3 years since Dad died. Some people say “since we lost, so and so”… to which I can envisage a small hunched granny in her 90s asking “Oh dear, where did you last have them“… Or does my imagination-memory detect a near imperceptible eye-roll from Stan? Quite possible.

Here are some excerpts from an old advent letter, entitled ‘Almost Advent 2015’. Hugh had just died. Dad was bereft. He said much, including the following…

“Pious platitudes stimulate a desire to stick my fingers in the speaker’s eyes. Wise people say “there’s nothing I can say.” If in doubt say nowt. People say they will pray for us. A few years back I heard a radio play in which Almighty God, overwhelmed by prayer requests flooding in by heavenly fax, asked his secretary to hand him the next in line for action. It was—a bit of a backlog—from someone whose family had been wiped out by the Black Death. My notion of the impassible Divine isn’t that of a celestial GP doling out analgesic pastilles on demand.”

“After 40 years of striving and moving and changing, this precipitated weeks of great exhaustion. We bought a small cottage in Penrith (Susan’s choice after years of having had little), but were not thinking of retiring yet – this post is congenial and there is work to do. Susan plods on. I see her as a kind of smallholder on the north Pennine moors that formed her grandparents: dogged, windswept, weather-beaten, cleaning up shite and feeding the hens. Stoic, heroic, self-contained, self-effacing.”

“As I write we’re on the ferry back to blighty. It’s a rough crossing, which pretty much sums things up for I feel like a buoy bobbing up and down on the waves of life. Or a tart’s knickers if you prefer. In September in person, and in October by FB message, Hugh and I had been discussing the future. We were planning a road trip along Interstate 70 west from Denver, and another trip to the Adirondacks. “You’re gonna go on for another 30 years, remember” said he to me. But he didn’t. He did not last even another 30 days.”

I can’t help but think that at times like those, poems like these must have come to mind:

This Be The Verse

By Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.  
    They may not mean to, but they do.  
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,  
Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse

A final thought. Imagine you are travelling from Ripon to Holyhead to catch a ferry for your school holidays at your new home, in Ireland. It is the early nineteen-nineties. You are in a green 1990 Renault 19 Chamade with ‘Forty Years On’ playing on the cassette player. Dad’s mood is immensely brighter as more of the A55 is no longer single carriageway. The tape, a BBC Radio collection Alan Bennett Double Bill (along with the very moving ‘A Woman Of No Importance’) must be nearly worn out by now. John Gielgud and Patricia Routledge seem to be sharing the same smirk on the cover. I wonder which joke carries over the portraiture frames. While many of the jokes wizz past my eleven years of age, I am happily anticipating dad’s gleeful reaction to Lady Dundown’s fabulous line; “Dear me. How cold it has turned. I must go in and put on another rope of pearls. The chair, Mr Grosvenor, if you please.”

Hope you’ll forgive the interruption. I’ll let you get back to your knitting.

Ed.