Some Notes About My Dad That I Have Made In My Notebooks
A little audio intro from me, to provide some context to what follows:
My dad has come to an arrangement with the public pool in Nottinghamshire where he swims: after everyone else has got out of the pool, he is permitted to do a somersault before he gets changed. “THEY OPEN UP THE STORAGE CUPBOARD AND LET ME GO IN THERE SO I CAN GET A GOOD RUN-UP,” he said. Last week my dad, who will be seventy in August, got his friend Malcolm, who is seventy-three, to film the somersault. “It’s shattered all his illusions,” my mum told me. “Until he saw the film he thought he was creating poetry in motion. But it’s really just an old bloke who can’t run fast doing a sideways flop.”
I told my dad I was tired because I’d oversocialised recently. “THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING SOCIABLE,” he replied. “IT WILL STOP YOU GETTING ALZHEIMER’S. THEY’VE PROVED IT.” He asked me if he’d told me the story about the hairdresser and the car. “Is that from the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen?” I asked. “DON’T BE FACETIOUS, YOU LONG STREAK OF PISS,” said my dad. I searched my exhausted brain, remembering a couple of hairdresser-themed incidents he’d told me about, including the multicultural tour of hairdressers he’d been on in Radford in Nottingham where, after hearing how loud my dad spoke, a young Jamaican girl had made the assumption he must be deaf then repeated all the tour guide’s comments for his benefit… but nothing about a car. “MY HAIRDRESSER HAS GOT THIS REALLY FLASH SPORTS CAR AND I SAW IT IN THE SUPERMARKET CAR PARK,” my dad told me. “IT’S WHITE AND IT WAS A BIT DIRTY SO I WENT OVER AND WROTE ‘HAIRCUT’ IN THE DIRT ON IT WITH MY FINGER, BECAUSE I NEEDED A HAIRCUT. SHE DIDN’T FIND OUT IT WAS ME WHO HAD DONE IT UNTIL ABOUT TWO WEEKS LATER. SHE THOUGHT IT WAS HER GRANDKIDS. SHE GAVE THEM A RIGHT BOLLOCKING.”
Message from my dad: “ON SUNDAY I AXED OFF A BIT OF MY FINGER AND PUT IT TO ONE SIDE JUST IN CASE BUT WHEN I LOOKED ROUND A BIRD HAD EATEN IT.”
Modern cars get panicky about running out of petrol far too quickly.
I miss the old tough-love attitude to petrol from cars: “Oops. All gone. So what are you planning to do now?” Now I have a modern car with lots of electronic bits in it, I notice that it is also extremely needy, and riddled with unnecessary anxiety about countless topics. All the same, I have no desire for a classic car. After all, I wouldn’t get the pleasure of seeing how pretty it was, because I’d be in it. I once hired an early seventies VW campervan and immediately lost my forever spectacles via a hole in the floor beneath the clutch. It had no discernible second gear, and I banged my head around a dozen times over the course of three nights of sleeping in it. The cars my parents owned in the seventies and eighties were always breaking down, with the sole exception of a Morris Minor they bought for a tenner when I was a toddler. The worst were the three Morris Marinas they went through, which broke down constantly in the UK, but, mysteriously, were as good as gold when my dad drove them from our house, in Nottinghamshire, to Italy for four successive summers of camping near my uncle’s family. Once, he did the journey all in one go, meaning we arrived earlier than expected and caused my relative Jason, who had just got his first job at a petrol station in Donoratico, to squirt four star down his leg in shock upon seeing us. My dad loved Italy, as it was a rare place where everyone was as loud as him and loved pepper sausage as much as he did. On a later journey there, without me, he joined in, uninvited, with a reconstruction of the Battle of Goito in Lombardy; an incident that still, well over a decade later, prompts my mum to shake her head in exasperation. “It was so embarrassing,” she remembers. “I kept losing him. The worst bit was when he joined in with one side – I’m not sure which – and shouted, ‘KILL THE BASTARDS!’ then started rolling around in the street, clutching his chest, pretending to have been shot.”
The New Year’s village hunt was about to ride through the fields behind my mum and dad’s house, chasing a man dressed in a fox suit. “QUICK,” my dad said to my mum. “GET THE CAT IN. HE’S ORANGE. THEY MIGHT THINK HE’S A FOX.”
Email from my dad. No subject heading. Just says “WE ARE LIVING
IN THE AGE OF THE GIT.” Nothing else. His pillow is still at my house, he tells me later that day. He stayed here six nights ago and has only just noticed.
My dad still has a good head of hair, at seventy. My mum’s theory
is that he has “glued it on” by using so much gel spray. I timed how long my dad sprayed his hair once, and it was forty-two seconds. There was then a pause, and he began spraying again, for a further thirteen seconds.
My dad has a black toenail, after stubbing his toe. Directly after stubbing his toe, he received a mass email from Boris Johnson, which he replied to with the sentence “FUCK OFF BORIS” and nothing else. My mum - while definitely anything but a fan of Boris Johnson - told him it hadn’t been a very nice thing to do, after which my dad tramped back upstairs and sent a follow up email saying “SORRY ABOUT THAT, BORIS. I OVERREACTED BECAUSE I’D STUBBED MY TOE.”
My dad was in hospital in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, after falling out of a tree as a result of climbing it in heavy rain whilst wearing gripless slip-on shoes. As he was wheeled into the hospital on a stretcher, with a suspected broken spine, a doctor asked him if he had any allergies. “YEAH,” he replied. “JEREMY CLARKSON.” Later, after several days in the hospital, waiting to be fitted with a back brace, he was given some pills with ‘TTO’ written on the bottle. “WHAT DOES THAT STAND FOR?” he asked a nurse. “To take ’ome,” said the nurse.
I visited home. My dad, who had put on an old shirt my mum had been using as a painting rag, showed me the new wildlife pond he and my mum had been digging out, and said he was thinking of getting a rescue swan.
“I will probably pop into Candlesock for lunch on the way to Derbyshire, if that’s OK?” I said to my mum. “What’s Candlesock?” she asked. “It’s the old Saxon name for your village,” I told her. “I looked it up.” A small river weaves mildly through Candlesock and as you walk along its mild banks, you might mistake it for a place where only mild people have ever lived, giving rise to events that are exclusively mild. But that’s not true. Once, the houses close to the river in the centre of the village were shops. One mistakenly once sold laudanum instead of tincture of rhubarb. It killed a man in the village. In retaliation the man’s son broke into the shopkeeper’s house and murdered her in her bed. On the west side of the village, the river hides for a couple of hundred yards in a corridor of trees, whose branches, when they have fallen in strong winds, have often been dragged by my dad to my parents’ shed then used as firewood. You walk across the field from here and reach my parents’ garden, where you will frequently find my dad burning garden waste or making friends with dog walkers and asking for their life stories. Sometimes, he will be wearing a high-visibility jacket. He tends to favour bold colours, as he does not want to turn into what he calls “AN OLD BEIGE PENSIONER”. He recently showed me a mustard jumper he was wearing. “LOOK!” he said. “THEY’RE MAKING CLOTHES IN ALL SORTS OF GREAT COLOURS NOWADAYS. NOT LIKE ALL THOSE BORING BLUES AND GREYS AND BLACKS.” I pointed out that the latter are the colours I usually wear. “YEAH,” he said. “THAT’S WHAT I MEAN. TOTAL FUCKING RUBBISH.”
Text from my mum: “Your dad asked the plumber yesterday if there
was any gossip in the village. The plumber said, ‘YES! Pete Wilton’s bull got out and mounted one of John Michael’s cows and now she’s pregnant!’.”
My parents are in Devon, staying at my house. I’m at their house, in Nottinghamshire. My mum calls to ask me how everything is. I tell
her it’s fine. She’s in the car, which is being driven by my dad. “LET ME TALK TO HIM. I’VE GOT SOMETHING URGENT TO SAY,” says my dad, in the background. “Hi,” I say. “I JUST SAW A MAN SELLING CAULIFLOWER IN A FIELD,” says my dad.
For a long time during his childhood, my dad believed that leopards didn’t have bones, because that’s what his dad told him. They were at the zoo at the time, in Blackpool, which was also the town where my dad’s Uncle Ken got his Alsatian, Bruce, who my dad often believed was intent on killing him. “NOBODY WALKED THEIR DOG BACK THEN. YOU JUST LET YOUR DOG OUT,” my dad recalled. '“THERE WAS DOG SHIT EVERYWHERE. JENNIFER WOODBURN SLIPPED ON BRUCE’S AND BROKE HER LEG.” Ken went to Blackpool often, and stayed with a landlady, which to my dad sounded very exotic, and made him hope that he too, at some point in his life, would get to meet a landlady.
I was in the garden centre with my dad. “THIS REMINDS ME OF THE TIME I STABBED ALAN TITCHMARSH,” he told me. "You stabbed Alan Titchmarsh? You mean the TV presenter?” I said. “ALMOST,” replied my dad. “IT WAS A LIFE-SIZE CARDBOARD CUT-OUT OF HIM, ADVERTISING HIS GARDENING FORKS. I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE FUN TO STAB HIM WITH ONE OF HIS OWN FORKS BUT THEN I THOUGHT I MIGHT GET INTO TROUBLE SO I WENT RIGHT UP TO HIM AND WHISPERED ‘FUCK OFF, TITCHMARSH’ IN HIS EAR.”
Last week my parents attended a talk by the Gardeners’ World presenter, Monty Don. Afterwards, my dad was seeing my mum out of a tight parking space and lost concentration, which meant my mum came very close to running over Don, who happened to be walking past at the time. My dad immediately ran over to him to apologise. “SHE LOVES YOU,” he told the celebrity gardener. “SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN ABSOLUTELY HEARTBROKEN IF SHE’D KILLED YOU.”
My dad often loses me at night. I am a few inches taller than my dad, but in his dreams I am tiny, and he is often forgetting where he put me, before locating me in coat pockets and empty coffee mugs. Sometimes in the dreams, I take the form of a bird and fly away. One night last month my mum woke to a discordant duet: my dad shouting in his sleep and their cat The Bridget wailing. In my dad’s dream on this particular night a boxer dog had me in its mouth and was running away with me, and he had grabbed its tail in an attempt to stop it. “Fortunately The Bridget didn’t seem hurt afterwards, just a bit upset,” my mum assured me.
I went to the pub with my parents. A waitress left her notepad and pen on the table and my dad immediately began to sketch a man sitting two tables away. My mum pointed out the trout on the menu and said it sounded nice and I agreed but reminded her that I had been vegetarian for quite a while now, not just pescatarian, like I used to be. “TROUT DON’T HAVE FEELINGS,” said my dad. “THEY’VE PROVED IT.”
My dad said he touched another man on the street yesterday, very gently, without the other man realising. “IT WAS THE MATERIAL ON HIS SUIT,” he said. “IT LOOKED LOVELY AND I COULDN’T RESIST HAVING A FEEL.” He was in London, where he’d met a Komodo dragon, which he thought was called Roger, but discovered was called Raja only after he had addressed the Komodo dragon several times as Roger. Later, he talked about my grandma, who was always very aware of the worst things that could happen in any situation, and would not permit him to wash knives as a child. On the street in the council estate where my dad grew up, my grandma once found two of the boys from across the road fighting in front of her and my granddad’s house. “Are you boys making love?” she asked the boys, and they let go of one another and retreated indoors.
My mum and dad’s cat The Bridget often goes on lengthy wanders in summer, sometimes not coming home for a fortnight. It worries them hugely, especially my dad, and to occupy himself, he will often paint her adventures with phenomenal intricacy, imagining her as a time traveller, turning up at a variety of history’s most significant events, like a more intrepid and far-reaching feline Zelig. I think my favourites of the dozens of paintings he’s done are Bridget’s appearance on Abbey Road with The Beatles and - with a freshly caught mouse hanging out of her mouth - in Hunters In The Snow, the 1565 painting by Pieter Bruegel The Elder.
Visiting my parents in Nottingham. My dad has found an obscure but - he assures me - significant piece of stone in a local field while collecting wood. “I’M GOING TO TELL YOU EXACTLY WHAT IT IS LATER AND I WANT YOU TO LISTEN,” he says. “I’VE JUST HAD A BATH AND SWALLOWED A LOAD OF RADOX BUBBLE BATH BY MISTAKE.” At this point mum arrives in the kitchen, apparently a little flustered. She say she’s lost her ticket to an event organised by her village book group. “IT’S BECAUSE OF YOUR CRAZY LIFESTYLE,” says my dad. “YOU’RE WORSE THAN LINDSAY LOHAN.”
“YOU KNOW WHAT I LEARNED TODAY?” my dad asks. “What’s that?” I reply. “HOW TO LOOK AT ALL THE PHOTOS I’VE TAKEN ON MY PHONE,” he says. “I’D NEVER SEEN THEM.”
Norwich is a quiet and mild city, although I perhaps didn’t realise how quiet and mild until I walked through it with my dad, who is neither of these things. My mum and I kept losing my dad, then realising he had stopped to take a photo of some people sitting on a bench who he thought looked interesting, or to pretend to shout abuse at someone on a loud motorbike, or to try to sneak onto the end of a guided history tour and consume some of the information for free. “LOOK AT THIS, IT’S FUCKING AMAZING!” my dad said, as we reached Pulls Ferry, the fifteenth-century flint Watergate near the cathedral. “WHY HAVE YOU NEVER SHOWN ME IT BEFORE?” “I showed you it in 2005 and then again in 2009,” I reminded him. “NO YOU DIDN’T,” said my dad. “I’D KNOW IF YOU HAD.” I noticed that nobody else in Norwich was as loud as my dad, or as keen to make friends with strangers. I began to feel like someone leading a large, inquisitive dog through a lawn bowls event, with a blaring radio attached to the dog’s collar. ‘I am charmed by this dog’s enthusiasm but why don’t its owners turn the radio down?’ I imagined the bowls players thinking. But what the bowls players didn’t realise was that the radio didn’t have a volume switch, just one marked ‘ON’ and another marked ‘OFF’, and that these switches controlled the dog too, not just the radio.
I’ve driven up from Devon to see my my mum and dad in Nottinghamshire. We’re in their front room and my aunt, uncle and cousin are there, too. The phone rings and we hear my dad answer it, in the adjacent room. “FUCK OFF YOU BASTARD,” he says. “Who was that?” we ask, when he returns to the room. “IT WAS ONE OF THOSE BASTARDS YOU GET SOMETIMES,” he says.
“PUT SEASHELLS IN THE ANKLES OF YOUR SOCKS,” my dad told me on the phone today. “Why on earth would I do that?” I asked. “YOUR MUM TOLD ME YOU’VE GOT BADGERS IN THE GARDEN. WHEN THEY BITE YOUR LEG, THEY’LL CRUNCH ON THE SHELLS AND THINK THEY’VE ALREADY HIT BONE, THEN LEAVE YOU ALONE.”
My mum was preparing for the life drawing class she sometimes organises, which had temporarily moved from a venue down the road to my parents’ living room. She said she was doing some nibbles for everyone, then asked my dad - for the third or fourth time - to get the electric heater from the loft so the model wasn’t chilly. My mum and dad’s fridge, which had been left open, was making a beeping noise. “I’M DOING IT NOW,” he said. “I DON’T WANT HER TO BE COLD. DON’T USE THAT WORD. NIBBLES. IT MAKES ME CRINGE. I’VE BANNED IT. IS THAT FRIDGE REVERSING?” My mum asked my dad if he knew that he’d bent the potato masher earlier when he was mashing potatoes and he said he hadn’t noticed and apologised for bending the potato masher.
This week the regular life model for my mum’s life modelling class wasn’t able to make it so a replacement was sent. She said many of the people attending were surprised to discover it was the village postman. “EVERYONE RECOGNISED HIM BY HIS SACK,” said my dad. Later, he took me to one side for a quiet word that he said was important. “YOU SEE THESE?” he said, pointing to some potatoes he’d grown. “YOU’RE GOING TO NEED SOME WHEN EVERYTHING FALLS TO BITS.” We walked to the bottom of the garden and he showed me his logstack, which was very impressive. “I’M GLAD YOU’VE GOT YOUR MUM’S PERSONALITY AND NOT MINE,” he said.
While I was walking through Newark with my dad, a motorbike roared past us. “I KNOW THAT BLOKE: HE BUYS FISHCAKES AT THE MARKET EVERY FRIDAY,” he commented, before continuing his story, which was actually a story from his policeman friend at the swimming pool. The story was that the policeman friend had taken a statement from a student who’d been mugged at knifepoint in the part of Nottingham where my nan used to live and offered to pay the muggers with a cheque. The muggers declined and instead marched him back to his flat, which they proceeded to ransack.
Message from my mum: “Your dad is back from swimming and has some frogspawn. His friend had left it in the changing room for him.”
Message from mum: “We’ve got mice living here. Your dad’s not happy. They’ve stolen all the chocolate he hides under the sofa cushion.”
I’ve moved to a remote house in the Peak District and my dad, who is visiting me, has been out exploring the immediate surroundings. “I’VE MET EVERYONE AND I’VE GOT LOADS TO TELL YOU,” he says. “IF RICHARD COMES OVER WITH A RAM’S SKULL THAT’S FOR ME.” Later, driving me past some of the Derbyshire haunts, he spoke nostalgically about the county, and the biography of Napoleon that he was reading. “YOUR MUM WENT TO THAT CO-OP IN 1974 AND AN OLD MAN WET HIMSELF. IT’S NOT A CO-OP NOW. LOOK AT THOSE SHEEP. BRILLIANT. SEE THAT? NO BLOODY SIGNAL. THAT WAS THE OTHER THING ABOUT NAPOLEON. PUT YOUR LIGHTS ON, YOU IDIOT. HIS SOLDIERS USED TO CUT OPEN THEIR HORSES WHEN IT WAS COLD AND SLEEP INSIDE THEM. THINK YOURSELF LUCKY.” I told him I thought my new house might be haunted. “DON’T BE FUCKING RIDICULOUS,” he replied. “YOU’RE JUST LIKE YOU WERE WHEN YOU WERE EIGHT. GROW UP.”
Read about my dad and the toad who lived in his shoe here, plus more about him here and here.
My non-fiction books 21st-Century Yokel, Ring The Hill and Notebook feature my dad quite heavily. All of them are available with free delivery from Blackwells.
The Bruegel Bridget painting is my favourite (one I own as a greeting card and will not send to anyone: I hope to frame it), partly because Bridget is in some ways the most successful of the hunters, also because Hunters in the Snow is one of my very favourite paintings full stop. These notes are delightful. Long may your Dad's FULL CAPS OBSERVATIONS continue.
Ah, yes, the old I-cut-my-finger-with-an-axe bit.
Long before I was born, my grandpa whacked off his thumb down to the knuckle with an axe.
He told my grandmother to go find the rest of his thumb in the wood pile so he could take it to the hospital and have it sewn back on, but she said no.
Due to the lack of thumbnail, by the time I was little, he was quite excellent at Got Your Nose and regularly horrified small children with it, first myself and later my own kids.
He was, all in all, a jovial and big-hearted man, and I miss him very much.