I am so proud of my son I think I may just explode!

So he made it! He got to the end of Intro Week at university and has come home for the weekend, for a breather and some 'space'. And it was a very happy, vibrant Ben that I picked up from the railway station yesterday evening followed by what seemed like hours of Ben recounting all the things he's done this week and people he's met. It could have been so very different, couldn't it?

Or, an even better way to play this 'game'...

Even better, a 'game' where he has to guess what's on my list - and say it aloud (to reinforce the messages in his head). He gets points every time he gets something on my list - and extra when he comes up with positives that aren't there!

"Imagine a game," I plan to say to him this weekend...

"Imagine a game where the prize is £1000 to spend on Warhammer products, however in order to win the £1K you are only allowed to make positive statements. Any negatives result in lost points. The idea is that you look back on the the week that's just gone and make statements about how it's been, what you've achieved, how you've felt, etc - but they have to be positive. OK, let's start..."

Welcome to the rollercoaster...

Up we go... woosh! Down we go... lurch! Then up again... And all the time feeling sick to the pit of our stomachs about what's going to happen next. This week sure is turning out to be a rollercoaster, but - thus far - both Ben and I have managed to keep Ben hanging on in there and on track. From what I can see from the pics someone's posted on his FB page, yesterday afternoon was a 'high' on the rollercoaster stakes. Let's  hope things stay up there for a while... or longer...

The firefighters may be on strike today, but not firefighter #1 i.e. meeee!

So I got a phone call at 9am from Ben, so upset I couldn't tell what he was saying, so I had to ask him to breathe and repeat slowly. It seems that this morning he had what turned out to be a phishing email from someone pretending to be Student Finance England and he provided them with all the details they asked for (ouch!)... only to get an email a few mins later from the uni warning that a phishing email was going round, by which time it was too late. He was beside himself, so I calmed him down as best I could and called his bank to put a block on everything, followed by student finance. Then I grabbed my car keys and drove down to Sheffield where we spoke to student finance's fraud team and went to the uni branch of his bank to sort everything out. By lunchtime everything was duly sorted out. New bank account being set up and new student finance log-in, etc. Phew.

A very productive day all in all

Today was the day I drove down to Sheffield with some extra things for Ben and an opportunity to touch base with him. It began with a pretty depressed Ben meeting me in the student residences car park. I dropped off the stuff and we walked down to the cosy cafe in the Botanical Gardens, which is the cafe we sat in last year (if you've read Please eat... it's the cafe where he broke down in tears about hating being at uni - and so did I...)

Let's rewind to September 1977...

It's September 1977 and I'm en route to Sheffield Polytechnic to begin an HND in Business Studies. I couldn't get into halls of residence and so - after looking around at some truly awful accommodation including one flat which was basically just a room with 3 or 4 bunk beds! - me and a girl from my school found a flat owned by a rather unpleasant (and, worse still, racist) lady called Mrs M. (Who, being racist, made sure we were white females before allowing us to sign the tenancy agreement.) Unfortunately there were literally no other options, so we had no choice but to move into the dreadful Mrs M's poky little flat.