I just went to a graduation ceremony. I wasn’t the only one. On station platforms at every stop there were graduation groups in evidence, in the spirit of the newlyweds and their families in Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings.
Graduation parties are generally three in number. One is young, the other two are older. The older ones will have sore hands from clapping long and hard, as hundreds of soon-not-to-be students file on stage to receive their degrees. There are plenty to get through – in the UK, well over 1m undergraduates and postgraduates are awarded their certificates every year. Parents’ eyes will hurt from all the squinting, trying to keep tabs on where loved ones are in the queue, working out when their turn will come.
I’ve now been to three ceremonies – my own and my two daughters’. In the three decades separating mine from theirs, not much has changed. It’s the same rather specific thing, peopled by the same types. The graduate, though no longer a teenager, is yet to shake off their teenage embarrassment at being seen out with their parents. Their toes are ready to curl at something, anything, their mums and dads might say or do to mortify them. The graduate might catch the eye of a fellow graduate – a close friend, an ex-friend, a partner perhaps in who knows what crazy caper that came to pass one lost night. And they’ll both pray, really pray, that their respective parents won’t meet. Everyone shuffles about uncertainly. It’s a festival of awkwardness, pride, emotion and other stuff besides. There’s a lot going on here.
It’s a funny thing, but you rarely hear anybody talk with any great affection or vivid memory of their graduation day. All you have to remember it by is that photo of you with bad hair, sporting expensively borrowed garb, that goes up on the wall forevermore, to be scoffed at by your own children one day.
And yet, in terms of the moment it marks, for those who do go through higher education, this is the most significant day of your life. OK, it doesn’t feel anything like as big as the day you left school, or the day you got your A-level results, or the day you left home to go off to university. But graduation day represents the very last gasp of your minority, your childhood, your teenage years. Yes, you might well end up living back with your parents, but this is the moment you otherwise have to assume the independence that is now expected of you. It’s an exciting moment, for sure, but also sad and, in many cases, plain terrifying. The dread question hanging heavy in the air on graduation day is this: now what? What on earth am I going to do with the rest of my life? Some have the answer already; most don’t. I know I didn’t.
On graduation day, our children finally stop being children. They’re already 99% proper adults, but not quite. They’re now on the very cusp of proper adulthood. And we parents are on a cusp of our own, between being adults and being older adults, AKA old farts. Our kids are now out of education and making their way in the big wide world. Yes, this is the moment we transition into oldfarthood. We must focus on growing old as gracefully as possible.
At the end of the ceremony I went to in Newcastle, one of the graduates made a rather wonderful speech about what that university, and the great city, had meant to this cohort as they’d come out of lockdown and learned to love their new freedom. The bit that made me blub came at the end when he wished everyone luck down the line, as he put it. I loved that, but wanted to stand up and warn them all how quickly their lives will now rush down that line. I kept quiet, though, which was for the best.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
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