it resurfaced again, when two friends returned from their new home in the Middle East. When their second child had reached university age, they upped sticks for a world of perpetual sun and playful frolics in the desert, leaving their two daughters behind at university in Scotland.

Did the young ones feel abandoned and unloved? Not if the evidence of last weekend is any guide. I have never seen such a loved-up family since Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and their brood of six played it up for the waiting paparazzi to counter rumours they were about to split. They were being nice to each other, smiling at each other and seemingly wanting to spend time with each other. What kind of normal family life is that? No better proof have I seen for the old saying that absence makes the heart grow fonder.

So let's turn empty nest syndrome on its head. Let it be the children who suffer the pain and distress, who wander from room to room searching for memories, while we are living it up in foreign climes with not a care in the world. We deserve it; they are young enough to get over it. n