There’s a large group of us.

Standing behind the steel black gates. Waiting.

It looks something like an industrial picket outside a factory. Except the tensions are higher here, the nerves more fraught.

The school bell sounds, more like a car alarm than a bell. A nasty, horn of a noise. A man with a large ring of keys opens the lock. The parents edge forward like nervous mountain sheep looking to be fed.

The grey void of a sky is melting and a pale sun is trying to break through.

There’s a moment of confusion, nobody really sure what happens next. Then the teachers appear, bringing the kids out into the playground, making them stand in lines.

We see our boy and soon we’re waving furiously. He spots us and his shyness can’t conceal the excited smile.

The teachers let the children out one by one, when they know the right parent is there.

Soon it’s his turn. My stomach leaps like a hungry fish.

He begins to run. I hold my arms out. He runs. I kneel down. He runs….

Straight into mummy’s waiting arms.

She’s drowning him in kisses and I have to content myself with a fatherly ruffle of his hair. But that’s grand. He’s back with us.

The classroom assistant tells us he’s been fine. A few tears after we left and then calm. It’s all going better than we’d ever hoped.

The first day is done. Chalk one off the total.

We take him into town in my car. We’ve promised him a new toy and lunch at a cafe as a treat.

I fire questions at him. I want to know about the first day. But he’s not for sharing.

‘Did you play with your friends?’

‘Mummy’s nose!’

‘Was the teacher nice?’

‘Mummy’s nose!’

‘Did she tell you a story?’

‘Mummy’s nose!’

I feel I’m not getting the full picture.

A few more of my questions are batted aside before he decides to bring a halt to the interview.

‘Daddy, if you really want to know want P1 is like then just become a kiddie again.’

I suppose we’re all a bit worn out. The long build up of emotion. The short release. The weary aftermath. The car is quiet now.

I don’t quite know what to feel. I’m thinking about a poem one of my correspondents reminded me of last night. On Children by Kahil Gibran. One line keeps coming to me now.

‘They come through you but not from you.’

Because I think it’s a reaction to that we’re feeling in our own way. Our desire to claim him. To own him. To stop anyone else getting a stake.

But that’s not the way forward.

I know that he’ll do better with all the other children. With the teacher. With all the questions. With the new world.

The truth is I can’t stimulate him enough. There’s a part of him that’s outgrown me already. A part of him that needs the new challenge. Even if he doesn’t always know it.

And that’s good for me too. I can’t be all of him, just like he can’t be all of me. I know I’ve been hiding behind him for many months. A good comfort, a good reason why I don’t have to engage with society.

It’s time for both of us to show our faces.

We’re in a cafe now. He’s eating chips and playing with his new toy. A dinosaur set.

He’s babbling excitedly. ‘Mummy, you can be the dinosaurs, I can be the hero.’

‘Who can I be son?’ I ask.

‘You can be the tree daddy.’

And that’s it. We move on as before. He wants to go to the lake to feed the ducks next, to jump in the puddles.

It’s a busy day. A full day.

I saw some old style lemonade bottles in a local shop today.

It made me quite wistful. Memories of the lemonade man. Ten bottles every second Tuesday.

The memories of youth. Brown lemonade. White lemonade. Raspberryade. Cloudy Lime. American Cola.

Drinking it straight from the bottle after an afternoon spent picking blackberries. Our legs stinging from nettle stings and briar scrapes.

I held a bottle in my hand. I hadn’t seen one in a while. I examined it.

Then I read the ingredients on the back of the label….

I look out the window.

There’s no sky today. Just a creamy grey void where it should be. Without definition.

The rain’s coming down, steady as a prison sentence.

My son and mummy were awake before me. Already about their business now.

I move to the stairs and see him coming up to find me. We meet in the middle, like the Grand Old Duke of York, I tell him.

We sit there on the stair. Just like that. He’s on my knee and I’m holding him in my arms. Neither of us speaking. No need to.

We sit there. Just like that.

I don’t think any of us slept very well last night. He ended up in our bed again, stretched out horizontally like a barrier between me and mummy. Feet at her end. Head at mine.

I had unquiet dreams. Of being late on the first day.

A friend had told me that the entrance gate closes at a certain minute, and if you don’t make it you have to go in through the front door, past the principal’s office to be marked as late. This is my dream from last night, except in it it’s me who’s late.

We move from the stairs at last. I make the breakfast, cereal and a smoothie. I go to feed him but he takes the spoon and sends me away, slightly chastised. He eats everything.

I can tell he’s a little afraid but he wants me to know he’s being brave. I ask him if he’s nervous and he gives the smallest nod I’ve seen. I hold his hand and we watch some TV.

I ask him if he wants me to dress him but he prefers mummy. That bond is just a little deeper.

The first tears come as the blue jumper is pulled over his head. The tiny grey shorts with a fierce crease. He’s mumbling something soft and I have to strain to hear.

‘I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go.’

Mummy talks to him. Tells him how brave he is. How proud we are of him. How it’s natural to be a little afraid on the first day.

It’s ok so far. Nothing worse than we expected. Just a couple of scratches, no scars.

I make a little snack. The challenge of finding something healthy he will actually eat. I settle on a pancake and some raisins.

I put the plastic lunchbox in his brightly coloured new schoolbag.

There are a few more tears as we put his shoes on. But when we produce our cameras to take photos for the grandparents a performer’s smile is worn.

This troubles me a little. It reminds me of my own capacity to make other people think exactly what I want them to. How I kept the real stuff packed tight inside.

The school raincoat is needed and the schoolbag is hoisted onto his shoulders. It’s so large that it seems faintly ridiculous, giving him the appearance of a snail carrying his home on his back.

I have everyone in the car much too early. I’m worried about the traffic and keep thinking about being late and having to walk past the headmaster’s office.

But it’s not that bad. I get parked right outside the school with time to spare. He walks slowly through the playground, holding both mummy’s and my hand, a little cowed by the presence of older and noisier children.

But we see some of his friends and his face brightens a little. I know he’s doing everything he can to be brave for us, and it’s pulling me to bits.

The headmaster opens the gates and we move to his classroom. Every child has their own manner. Some rush inside, barely looking back at the tearful parent, while others need that little bit more care.

Mummy takes him inside and to his desk. I want to go to but decide to hang back. Two parents inside seems excessive. Staying back seems even harder though.

My face is against the window. He’s fine. While mummy’s with him. Some of his friends from nursery come to play with him and I see signs of animation and excitement in his face.

Some other parents are in the classroom too. I see one little girl who has her arm around her mother’s neck, closer to a wrestling hold than a child’s gesture of love.

Soon the teacher shuts the door and mummy is gently ushered out. The poor teacher has to deal with the little children and the big children.

I can see my boy is crying now. I knew he would. But the teacher’s there to comfort him and so are his friends.

It’s ok. There’s no real distress. No sense of horror.

We retreat to a nearby coffee shop and meet with some other parents.

It’s almost like the aftermath of a funeral as we swap tales and anecdotes. Some back humour about the tears.

And then we’re home again. With nothing really to do but wait until we pick him up.

Mummy distracts herself with some cleaning. I write. We wonder what he’s doing now.

It’s a funny sort of in between time. We’re neither up nor down. 

We’ll find out soon enough. That’s the first morning done.

And so it begins.

Mummy has everything set out and ready for the big day.

Wonder if she intends setting out my socks and drawers too? 

My little boy starts school tomorrow.

The uniform is bought. The new schoolbag and pencil case too. The shoes are brilliantly black.

Mummy and I will both be there in the morning to take him to the P1 classroom. To show him where his desk is. To introduce him to the teacher.

Undoubtedly there’ll be tears. From him and us.

I’m desperately proud of him. I’m desperately nervous and afraid as well.

We’re as ready as we can be.

But yet something doesn’t seem quite right. There’s something about the whole process which makes me want to yell ‘Stop!, it’s too soon!’

I suppose that’s the curse of the parent. The emotional tic. The feeling of never wanting to let go. The feeling that he’s better off at home with mummy and daddy.

But perhaps there’s something more profound at work here as well.

My son’s birthday is at the end of the academic year. There’ll be kids in his class almost a full year older than him. A year means nothing to us but to a four-year-old it can be an unbridgeable chasm. That’s a world of physical and emotional development.

I have friends whose children were born two months premature. They are also starting P1 but the education system takes no allowance the fact that the first months of their life were spent fighting for their very existence, never mind trying to catch up with other children. It’s a blunt instrument.

All children are not the same. They develop and learn at their own pace. In fairness it’s virtually impossible to design a system which allows them all to thrive.

But they are trying. Everything I’ve seen about the school system since I’ve been a parent suggests it has travelled well along the route of compassion and fairness.

Things are unrecognisable since I started primary school in the 1970s when there were teachers who could barely contain their lust for the stick or slipper.

I was lucky in that I had enough academic ability to keep me from many of the worst excesses but I had several classmates who were ruthlessly beaten.

Looking back, I can see now that many of them clearly suffered from learning difficulties or massive emotional problems. Yet, no allowances were given and failure at academic tasks was met with the crudest forms of discipline.

Children were simply divided into those who were smart and those who were not. Those who were not were all but abandoned.

And not all of the punishments were physical. One of my clearest memories of P1 is being punished for some supposed misdemeanour by being made to stand in the corner. I told the teacher I needed the toilet but she grimly refused to let me move.

I stood there for so long in pain that eventually I wet myself. In front of the whole class. A crueller way to treat a scared four-year-old would be difficult to imagine.

But it’s scarcely relevant to go over all this old stuff. The world’s a very different place.

But the fears remain.

I’ve got my son with me now. I’m inexpertly typing this with one hand while he holds the other, watching the TV.

I’m trying to keep a feeling of normality about the week while also explaining that things will be a bit different from tomorrow.

And that’s just it. It will all be a bit different from now on.

After today all the time I’ve got with him will always be before or after school, between terms or at weekends. The idea that it’s just me and him and mummy with nobody else to interfere will never quite exist in the same way again. The link that’s existed since his birth becomes inevitably diluted just a little. It will never be just us again.

And it’s the first step for him on that relentless path of life. From school to university to employment. The first inching turn of the groaning, grinding old wooden wheel.

The same relentless path which almost destroyed me.

And yet it has to be. I can’t rewrite the world and I’ve got no better ideas on how it could be done. He’ll make new friends, learn about the world. Learn how to live on his own. It’s the beginning of the biggest journey of all.

So why am I wasting my time writing? Maybe just because I feel a poignancy that I can’t shift today. Maybe because I think some of the other parents who’ve been in this position will know exactly what I’m going through.

Maybe it’s just my typically long winded way of saying I’m going to miss him. I know it’s only a few hours, but I know I’m going to miss him so much.

He’s so happy sitting here beside me now that it feels like it could last forever. It can’t.

But I’m going to keep holding onto his hand for just a little bit longer.

Take a look at the photograph above.

That’s me. About 16 months ago.

What do you see?

When I look at it now I see a man with haunted eyes who is thin. Painfully thin. Dangerously thin.

What is most scary is that I didn’t see that at the time. I looked at myself in the mirror every day and saw nothing wrong.

And yet people were warning me. Loved ones were telling me I had lost too much weight. Some people even asked if I had a disease.

And still I saw no problem. If anything I probably thought I could do with losing some more weight.

I don’t look like that now. My body, face and arms are a different shape. Much fuller. The pictures now tell a different story.

My brother showed me this photograph last week and it scared me. Not just because of my appearance but because of what it says of the remarkable capacity of the brain for self-deception.

How can you see that something is wrong when your brain projects a different image?

I should probably give some context. At the time I had just run a marathon. From having no athletic experience at all I trained obsessively for six months to complete the running challenge.

I was going through a tough time at work and my mental health was fragile. Looking back I clearly threw myself into a crazy training regime as some sort of diversion.

I was running six days a week. Getting up some mornings at 4:30am to do a 20 mile run before work.

But no matter how much I ran I could never shake the persistent feeling that I just wasn’t doing enough. My old friend the nagging doubt.

I also started doing strange things with my diet. I cut out gluten, dairy and sugar entirely. I lived on brown rice, nuts and canned fish for a long time.

I’ve always had a complex and difficult relationship with food. A troubling fascination about how my body will react when different things are put inside it. Or not.

This is woven into separate issues surrounding weight, body image and mental health. It’s such a difficult interdependency that I’m pretty confident I’ll never really understand it.

Or understand why it is that I do certain things.

As a young child I often remember being hungry. Where I grew up it was spuds for dinner every night. I was never too fond of potatoes boiled to the point of being almost souped so I sometimes went without.

We’d have a Rich Tea biscuit and a drink of water for supper but I often remember going to bed with a sore, almost empty stomach.

I think this drove in me a determination to be self-sufficient in the kitchen. I remember using the chip pan by myself when I was about eight or nine. Long before they were dangerous. But I had no proper understanding of food and no culinary skills.

Despite this I was a good eater. I loved school dinners and would gorge myself on the steamed puddings and thick custard that the other boys turned up their noses at.

Something changed when I was a student at Queens. At this difficult time some of my anxiety problems were beginning to manifest themselves.

I was becoming more and more conscious that my skeletal pale frame looked puny and absurd compared to most of my more muscular peers. I was very embarrassed about how I looked. I always assumed girls were laughing at my physique.

My diet lost all sense of structure. I found I had the capacity to go for long periods of time without food.

I never ate breakfast and very rarely dined during the days at all. Sometimes I would feast at night, having my first meal of the day at about 11pm. On other occasions I would not eat at all.

I also became aware of the first time of the link between food and what was going on in my brain.

For years I simply could not eat in the presence of other people, family and close friends excepted. My stomach would churn and my throat seemed to contract at the horrific thought of it.

This destroyed eating out as a social choice. I came to dread any situation where I had to eat in front of other people. Several times I had to invent lies about feeling ill to explain why I wasn’t having any food.

One year a close friend invited me to her house for Christmas. I shouldn’t have gone. Her mother plated a huge Christmas dinner which I couldn’t touch beyond moving the food around the plate pathetically with my fork. The mother looked horrified and I was humiliated.

It got so bad that on several occasions I found the only way I could stomach having food was when I was drunk.

But over the years things began to improve. In a sense.

As I started to assert my independence in life my interest in food deepened. I devoured cookbooks and taught myself the basics about how to prepare food properly and to make use of fresh ingredients.

My fears about eating out eventually melted away. I developed a love of the cafe and restaurant culture which remains among my dearest pleasures in life.

And so developed another problem.

I found that I couldn’t stop.

I simply didn’t possess the capacity to know when I’d had enough. The trigger in the brain which says stop just wasn’t working.

From the shy teenager who couldn’t eat a pick, I became a gorger.

In the morning I couldn’t stop at one bowl of cereal, I had to have four or five. If I opened a packet of biscuits then I wouldn’t cease until they were all gone in one sitting. I would buy a packet of six yogurts to last all week and then devour them all within minutes of getting home.

There was something about the way I ate as well. It was urgent. Like a force of nature not to be disturbed. I deplored people trying to talk to me as I feasted.

It could be quite embarrassing, if we were with a group in a restaurant. While all my peers were still stuffing their napkins into their shirts I was already finished and wanting more.

My wife also developed the habit of eating fast as well. For her it was an evolutionary defence against me stealing her food once I was done.

I existed on the edge of what is socially acceptable with food. I would ask others if they intended eating what was on their plate.

I stared longingly at the food on the plates of diners at other tables. I simply couldn’t comprehend that they could sit there chatting casually to each other while they hadn’t finished their food. It angered me that they could be so blasé about their meal.

It seemed absurd that society demanded that their leftover food should be binned rather than allowing me to walk over there and take it from their plates.

Some wives may suffer from husbands whose eyes are drawn to other women. Mine often had to tell me off for staring too obviously at someone else’s plate.

But the downside could be debilitating. The linkage of overeating with depression is well known. Often my most acute feelings of worthlessness came when I had eaten so much that I felt sick. I knew it would happen, I told myself to stop, but I just kept eating. Then I despised myself for the weakness.

But somehow I stayed slim. No matter how much junk I ate it never seemed to have any impact on my body weight or shape.

My thin frame, which had been a curse when I was a teenager, now seemed a blessing. I saw countless younger men’s bodies collapse into a middle-aged pear shape while I stayed relatively lithe and fit.

Well, for a while at least.

As I passed 40 things began to happen. There was hair on my body where it had previously been desert. My stomach, up to now admirably concave, collapsed into some sort of soft convex bulge.

So I decided to do something about it.

There comes a point in your life where you know you have to start looking after yourself. I also thought a fitter body would assist in combating my mental gremlins. It seemed to make sense.

Unless you’ve got a chronic depressive obsessive personality-type.

One of my first decisions was that I needed to drink more water. So I drank three litres every day. Exactly three litres. Every day. Not a drop more or less.

My wife bought me a watch with a step counter. I decided I had to do 20,000 steps every day. If it got to late in the evening and I was lagging behind I could be found walking incessantly around the kitchen table. I pulled all sorts of diversions to ensure that the step which took me into bed at night was my 20,000th.

Sugar, gluten and dairy were all binned from my diet. My kitchen cupboards were reorganised to be full of glass jars packed with nuts and seeds. Coffee was banned.

Just to offer some brief defence for my actions. I knew there was no point in me trying to cut down on something like sugar. The only relationship I have with sweet food is one of excess. The only hope I had was to banish it from the house.

And then there was the running. The endless hours of pounding the pavements.

I trained for the marathon through last winter, which brought a surfeit of nasty storms with names. I found myself running in the darkest, blackest mornings several times with gale force winds blowing sheets of stinging, icy rain straight into my face.

And yet I kept on going. I learnt that my willpower is like iron when I set my mind to a task. I was a victim of my own stubbornness.

And so I ran the marathon. In a decent time.

And then the photograph with which I started this blog post was taken.

Was I healthier than before? Perhaps in some ways.

However, my face looks haggard and drawn. The arms are skeletal. The torso so sickeningly thin.

But the real point is the look on the face. There’s no joy there. No love of life. There’s fear in the eyes.

Gradually I’ve drifted away from the fitness and dietary regime I set myself and my body is now pretty much back to where it was before I started.

I still eat way too much. I wish I could stop that.

I could probably do with losing a pound or two.

My son likes to make fun of ‘daddy’s big fat belly’ and plays a game where he slaps it repeatedly to watch it wobble.

Your physical health is like your mental health, it never stays static. There’s always a process of improvement or regression. You try to keep it moving in the right direction.

And you guard against the other. Because you don’t always see it in the mirror.