It had always been Colin's bedroom.

John and Sally were not used to the idea that they now shared the Big Bedroom and that Colin was away at university.

They had wasted no time in dismantling all of Colin's toys (although he'd have hated the word "toy" for his "artefacts" at his age!).

On the big wooden table in the centre of the room they had each put down their playthings and been unusually co-opeartive for two eight-year-olds when it came to marking out their respective territories.

There was the occasional dispute, of course. Sally had a massive fluffy bear who seemed to dominate the proceedings unfairly.

It wasn't just that John hated bears: it was the size of the wretched thing.

Sally argued that he'd spent a lot of his time in Colin's room in the old days anyway so he was a kind of hang-on of the Coln era rather than specifically being Sally's... sort of thing.

John would give her a withering glance when she started this kind of logic.

She would persist, though, and remind him that she had brought her bear in when Colin had been telling her one of his stories, which she hadn't totally understood. It had been about politics, as his stories tended to. She didn't like to say it to him, because she adored Colin, but some of that could be quite boring.

He had got the hint, though, and lightened up the story tremendously by introducing her bear in the very first chapter: the furry creature had been pushed in some politician's face. Colin had, under pressure from John, brought a lot of farting into his tale as well. Sally would always roll her eyes but John would laugh, partly at Colin's dead-pan delivery (it hadn't struck John, of course, that maybe it was dead-pan because Colin was about to go to university and was actually too old to be laughing at fart jokes).

Sally and John were both in two minds about Colin's going. On the one hand life was a bit quiet without him. On the other hand they'd got the Big Bedroom - yay!

Mind you he'd have it back whenever he returned for the holidays.

Sally was looking forward to Colin's next home-coming. She wondered if he ever thought about his brother and sister while he was out there.

He obviously loved his course, even though it sounded awfully boring to Sally. He was doing a History course. His speciality was "Exclusion to the Great Reform Bill: A History of Britain's Whig Party".

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