Page 114 of Vivacity
If I close my eyes and think about the past few weeks, in my mind, the memories are golden and sun-drenched. You know, like a retro movie where sun flares keep hitting the lens.
I couldn’t have chosen a better place than Australia to come with my son and work on our relationship. With every day here, we heal, and we talk, and we build. I don’t mean to say that we’re baring our souls—this is an introverted fourteen-year-old I’m dealing with, after all. There’s more grunting than baring, at his end, anyway.
Still, I’d call this healing. Every time he feels my full attention on him, I hope it rewires his system a little in the direction of knowing deep inside how important he is to me. Every time he does some crazy stunt, or we celebrate a random achievement of his just for the sake of it, or he lights me up becausehe’slit up, I hope he understands that I love him forhim. Just as he is.
I’ve talked a lot to him about myself. My dad. My upbringing. The extreme bodyguard parts that have had me in their grip for so very long. I’ve talked to him about unknown unknowns and known unknowns, about the difference it makes to develop an understanding of what you’re grappling with as opposed to being blithely oblivious to it.
We can’t always access Self Leadership. We can’t always prevent ourselves from being hijacked by well-meaning but extreme protectors, or guards. But it’s certainly helpful to know that they exist, to grasp their agenda, and to have an open line of dialogue with them.
I should know. Aside from this past fortnight on K’gari, Philip and I have been working hard on doing just that.
Even without the official therapeutic work, this place is like therapy all on its own. Elena and I may have tried to give Jamie as normal an upbringing as possible, but a billionaire father and an elite schooling and bodyguards (actual, not just emotional) barely constitute normal. London’s an intense environment at the best of times, and this is a world away from that frenetic pace.
Starting in Sydney was a way of easing ourselves into the transition with big city energy and the delights of Bondi. We may not have visited the Opera House (Jamie has the cultural sophistication of a banana) but we scaled the bridge: terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure.
Since then, we’ve shed our city skins and morphed into surfer dudes—I’d like to think so, anyway. Noosa was good, clean fun of exactly the kind I’d hoped we’d find. Our surfing stunts may not have been worthy of TikTok, but we fell into bed exhausted every night, our hair crusty with sea salt.
And on K’gari, we became even more feral. I’m sure both Elena and Soph would have been horrified by our lack of personal hygiene. We got pretty attached to our 4WD camper van, watched both the sunrise and the stars at the incredible Tukkee Wurrow, and met some dingoes. There’s something about stripping back all of the bullshit and the trappings to the stuff that really matters: food, water, nature, and human connection. Love. Not sure there’s more to it than that.
We both had a thorough shower before Elena came to join us in Port Douglas for some beach time, and we reluctantly swapped our four-wheeled home for a swanky villa. My ex isn’t a princess, but if she was coming all that way to get her Jamie fix, the least I could do was put her up in style. It was a successful visit, I think. She and Jamie were ecstatic to see each other. I was worried that hanging out as a trio would be awkward, but it wasn’t. Not really. There was enough to do and see to keep us occupied and provide plenty of conversation fodder. A few times, I caught her observing us together with a mixture of what felt like bewilderment and happiness. It seems she liked what she saw, and if I’ve given her any reassurance that this was the right call for all of us, then I’m a happy man.
I sitin my plastic folding chair, nursing a nice cold beer as Jamie struggles sweatily with our tent. I wouldn’t mind, but I even got us a pop-up one. And yet he seems to be making a dog’s dinner of it.
We’re still in Port Douglas. Jamie argued that the fancy villa where we hosted his mum was ‘wanky’ and insisted that we redress the balance with a few nights in a super basic, ‘normal’ campsite. I can confirm that this place ticks that box: it’s extremely low budget but has a chilled vibe that I appreciate. He’s insisted on being on tent erection duties, something I’ve agreed to with pleasure and watched with great amusement.
‘How’s it going over there?’ I enquire, crossing one ankle over my other knee. Thanks to the fleet of staff at the villa, my Noosa t-shirt is distinctly cleaner than it was, but that won’t last long. I reckon we’ll have to burn our clothes when we get home.
‘Fuck off,’ he mutters, and I snigger to myself before taking another cleansing sip of beer. Ahh, this is the life.
Finally, the tent is up.
‘Well done,’ I tell him. ‘Make sure to hammer the tent pegs in nice and deep. We don’t want to blow away in the night, do we?’
He gets to work, hammering away at the pegs one by one. Bless him, physical coordination is not this kid’s skill. He may have built a little muscle with all that surfing we did, but he’s still all gangly limbs, with very little control over his motor skills. I grimace as he attempts to bash one in. The ground is seriously dry, to be fair. I imagine it’s hard work, trying to hammer aluminium into earth as packed as this, but he has the angle all wrong.
‘Careful. Try and hit it head on.’
‘Nobody asked you,’ he grunts, and I chuckle.
‘Fair enough.’
Thirty seconds later, after a particularly aggressive hit at an ill-advised angle, the damn thing snaps in two with a comedicdonksound. Jamie stares at it in abject horror and gasps loudly. He looks up at me, his eyes wide. I stare back… and then I lose the plot, laughing my head off. I don’t know why it’s so funny—it’s low-key slapstick, nothing more—but I find it hysterical, for some reason. I’m crying actual tears.
‘You should see your face.’ I point my beer bottle at him. ‘Absolutely priceless.’
‘But what are we going to do?’ His tone is panicked. He looks around at the tent wildly.
‘Hmm, I dunno.’ I pretend to think. ‘If only we had a couple of spares—oh, wait.’
I push myself out of my chair and wander over to the pile of pegs. ‘Here you go. They tend to provide extras in case the person putting it up is a total muppet.’
‘It wasn’t my fault! The ground was too hard!’
‘You tell yourself that.’ I ruffle his hair, just to piss him off even more. ‘But honestly, chill. It’s just a tent peg. It’s not like it’s a five-hundred quid graphics card, is it?’
He sucks in a harsh breath that I’ve gone there. ‘Such a dick.’
‘Too soon?’
