My Dad
My Dad would have been 80 today. Instead he's been dead for a decade, which is unthinkable. As is his death.
He was a lovely man; kind and unceasingly generous even to me his mystifying eldest son. He'd been a quietly driven man all of his life. He left a tiny corner of Cavan for the horror of the Irish experience of 60's London, where his countrymen were seen as comical buffoons, wearing their muddy boots in bed, and drunk every day in their donkey jackets. Later in Brighton at the height of the IRA's bombing campaign, with his biggish Catholic family, he somehow he managed to rise to a managerial position in the staid world of international insurance, eventually becoming a director of the company.
We went from being dirt poor in the early seventies (my mother would dispute this but it was true - we had nothing) to being quite well off by the late 80's.
I, on the other hand, have managed to sustain a career of hand to mouth subsistence living for nearly thirty years. Its a marked difference.
We are alike in some ways: diffident sober we're jolly drunks. We have similar faces, though I missed out on the big baby blues - my eyes are a murky green, more like baby poos. He ran away from cameras when I was growing up which I could never understand then and understand only too well now. There is a law of diminishing returns, after all. He was, hilariously, quite vain. He was the last man you might expect to be vain but his appearance was fastidious, his hair always just so, his Pringles impressive .
I miss him. We didn't really talk, not about anything serious, not at any length, which I now regret. I never asked him questions about his life, about his thoughts. It didn't really occur to me that he might die. It was so out of character.
When my play had a review in the Guardian last week my mum piped up "Oh, your dad would have been pleased - that was his favourite paper." Was it? I don't remember that. He was always politically left leaning, which seemed odd for the Catholic director of an insurance company, but I think my Dad took the obvious lessons of the New Testament at face value: love thy neighbour, be kind to the sick and the poor, lets get those money lenders out of the temple while we're about it. They're the basic, socialist tenets of Christ's teaching. In that way he was quite a simple man - he didn't have to tie himself up in epistemological knots the way that modern, right wing, money loving, people hating Christians can often do. He knew the tough times that camels had with the eye of a needle. He did it properly. He was a lovely man and a good one.
And I miss him. I quite often dream about him and our relationship remains the same: amiable, slightly baffled, bumbling along together. Its not quite the same; but it is sort of quite the same.
He was a lovely man; kind and unceasingly generous even to me his mystifying eldest son. He'd been a quietly driven man all of his life. He left a tiny corner of Cavan for the horror of the Irish experience of 60's London, where his countrymen were seen as comical buffoons, wearing their muddy boots in bed, and drunk every day in their donkey jackets. Later in Brighton at the height of the IRA's bombing campaign, with his biggish Catholic family, he somehow he managed to rise to a managerial position in the staid world of international insurance, eventually becoming a director of the company.
We went from being dirt poor in the early seventies (my mother would dispute this but it was true - we had nothing) to being quite well off by the late 80's.
I, on the other hand, have managed to sustain a career of hand to mouth subsistence living for nearly thirty years. Its a marked difference.
We are alike in some ways: diffident sober we're jolly drunks. We have similar faces, though I missed out on the big baby blues - my eyes are a murky green, more like baby poos. He ran away from cameras when I was growing up which I could never understand then and understand only too well now. There is a law of diminishing returns, after all. He was, hilariously, quite vain. He was the last man you might expect to be vain but his appearance was fastidious, his hair always just so, his Pringles impressive .
I miss him. We didn't really talk, not about anything serious, not at any length, which I now regret. I never asked him questions about his life, about his thoughts. It didn't really occur to me that he might die. It was so out of character.
When my play had a review in the Guardian last week my mum piped up "Oh, your dad would have been pleased - that was his favourite paper." Was it? I don't remember that. He was always politically left leaning, which seemed odd for the Catholic director of an insurance company, but I think my Dad took the obvious lessons of the New Testament at face value: love thy neighbour, be kind to the sick and the poor, lets get those money lenders out of the temple while we're about it. They're the basic, socialist tenets of Christ's teaching. In that way he was quite a simple man - he didn't have to tie himself up in epistemological knots the way that modern, right wing, money loving, people hating Christians can often do. He knew the tough times that camels had with the eye of a needle. He did it properly. He was a lovely man and a good one.
And I miss him. I quite often dream about him and our relationship remains the same: amiable, slightly baffled, bumbling along together. Its not quite the same; but it is sort of quite the same.
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