Search results for "dad "
Epiphany
Today is my father's birthday. He would have been 57. I miss, amongst a myriad other things, his way of pricking overblown seriousness with scurrilous absurdities. And buried in his poems I find this moment of pathos, which made me chuckle in light of my recent grappling with philosophical horse-bollocks:
I found out!
For one moment I knew.
Then it passed from me
In a drunken stupor
In the Market Place Gents
Andrew Herbert Flintham (1951 - 2001)
Ashes
Sunday, 07 January, 2007 - 14:57
We went to Whitby in the cold, rainy, misty January of 2002; over the moors, into the crook of the valley, down the quaintness of the streets, past the noisy amusements, past Magpie fish and chips and the vinegar smell mingling with the fishing boats moored in the harbour; along the harbour wall and right to the end of the pier. There are steps down to the lower deck of the pier, where crazy men stand with fishing rods.
We each took it in turns to scatter some ashes into the sea. It was windy and when I threw them, they were scattered back on the harbour wall below us, just above the reach of the swell of the tide. 'You've got me dad down the wall!' said Kieron, mock-aghast. Kathryn threw flowers into the sea. Pink bobbing heads and stems buffeting in the wind and sea rain.
In Whitby, at the end of the wintry north moors, cobbles and slate and jet are monochrome in the wetness of January. The boats in the harbour look gaudily colourful against the sombre background of grey, and the abbey on the hill-top. The ashes are somewhere in between - grey and monochrome and indestructible, and mixed into the sea with the loud boats, with their jangling chains and masts and pastel sails.
I sometimes wish Whitby would telescope away - be the hardest place in the world to reach, clinging to the side of the cliffs at the edge of the end of the world. There should be no B-roads to the next world.
Door
Monday, 25 December, 2006 - 14:27
So it was 5 years ago, 2.30pm on Christmas day. Andrew's breaths had slowed down - there were 45 seconds between the last, I don't know why I was counting. I waited a little, and there were no more. I didn't say anything to anyone else in the room, I just went outside for a cigarette. When I came back, everyone was standing outside the door. A nurse had been in to check him, and had suddenly asked everyone to step outside. Now there was a doctor in there. He came out a few minutes later, and told us he was very sorry. I was glad I hadn't been there to be told to leave.
I can't describe what happened when we went back in the room. Maybe in another 5 years? I remember afterwards that Kathryn called the smell the death-spray - something they spray in the room, that just smells of death, masking malodour with malodour. Different worlds, either side of the door.
What is strange is how you know when you leave finally that that is the end. You can't go back to the body. Once you leave, you have left forever. The body lies for days, and I suppose if you demanded it, you could go to the mortuary, wherever it is - the basement? - and be with it again. But really after you leave the room, 'it' is now an 'it', not 'him'. I held his hand, and of course it was still warm. They had closed his mouth, as well as sprayed him with death, but it had fallen slightly ajar. Ajar, like a door. I don't actually remember leaving the room - just being outside again - the sun had gone in, and the day was grey from then on.
Consumption
Sunday, 24 December, 2006 - 11:50
1997: just days before christmas, around about when I really started to cough blood, I was diagnosed with TB. My dad insisted I should come and stay with him, but a few minutes later, called back to say he'd realised, of course, I couldn't come to stay. I was supposed to be in isolation, and certainly not hanging around with kids.
Two weeks I had to stay away from people, and my house-mates had to get checked up before going away for the christmas break. And six months of anti-biotics and no alcohol. My mother and her husband came to stay with me, and we had a roast lamb christmas dinner in my student house.
It wasn't all bad - I was just trying to get a job as a writer with a small publishing company, and told them of my predicament. They said that having consumption was a good omen in a writer.
Swiss-army Knife
Saturday, 23 December, 2006 - 18:56
1983: At my grandmother's house, and big sprawling family - uncles, great-uncles, aunties, babies, cousins, great-grandmother, mother, a clan numberless. For christmas, I got a pop video annual with David Bowie and the Police in it, and a swiss-army knife from my dad, who had come early that year.
I have photos from that day, where I sit next to my great-uncle (he was a great uncle, he said 'well, I don't know...' and when he said it, it meant 'isn't the world an amazing place?'). He held a child in his arms, looking as though about to fall, a shy look on his face. I remember aluminium steamers full of sprouts and carrots, and steam everywhere.
The swiss-army knife lasted for years. It opened tins when I hitch-hiked to Frankfurt 7 years later, and sliced dirty cheese on trips with my friends to camp-sites in the wet English summer. The cork-screw broke quickly though, before I was supposed to use it. Sat in my fist like a knuckle-duster. It's gone now, like so much else from that day.
Christmas Melodica
Saturday, 23 December, 2006 - 13:21
I must have been eight or nine, when for christmas I got a melodica, a cross between a recorder and an accordion - the bellows replaced by a mouthpiece. It was a beautiful day, so sunny and bright, and crisp, walking down the road home from church, I was a pied-piper, blasting a cacophony from my new toy.
Back home, I competed with the radio in the room whose details are just so to me but must seem bizarre. A pram hung from the back of the door. Giant red rats stuffed with cotton wool and rags. Cloth on the walls, and through the window, the bare tree, winter-blasted but basking in the sun.
The moisture in my breath condensed inside the medolica, making it gurgle, and when I got carried away and blew the thing like a herald, it trickled back into my mouth. And my dad visited, as he did faithfully every christmas, and I blasted some noise in his ear and he seemed delighted.
Death on a cold day
Friday, 22 December, 2006 - 00:50
On very cold days, when your breath buffets away visibly, I still think of a car-park, outside a hospital, five years ago. Frost on the wind-screen first thing still takes me back to mornings five years ago, over christmas, going from hospital to house to house, brother, ward, step-mother, brother. Cold winter, hospitals, houses, disconnection, cancer, death, ward, breath. Dad. Never cried like I cried on christmas day, 2001.
I still can't write about it. Winter mornings, cold breath, disconnected hardness, death. Man aloneness. I remember most clearly getting out of a car, looking up at the hospital building, christmas morning, breath tossed away, little brother, silent, sun shining, carrying PG Wodehouse to read to a man in a white starched bed, wanting to be made of granite.
If I'm miserable and nasty to you at christmas, I'm sorry, I can't help it.
Prelude
Saturday, 06 May, 2006 - 22:55
I've just started a new web site called Don Chihuahua, which will eventually explain itself, but suffice to say for now that it is about performing music, and is as much fictional as it is factual. Today, I thought I'd officially launch, with a recording dedicated to my father, whose birthday would have been today.
Listen: Bach - Prelude mp3
Petouli
Monday, 27 February, 2006 - 19:34
I got a CD through the post with some petouli (patchouly?) scented rose petals in it.
I haven't smelt that scent for a while, not even down the Hatchet where the petouli-types go. And when I first got a whiff of it the other morning, I didn't think of Jack wearing it when we were at school, or about Alison whose leathers smelt of it when we were 17 and on a bench in the park one night; I didn't even think of Michael my third step-father, who wore it because he was a twat.
I thought about my dad wearing it when I was a kid and we went to a sea-side camp for a day and visited one of his women; and when he wore it after tidying up the lounge where I was sleeping because he had a date coming for dinner; and when he wore it when I must have been about 10 years old and he lived with a feller called John, who got really embarrassed when he and my dad went to the chippy, and the guy asked if they were together, and my dad said, 'yes, and we're very happy'.
I miss my dad :-|
