LIFE in a family household is always a little bit weird when there's something momentous going on in the wider world.

Last week I spoke about escaping. Ignoring all the horrors, nastiness and anger that appears to be going on elsewhere, and while that's all well and good, up to a point, when you have children there is a responsibility not to hide them away from it all.

At some stage you are going to send them out and they have to be prepared for all that life is going to throw at them.

I am acutely aware of this now because my daughter is currently looking at universities.

This is very exciting. I went to university and as I may have said in this column on numerous occasions I had an absolute ball.

Obviously I worked very hard to get the very best degree I possibly could (cough, cough, waits for nose to grow a metre long) and didn't really spend a lot of time drinking in the college bar (80p a pint for goodness sake, what's a guy supposed to do), but on a more serious note it did teach me how to be a human being.

Basics like how to cook, how to achieve a work life balance (of sorts), how to get from A to B without getting yourself lost, hurt, or even killed. But also how to interact with people. How to make people feel better when something's gone wrong, how to make them happy, how to love someone.

Pretty much the foundations for the rest of my life.

What helped me realise these fundamental things was the platform my parents had built for me from which I could spring from.

My siblings and I have a lot to thank mum and dad for. Their sense of fun, kindness, justice and about a million other practicalities which they instilled in us to then go and make our own mark on the world.

It's a tough job to follow, and with the referendum, the horror of MP Jo Cox's death and of course the ruddy football, there's been a lot of explaining to do these past couple of weeks.

Now it's not my job in this column to be political, or to even offer up an opinion. I'll leave that to the Editor and the Letters page, so let's just deal with the complexities that arise when a ten year-old boy asks the most basic of questions like 'why did someone kill that woman' and then a day later 'why did Roy Hodgson make six changes to the starting line-up of the England team'.

And I am not an expert on either!

However my job as a parent is to explain, provide answers, even when I don't have a clue myself, but let's put this into reality because what I had to do this week doesn't even come close to what Jo Cox's husband has had to explain to his children. I don't want to even imagine what that must have been like.

In his incredibly moving and brave interview with the BBC's excellent Laura Kuenssberg, Brendan Cox thanked the public for their support and in return I kind of wanted to thank him because in that moment, in the most terrible of times, he demonstrated the very best a parent can be.

And if any of us can be half the parent that man will almost certainly be, then we'll be doing very well indeed.

NEIL D'ARCY-JONES

WEEKEND WINDOW

"Incredible result in your degree Jack, nice one!" Jenny and Michael.