Who's The Daddy

Crowds at the Thursday night Highest Point Festival at Williamson Park, Lancaster. Photo: Kelvin Stuttard

It’s like that feeling you get when you stand up too fast or have pedalled a bit too hard on a spin bike - everything goes a bit grey and woozy.

At the time of writing she is dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on her final law exams, preparing to fly off on holiday - twice in three weeks - and packing up her student life in Liverpool and moving it all to her new flat share in Manchester where she starts her first proper grown-up job at a law firm next month.

There’s one essay still to write, but once that’s sent it’s the end of 17 years in education, a world where you’re trained to churn out 3,000-word wodges when in reality all employers want are your game-changing ideas summed up in one short sentence.Her time at university has flown by, thanks in part to 18 months of Covid disruption and endless strikes by lecturers.

The graduation ceremony date is on the kitchen calendar - so it’s official - the dog’s booked in for day care (we’d bring him but you only get two tickets) and the ruinous cost of part-funding one of our two children through university is over. Daughter #2 still has two years to go. If you’ve got little kids and have university aspirations - start saving now. Do it.

Well, the money pit’s done for us. Daughter #1 will be paying off her student debt (plus crippling interest) for the rest of her working life.

The other reason I feel about 90 this week is spending last Saturday night at the Highest Point Festival. Once upon a time (about 30 years ago) yours truly knew every band going. The NME was inhaled for about two hours the day it came out and my specialist subject on Mastermind would’ve been the admittedly niche subject, Shoegaze Bands Of The Early 90s. Go on, ask me anything.

The line-up for this year’s Saturday night sell-out crowd? Hand on heart, this middle-aged 90s throwback had heard of three of them - and one of those (the admittedly brilliant Shy FX) was only because daughter #1 accidentally pocket-dialled us from one of his gigs in Manchester a couple of years ago at 4.30am.

The festival has become a focal point for our friends from S Martin’s back in the day and they stay over at ours, swap old stories and compare aches and pains. The Sugarhouse advertised Highest Point afterparties. Sorry but those days are long gone. We reckoned the last time any of us set foot in the place was 1992.