Joe is getting older too. At fourteen he’s accelerating rapidly out of boyhood into adolescence, a process I watch, like most fathers, with pride but also with a tinge of grief. I know I’m losing a part of him to adolescence soon. His properly proportioned fourteen-year old physiognomy is starting to elongate and become absurdly gangly, an untidy tangle of knees and elbows. When he reclines on the couch in front of the TV he resembles a heap of discarded chicken wings. His feet – almost as big as mine – are too big. The sweet choirboy voicemail message he recorded on his phone in January
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