THE phone rang. It was son number two and I could hear another voice in the background. “I’ve got a bit of a problem. I need your help,” he said. He’s living away from home for the first time, 200 miles away in Norwich.

When we drove him down there to start his university course last month, his dad and I stayed at the Premier Inn for the night. “You must be really busy all this week with parents bringing their children to university,” I remarked to the manager.

“Oh, we’re busy all year,” he said.

“We get parents coming all the time.

Sometimes their teenagers get into difficulty and need sorting out.

We’ve even had some mums staying for a month to help settle their children in.”

I thought we were getting 18-yearold Charlie off our hands. But this sounded ominous.

And so, when I received Charlie’s call a few weeks into the term, I wondered what on earth could have happened.

Had he been mugged? Was his room on fire? Had he been chucked off his course?

“What is it?” I said, trying to sound as calm as you can when you have images of your son – with a knife in his chest or leaping from a burning building racing around your head.

“Well, I’m with Rich in the laundry room and we’re confused,” he said. “We don’t understand this whole thing about coloureds and whites. We’ve read the labels over and over again and it just doesn’t make sense.”

Rich, I happen to know, is a law student. Charlie is studying philosophy.

And yet, the pair of them were totally bamboozled by the simple instructions on a washing label. So I explained it as simply as I could.

“The thing is,” said Charlie. “I’ve got this white T-shirt with a coloured picture of Rihanna on it. So if I put it in with the whites, won’t the colours from the picture run into them? But if I put it with the coloureds, won’t the white of the Tshirt be ruined?”

I suppose he had a point. I explained that the dyes in the picture would be fixed so that it wouldn’t run into the white of the t-shirt, so he could safely put it in with other whites.

With that initial panic over, I thought I could get back to concentrating on the 16-year-old, 12-yearold and nine-year-old I still have at home, and all the washing, cooking and ferrying about I have to do for them.

But the demands of long-distance mothering keep calling.

Charlie was on the phone again a few days later, asking me to email him my recipes for lasagne and carrot, parsnip and ginger soup, which I’d taught him to make before he went away: “I need it all written down. I have to know exactly how much to buy when I go shopping,” he said.

He was now about three weeks into his term: “So how much money have you spent so far?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. And he clearly didn’t have a clue.

So now, as well as the mugging, the room fire and being chucked off his course, I’m worried he’s going to run out of money.

Within a few hours, his big brother William, who’s just started the second year of his course in Belfast, was on the phone. “Can you send me the recipes you’ve sent to Charlie? I need them too,” he said.

William has just moved out of university halls and into a shared house in the centre of the city. He’s managed to survive one whole year on his own. But of course, I still worry about him too.

His shower and the house bath don’t work because he and the five other students he’s sharing with seem incapable of getting the gas switched on. They all use one little trickly electric shower, which is damaged. Their cooker has just broken too.

Although I haven’t seen it myself yet, I have heard particularly harrowing reports about the state of the kitchen from my sister, who lives near Belfast, and had a tour of William’s new home when he first moved in last month.

One of the housemates, who had lived in it during the summer, showed her round. “The kitchen sink was disgusting and there were plates and pans piled everywhere,” she told me. And then this lad pointed to the dishwasher.

“That’s the dishwasher but we don’t open it because there’s a terrible smell,” he said. “Why?” asked my sister. “There are a lot of plates covered with blue mould in there,” he replied. “We keep meaning to get dishwasher tablets but haven’t got round to it yet.” And he, heaven help us, is a medical student.

So, far from having two boys off my hands, living independently away from home, I now have the added worry of Charlie’s washing and budgeting problems and over whether William has got any dishwasher tablets and how he’s managing to cook.

And I’m not even thinking about the bombshell William dropped recently: “You realise we’ll both probably be living back at home again in a few years. There aren’t any jobs and we won’t be able to afford anywhere else...”