This blog is a shameless tribute to my Dad, the bravest, most charming, articulate, intelligent, handsome and most annoying all round good guy the world has ever known. Well, he would be if all of the world knew about him, so let’s assume for a minute that “the world” in this context refers to the people who have met him. And let’s exclude traffic wardens and English rugby commentators from that as well, since I very much doubt he has ever been charming towards any of them, should he have ever actually met any of them. And whilst we’re at it, we should probably exclude anyone who has ever said anything bad about HRH The Queen, since she is, in his opinion, the finest human being on the planet.
My Dad is a loyal friend and a terrible enemy. If you are his friend, he will go to the ends of the earth for you. If you mess with his family - my Mum, Little Vulture, Engineer, Judge, Boxer, Lioness or Bear – then you mess directly with him. He had an interesting / difficult childhood. He has 5 sisters, all of whom are completely nuts and absolutely charming. I love them all. I suspect that a lot of their eccentric characteristics were a coping mechanism for their childhood, at the hands of a difficult father, although my Granny was a proper Granny with a heart of gold, and a very gentle and lovely mother to all her children. For the only boy in the family, and the second oldest of 6 children, I suspect my father had a whole lot of expectation and responsibility loaded upon him. He didn’t fail to deliver, gaining entrance to Sandhurst and onwards into a successful 32 year career in the army – he retired as a Brigadier. He says, with characteristic frankness, that he achieved all this “in order to get away from my father”. This is probably mostly true. He lacks the blind ambition which drives people to succeed in their profession at the expense of their family, because whenever his profession threatened his precious time with his family, his family always won. I recognise this quality in myself, which is why I will never be a top level business woman. That, and the fact that I can’t really seriously envisage myself in such a grown up position, TBH. I still sleep with a teddy and cry at Disney movies and like playing in the snow.
With my father’s own children, he became the polar opposite of his father. Tactile where his father was cold and stiff, funny and charming where his father was stern and unapproachable, he is a proper Dad, who still worries constantly about his daughters (who are both in their forties, but nevertheless, people in their forties can still make hideous mistakes, I mean look at Nick Clegg), his wife of almost 50 years and his grandchildren. He was unusually domesticated where I suspect his father and many men of his own generation would probably not have recognised an iron if they had tripped over it in the hall. He ironed his own kilt, he polished everyone’s shoes, he did the washing up, he cleaned the silver (whilst polishing his Claymore). He expended a vast amount of time and energy setting the VCR so that it failed to record programmes off the TV, or recorded the whole programme except for the last 2 minutes when the plot was revealed. For the advent of digital TV we are therefore eternally grateful - Christmas time was always particularly stressful as we discovered which programmes we were getting to watch the whole of, and which ones would leave us hanging. He made up a leitmotiv for every dog we ever had, and he wept openly whenever we had to put them into quarantine for 6 months. He sang in the choir. He played the guitar quite well and the piano quite badly (except the base part of our own 3-part Chopsticks composition, at which he was a Maestro). He did all this, as well as the Dad tasks - cutting the grass, which always involved a goodly period of swearing at his ancient but beloved Flymo in an attempt to coax it to start, washing the car, mending broken things, building things out of other things – a greenhouse from a climbing frame, a garage from a greenhouse, etc.
6 years ago, my Dad ran the London Marathon in 4.5 hours. One month later, he had a massive, life-threatening stroke. He was not overweight, he did not smoke, he hardly touched alcohol (except his weakness for the occasional Rusty Nail, and of course the almost entire bottle of Cherry Brandy which he and I shared just prior to my wedding in order to calm our nerves), his cholesterol and blood pressure were both normal and he was fit enough to have just finished his second Marathon in 3 years in a more than respectable time. The medical profession wrote him off immediately. He couldn’t talk except in a whisper, he was dyspraxic, he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t sit up, he had no feeling in his right side at all, he couldn’t even swallow. They said he would never leave hospital, and if he did he would be in residential care for the rest of his life. They said he would probably never walk again. Then he started having epileptic fits, so they put him deep into a coma to control the fits, and when they brought him out of the coma, the drugs which they gave him to prevent the epilepsy made him dog-tired. All the odds were stacked against him. A lesser person would have given up. I suspect I might have given up.
The medical profession had not reckoned on the fabulous Astley Ainslie rehabilitation hospital in Edinburgh, nor the sheer bloody-minded determination with which my father has always achieved the things in his life that were really important to him. Nothing was going to keep him from his beloved wife and home. These days he walks (slowly and with a stick), he talks (mostly rubbish, but that hasn’t changed since before the stroke and he can do it loudly again), he lives at home (with minor modifications to the house and a very long-suffering hard-working wife) and he even got his driving licence back (but then he demolished the post box in the village so he has decided that discretion is the better part of valour where driving is concerned and he never really liked it anyway – and the Post Office are in hearty agreement with him). He named the dog after his physiotherapist.
He is a truly incredible man. My Dad. My Hero.
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