Ian Wood is leaving the parental home to set up house on his own at the age of 40...
"I left home yesterday. Went to the paper shop, bought a Viz comic, and came back again.
It says a lot that I'm still buying Viz as a forty-year-old. A few other things I did as a boy which I still do now, despite being more than half-way past my allotted three-score years and ten: I still love liquorice allsorts, still love Thunderbirds, still go to, erm, pop concerts. I saw Britney Spears once. "You rock, Birmingham!" she yelled. "And so do you, Britney," I thought. No-one else my age at that gig thought so, but I'm pretty sure the children they chaperoned did. One other thing I do which I did as a boy: I'm still in the parental home; but not for much longer.
Somehow I continue to enjoy good relations with my parents. I also enjoy a wide circle of friends who, if they think I'm a freak, they're kind enough to keep quiet about it. Truth to tell, I think I'm a freak, but I'm a good friend, so I won't tell me that.
Aged nineteen I left for polytechnic, but my home was too close for me to qualify for seven-day accommodation, and I had to return home at weekends. There was no real incentive to learn to cook, iron, do laundry, keep an orderly property or cope with household bills.
Fast forward to ten years ago when a friend of mine about to go on extended holiday asked me to mind his room in a large house. This was close to the kind of character-building domestic regime I'd opted out of as a student. But it was not a happy time - bills, cooking, cleaning. I scurried back to an option that protected me from financial pressures and domestic obligations.
The eccentric hours I work mean I can go almost a week without seeing my parents. To their great credit, they've never thrown the jibe at me, "You treat this place like a hotel!" Which is true. They'll be delighted to see me settled in my own place, but never have they put pressure on me to leave - and here they're at the leading edge of a growing trend imported from Europe, where it's the done thing for children to stay at home until they find a partner.
It could be that staying at home is a new form of rebellion. This whole business of committing the thick end of your hard-earned is increasingly questioned, especially as the bottom rung of the property ladder disappears into the stratosphere.
That said, my parents have signalled their intention to leave the city where I was born and brought up, and I've signalled my intention to stay here. I'm going to face the gamble millions of others face every year in leaving home for good. The risk goes beyond the financial. It'll test my personal resources: the ability to organise a smooth-running household, to do everything that's always been done for me, to have friends round for sophisticated dinner parties and not be fazed by the responsibility. I could just buy somewhere near a McDonald's so that'd solve that problem.
The choice to leave home will be the first of hundreds I'm steeling myself to face. Which mortgage? What kind of property? What kind of decoration and furniture? Whether to have a garden? Or a lodger to help with the bills? But for all the decisions that lie ahead, there's one I'll have no trouble making. I will not, under any circumstances, watch a television makeover programme."
