overlap

... from outer Spain - doesn't have the same ring to it, does it? I had an exchange of text messages on the day of the funeral that hugely upset me, though in the right way if there is such a thing. It surprised me to find myself quite so very upset, and while I could write that off as part of the long way from home, not enough sleep, not enough to eat, generally out of sorts thing, the truth is that I'd be fooling nobody by that, and certainly not myself. I made a few pages of notes at the time, but I'm not going to repeat them here and now. Suffice to say that I'm entirely clear that I don't need the rituals of the Christian church to sanction or validate my feelings, especially not regarding someone whose interest in matters churchly was non-existent for as long as I can remember. It suits me fine to be able to concentrate on remembering my father alone, rather than have the whole thing coloured (and indeed tarnished) by the inevitable disagreements with the other people I'd have had to deal with if I had been there. That said, I was trying to think of the last time we spent any meaningful, constructive or positive time together, and I came back to two examples - bunking into a motocross event where it was a pay on entry to the car park thing, so me being driven in in the boot meant getting away with not paying full price for two adults, and me cataloguing a bunch of machine tools that he'd 'liberated' when he was being made redundant. The motocross I can date at around April 1991, the machine tools almost certainly a little earlier. Ever wondered where I got my complete lack of integrity and moral probity? :-) My father's life probably informed my class consciousness far more his own, and I'm lucky to have known his father too, a quiet man, never without a crossword and whose temperament I most closely inherited. In understanding my father, and where he came from, I know where I come from, and that's all part of anyone's self-knowledge and family history, but there's nothing to say it's obligatory to carry on along the same lines. It would be easy to get into more detail and at greater length, but for now it's enough to say that I just spent a week away with some pretty close friends who had no idea what had happened just before I left home, and I'll be going back to work tomorrow with a bunch of people who are equally none the wiser. When it comes up that I'm apparently being cryptic or less than clear, as it does from time to time, it's much more an expression of the fact that I tend to keep my business to myself than that I'm deliberately trying to mislead or confuse. And that's as much a feature of growing up on the defensive as anything. My father was a simple enough man, and one with human flaws and limitations. I prefer to remember him in his 30s, when I was young enough not to question, and he was plenty fit and well enough to do stuff like fall through windows into plates of baked beans, and drive around rugby fields with me on his lap doing the steering. That was my dad.