It being Father’s Day I have, perhaps unsurprisingly, been thinking about my own father, but he is something of a distant memory.
He was thirty one (and a half almost to the day) when I was born and died 37 years ago. On the basis that I have almost no memory of my first four years on this planet my dad and I really only shared about 21 years of life. We weren’t close by any stretch of imagination and I can’t really ever remember having much of a conversation with him; we obviously did talk, but not that much.
If he had not died in his mid-fifties perhaps we might have developed a closer relationship and I might know a lot more about him, but even his family were a mystery until a couple of years ago when I found that I had an older half-brother and had lost an older half-sister. I knew that he had served in the Royal Navy in WW2, was sunk twice in the Mediterranean during the invasion of Italy and had worked as a silversmith prior to joining up when hostilities started, but otherwise he was something of an enigma, still is.
On a day when so many are expressing their feelings for father’s lost or otherwise I have no real feelings either way for mine for he was someone that I barely knew. Does that matter? Not to me. I don’t regret the lack of a relationship because there is no point; I can’t go back and change things.
I’m happy for all of those people who are celebrating their fathers or the memories of them and I’m quite content myself too. Happy Father’s Day.
The Voice of the Bloke at the Back 