My tribute to my late father

As my earlier entry suggested it was going to, cancer took my dad on the stroke of midnight on March 15th/16th. My family are hugely grateful for the love and support that's been shown to us. I don't propose to relay the details of his last few days here, rather I'm just going to place here what I said at his funeral service this morning.

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When we were nippers, the phrase ‘wait till your father gets home’ meant something. Dad’s size, giant to a young child, coupled with the fact that he worked nights so we didn’t see much of him during the week, gave him an imposing air that you respected without thinking about it. Mum only had to say those words to put an end to any misbehaviour on our part. To count the number of times Dad ever laid a hand on us in anger, though, even after hearing any report of some wrongdoing, some broken vase or refusal to go to bed, I wouldn’t need the fingers of a single hand. It was so rare that, if I ever did get a smacked backside, my main response was one of shame, because I’d know without question that I really had done something that deserved it. That’s how Dad was; a man of contradictions. When we lived in Edinburgh Road, for example, he was a subscriber to Militant magazine. By the time the folks left Bevendean, he was reading, to my horror, the Daily Mail!

Examples of these contradictions run like a thread all through his life. Unlike his father and grandfather before him, he didn’t join the Navy, though his great respect for his forebears having done so was clear. He told me once that the reason he didn’t follow them was because the Navy told him he’d be a good fit for some kind of engineering role, which didn’t appeal to him. He didn’t fancy sitting in a confined space in the bowels of some ship, surrounded by the noise and grease of his work. He then, of course, spent much of his working life doing exactly that type of thing on land rather than sea, quite literally getting his hands dirty to earn his living.

He didn’t want us to have to do the same sort of thing, urging me once to seek so-called ‘white collar’ work rather than any kind of job you had to wash off yourself at the end of each shift. Glenn, though, has inherited his mechanical talents, and Dad wasn’t afraid to tell both of us how proud he was of us as young men, not minding at all that Glenny had found work like that, despite the advice he’d given us to the contrary.

Dad was a man with a low embarrassment threshold. He did not like people to think he’d made some mistake, he fretted about how he looked whenever he stepped out of the house in anything other than his overalls; he placed, in short, a high value on his dignity. So, knowing that, and as another illustration of the contradictions I was talking about, let me tell those of you who never saw it about the White Admiral public house in Bevendean.

This now-demolished boozer was one for which the term ‘spit and sawdust’ could not have been invented, because it suggests a salubrity and class which was simply absent in the Admiral. Possibly blood and sawdust would suffice, though I suspect any sawdust would have been nicked had it been left sitting around unguarded. One Christmas the Admiral held a fancy dress competition. Dad, perhaps miffed by the fact that Mum used to win something in every single one of the pub’s many raffles, decided he was going to win it.

Now bear in mind that this is a man who once asked me if I thought he looked like a ‘retired copper’ before he left for a night out. Turning up in any fancy dress whatsoever would have provoked surprise, so when he came into what was laughably called the ‘family bar’, they might as well have called the competition off and put first prize straight in his hand. His chosen outfit was a deep, iridescent blue, off-the-shoulder ball gown, a long blond wig and a tiara. I was, like everybody else, so startled by this that it was only much later that I wondered where he got these items in sizes that would fit him. Of course he won.

He was a voracious reader, a love of words being one of the greatest gifts he bestowed me, and he had a sophisticated and varied sense of humour. The hardest I ever saw him laugh though was in response to a silly pun about the controversial French footwear designer Phillipe Floppe. He was helpless for about half an hour and for a short time I thought we were going to end up gathering to celebrate his life a lot sooner than we actually have because he went the colour of that ball gown.

In truth he was always pretty quick to laugh, a great quality in my view, and despite being quick to express his displeasure when he felt it, usually with some inanimate object he was threatening to cast through the nearest window, he was no less quick to express the great pleasure he took from so many things. As you’ll have seen from how he made his final journey today, he had a lifelong love of motorcycles, refusing to allow the last one he owned even to get wet – if it ‘looked a bit threatening’, the bike remained in the garage. Though he never joined the Navy, he did love the ocean cruises he took with Mum, her sister Chris and our greatly missed uncle Clive, and he took particular joy in the pleasure boat he and Mum bought to tour the Norfolk Broads.

He also found friendship and brotherhood in the Freemasons, the support from whom has gone above and beyond the call, and extended well beyond the point at which he was too ill to play any active role. My family owe Mr F in particular a debt of gratitude which we can never expect adequately to repay.

Some family secrets came tumbling out of their hiding places over the course of Dad’s illness. These have served to illustrate the point I’ve been making about his contradictory nature. For all of that, I could not have asked for a better father as a kid. The last thing I said to Dad, when I thought he was sufficiently awake to understand it, was to thank him for everything he’d done for me. While we were doing a bit of tidying up at the bungalow he got to enjoy so briefly last week, my partner Cristina came across a ring that Mum had, as she frequently does, ‘tucked away’ somewhere or, as I’d call it, lost.

‘The last thing he ever bought me’, Mum told us, quickly moved to tears. ‘He loved you’, Glenn said to her. He did. He loved all of us. And we loved him, and will miss him terribly.

Goodbye, Dad. And thanks.

Dealing with the inevitable

It seems that the cancer which my father has already given up parts of himself to try to slow up is not going to give him much time at all. A very difficult few weeks has seen him go downhill quite quickly and he’s now back in hospital. None of us are labouring under any illusions about what’s coming – he’s going to be moved to a hospice very soon if the admin can be worked out.

This isn’t something we didn’t know was coming. The surgeon, after his op last November, told us that there was nothing more they could do for him. Kidney function that was only just above requiring dialysis meant that chemo- and radiotherapy were out, so it was only ever a matter of time.

That doesn’t necessarily make what’s happening now much easier to deal with. Perhaps the worst of it is seeing him so reduced. My father was always a big bloke – 6' 1", fairly chunkily built – but is anything but that now. I inherited my low embarrassment threshold from him; he’s always been a proud bloke, worried about his appearance and keen to retain his dignity at all times. Those things have now also been denied him.

Watching Mum’s dedication to him, and her exasperation at being able to do nothing, is extremely upsetting. She’s spending as much time as she can at his bedside but he’s only intermittently lucid and doesn’t really want anybody there. All he keeps saying, even now, is that he’s alright. Don’t worry about him. Do what you need to do. Go home.

The undirected, impotent fury I’ve felt for his cancer, and the anger with him for refusing to go to the doctor when the early signs were there over a year ago, have been replaced by a sort of flat, hollow feeling. A sense of guilt that my desire that neither he nor Mum suffer any longer than necessary feels like a wish that he’d die. I don’t, of course, want him to die. But he’s going to. And what he’s experiencing now could hardly be called living.

There have been, paradoxically, some very good things that have resulted from what’s happened these past few months. I can’t, yet, write about all of it here.  It’s certainly brought our family closer together. I have a renewed sense of love and respect for my brother, who’s carried the bulk of the everyday burden of moving people around, dealing with hospitals, finances etc., and have learned that, even more than I ever dared to believe, my mum is an enormously strong woman with an apparently infinite capacity for love, forgiveness and care.

There have even, in all this, been moments of great levity. When he was re-hospitalised a couple of weekends ago, he was initially taken to the Royal Sussex County in Brighton. It was chaos there – they’re under a Code Black at the moment, and redevelopment work on the crumbling buildings has exacerbated that. In the ward, all the usual noises of pain, misery and frustration were evident. A woman crying, the man in the next bed groaning in pain. Stark reminders that there are plenty of others in similar positions. I could clearly hear a chap, behind curtains, diagonally across from Dad’s bed. “Oh, I’ve never been in such pain,” he said to whoever was attending him. This was followed immediately by, “Ooh, I’ve been wondering where they’d got to – them’s me kippers.” I absolutely swear this happened and those were his exact words – I was so surprised to hear this that I wrote it down immediately. What? His kippers? Was he in for some kind of kipper removal procedure? Or was he using rhyming slang for slippers that I’ve simply never heard of? Even at the time we laughed about this.

We have also seen just how close, just how purely good, our friends are. Plenty of people have gone out of their way to help us, or to visit Dad, or simply to call and see how things are. This has been hugely reassuring – it really does help to feel that there’s comfort in numbers in circumstances like this because, while I realise that we’re a very long way from the first, or last, family to suffer what’s happening now, it could easily feel like we were without all that support.

(This has been written with the consent of Mum, Dad and my brother).

My father, who art in hospital

I was on a train yesterday morning when one of those public transport preachers you encounter from time to time got on. "Just five minutes of your time," he assured the carriage, before starting his efforts to save our souls with the words "The world is around 6,000 years old now." This piece of folly so startled me that I genuinely didn't take in much of the rest of what he said because I was going over in my mind ways to politely suggest to him that he may waste less of his time and better engage more of us non-believers if he didn't start with such a bizarre statement of 'fact'.

I did no such thing, of course. I did what everybody else did, what everybody else always does - I waited him out in silence before he finished up and moved to the next carriage. I do remember some of what he spouted over the next few minutes - stuff about babies not needing to be taught to lie, that we're all born into sin, that the world is full of murder, paedophiles etc. The usual mix of preaching and Daily Mail style hysteria.

Why have I brought this up now, after months without a blog entry? It's not as if there's been nothing to write about - take your pick from corruption in sport, the Russian jet, Paris, Kenya etc. There's been plenty of stuff worthy of saying at least something here. So I don't know. But this is nothing if not a personal blog, and it's personal stuff that's brought me back here. Standing on the train listening to this fellow, I wasn't doing the usual commute into work. I was actually heading south, to meet my brother and my mother, in turn to head off to Eastbourne to see my father, who's in Intensive Care in the hospital there.

My dad has just had a major operation - they've taken out a major organ, a bit of something else and the cancerous tumour that put him in there in the first place. That's why I was heading down there and not into work. What has this got to do with the preacher?

Well the surgeon who assisted the op spoke to us before we went in to see Dad, to tell us what to expect when we saw him, what had gone on in theatre etc. He was honest with us, as both Dad and we had asked him to be, and one of his questions was whether we're religious. None of my family are - my parents left my brother and me to decide these things for ourselves, neither stopping us attending church nor suggesting we should. It simply didn't come up during our youth. The surgeon, learning this, said that he wasn't either, he merely 'didn't want to close off that source of support'.

There is, on the same floor as the ICU at Eastbourne, and at the Royal Sussex County where both my parents have spent time recently, a chapel and a chaplain for people who do take comfort from their faith at times like this. Part of me envies the succour they must get from it, but this wouldn't be my blog without the words 'wind me up' in it, and the greater part of me is indeed wound up by this juxtaposition of church and medicine.

Where was God last Thursday week in Paris, when innocent people were being slaughtered in his name? Where is he for my mother who, having suffered a stroke which almost killed her in November 2013, now has to hobble to the hospital to see the very man who's cared for her at home during her own rehabilitation? This woman, so full of compassion and love for others, so completely selfless, who better exemplifies the qualities to which we're all urged to aspire in various holy texts than anybody else I know, would certainly deserve better in any world in which people get what they deserve.

They don't, though, do they? Much of the stuff I could have written about these past few months serves only to illustrate that fact all too clearly. So she sits watching over a husband she's doted on for the best part of fifty years while I contemplate if the always-empty chapel next door couldn't better be used as a bar, frankly. Watching and hearing the reactions of the other loved ones sharing both a waiting room and a waiting game with us, each with their own stories, their own hopes and tragedies unfolding in front of us, I don't think I was alone in feeling more like a pint than a prayer.

The tragedy of art imitating death

My absolutely favourite British writer of them all, Iain Banks, missed seeing what he knew would be his final novel published by just 10 days. His publisher, when they heard of the grim prognosis for his cancer, rushed the process to try to beat his illness to the punch, but it wasn't to be.

As with all his work once I'd first read him, I bought the novel on the day it was released and read it quickly. I finished reading it on the bus home last night. For the double tragedy of it being the last words he ever wrote and the nature of his death, and the contiguity of his illness with the similarly terminal decline of the book's main character, I had to fight back tears which would have no doubt had my fellow passengers assuming I was the bus nutter when I finished it.

The book is, you see, as well as being as powerfully written as all his work, about a man raging against the dying of his own light as cancer has its way with him. This horrible resonance was, apparently, a coincidence, with the first draft finished when he found out about his own illness. It makes every word, of course, doubly meaningful. How much did he change once he'd found out? How much of the dying character's raging, bitter tirade against a vacuous society and the disappointments of most people's lives when measured against their own, younger, more idealistic selves was actually the voice of Banks?

That's what made the final chapters in particular, and finishing the book, so poignant. The quarry which forms the geographical and metaphorical backdrop for the book is an ever-advancing abyss, which stares back at you when you gaze into it. His dying character dismisses such feelings as the solipsistic ravings of a drug-addled drop out friend, and vents his fury at society, at his friends, at himself and the cancer that's taking him.

I hope that's not how Banks felt, that he was able to face his own end with something approaching acceptance, but who'd blame the man if he didn't? To have such a gift, to be able to express yourself so eloquently through work which resonated strongly with your readers, leaving them awed at the scale of such a giant imagination, and then be denied the right to express it fully - I can't begin to imagine how he felt.

So I was upset that there will never be another Banks release. Upset that I'd finished it, that there was no more to come from the man, that such a talent has been taken from us. I usually hate the rush of grief-junkie teeth gnashing which follows the death of somebody famous, the desperate desire to show how hurt you are that Diana's gone, but in this case I'm one of those who will feel the loss his absence represents quite keenly. I'm just one of millions who never knew the man but felt the power of his work, and what a great power it was. Cheers, Iain.

Danny Baker

Get well soon, Danny Baker. The distressing news that my favourite broadcaster in any medium is suffering from cancer was horrible to hear, though depressingly expected given his mysterious absence from many of his recent programmes 'poorly', as the Delphic explanations of his co-presenters had it.

He has, of course, reacted with the positivity which so strongly characterises his show and makes him such good listening. A constant string of new and inventive subjects and the widest cultural referencing you'll hear anywhere make him absolutely peerless in terms of what a 'talk' DJ should really do, rather than the deliberately provocative tripe that comes out of most of their mouths.

His refusal to cloak himself with anything but the scantiest of Emperor's clothes when it comes to the whole showbiz veneer thing (a typical introduction to a guest is often 'Tell us about your new project. We wouldn't gather here with an aerial on the roof without good cause.'), he nonetheless refused to let negative talk of his cancer 'infect' his shows. He sees and speaks for the best in all of us and is genuinely funny with it, the affection for him from his listenership clear whenever he sends out a call for their participation.

I download his Saturday show ('Take the sausage sandwich game judge's adjudication seriously or the whole thing's pointless...') as a podcast for later, and often repeated, listening, to make my journey to work pass quicker. The airwaves will not be the same without him as he fights his illness. If goodwill and best wishes were any medicine, he'd have beaten it already and returned to work with a skip, such is the outpouring of support from his listeners, but sadly they're not. That's not, though, going to stop me wishing him all the very best for a full recovery.