It’s seven o’clock in the morning, and while the rest of the street is asleep I’m slipping and sliding back and fore between the car and the house, trying to relieve the car of most of its contents before I drive away.

Snow, fog and car battery permitting, I’m off to collect my son from his first term at university. His room in halls doubles up as a conference bedroom in the holidays, so he and all the other students have been warned to have themselves and their worldly goods off the premises by ten today at the very latest. Or else.

I’ve vaguely asked or else what – will they be banned from the union bar for life, for instance, or put in stocks and pelted with the underpants they’ve left under their beds – but it seems the punishment is so unthinkable that nobody’s actually thought what it could be, including the student halls manager.

So here I am. Stripping the car down to its essential component parts so that there’s enough room to cram the suitcases, boxes of books and bedding in and still have space for me and him.

My fingers have lost all feeling by the time I start the engine, and the blood has only just started finding its way through the icy capillaries again an hour and a half later, when I draw up to the university. There’s not a car park near the halls as such – cars are not particularly encouraged here – so I’m glad I’m here with an hour to spare.

As I walk up the stairs to his room I pass a couple of open doors. At one, there’s a stunning girl in pyjamas, staring aghast at the middle aged woman who is briskly gathering up the scores of dresses and patterned tights and leggings that are strewn all over the bed and desk and floor. The dresses are made of chiffon or nylon or something equally unsuitable for December and are also very slippery, and slide off her arm every time she manages to get some sort of critical mass together.

My son opens the door when I knock, which is a good start. Even better is the fact that he is fully dressed, and surrounded by fully packed cases, plenty of carrier bags full to the brim and a lot of computer equipment and a small fridge.

The bit of my brain that should do maths but doesn’t says quietly to me, er, how do you think we’re going to fit that lot into one car? But I’m so pleased to see him, and even more pleased that he’s not standing uselessly in pyjamas and waiting for me to solve his packing problems, that I ignore it completely and we set to draining the water out of the fridge and closing down the computers and getting ready to go.

Outside, the maths-free bit of my brain is practically wetting itself laughing, as we push, pull and pile stuff into the car.

There seem to be more cars than students now, and some immature tempers are getting frayed. One testosterone-filled male shouts to another that he’s getting in everyone’s way and holding people up, and the other makes an obscene gesture back.

The situation is only diffused when their red-faced 19-year-olds lead them away separately.

We eventually push back the frontiers of physics and get everything in by 9.58am, apart from a half-empty bottle of shampoo and some Twixes, which we can’t bear to chuck away so eat. I’m not sure why the Twixes wouldn’t fit in outside our bodies, but do when we eat them, but I can ask for a lecture on that on the way home. Except on the way home, he sleeps.

When I open the passenger door outside the house, he practically falls out. The box on his lap actually does, to the sound of breaking glass.

“Er, test tubes?” I ask.

“Cocktail glasses,” he grunts.

I wonder whether the woman who gathers up dresses has finished or is looking at an afternoon in the stocks.