The great British piss-off

We Brits are, in many ways, a pretty stoical lot. Matters that would, in other countries, lead to cars burning in the streets or lorry-loads of cow dung being dumped outside council offices, often elicit an online petition or a sternly worded letter to The Times here.

You don’t need to look too hard for examples of our usually measured response to things we don’t like. In the south at least, we put up with an utterly laughable ‘service’ on Southern’s rail network. Certain areas like London and Brighton voted heavily in favour of Remain, only for the rest of the country to disagree. Result of these two things? Protests, yes, but hardly human sacrifice and mass hysteria.

I wonder how long it’s going to be, though, before the masses march on the offices of Love Productions with burning torches because there are some things which are guaranteed to incite British ire, and messing with the Bake-Off is one of them.

Just look at the front covers of the press and you’ll see the country’s response to what’s clearly a national catastrophe. A frenzy of punning the like of which the tabloids reserve only for the most important matters. ‘Going, going, scone’, ‘Stick your dough’, ‘Bake Off starts to crumble,’ etc. Pretty serious stuff, then.

In that spirit, you have to wonder if Channel 4 have bought a soufflé which is going to collapse the minute it’s served. The two presenters, Mel and Sue, have already stated they’re not going to move with the programme. I suspect the two experts, Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry, will follow suit. What exactly have C4 paid so many millions for, if they haven’t bought the very pillars around which the show’s character is built? A format which they’ll no doubt change anyway, and into which they will have to insert adverts and possibly those irritating sponsorship devices which bookend ad breaks.

The BBC, meanwhile, shouldn't find it beyond their wit to put together some other show with this same gang of four and a competition format. A colleague suggested, as a spin-off from Masterchef, it could be called 'Masterbake', but I fear that may be too strong a pun. I think, frankly, C4 have been sold a pup. Which the previous owners have put down before they deliver it to them, knowing they can always breed another one.

The fact is that, even if all four of the main ‘characters’ came over, and the format was left entirely unchanged, it sill wouldn’t deliver the same viewing figures it commands on BBC1 - people simply don’t watch Channel 4 in the numbers in which they do the Beeb, pretty much regardless of what they’re showing. Neither the channel nor the production company may give a damn of course, if they can monetise the programme in a way which you’re unable to on the BBC, but that will serve only to drive even more people away from it and make it even less the show that they’ve supposedly bought.

I’m not afraid to confess that I watch and enjoy Bake Off. I certainly won’t bother doing so on Channel 4 because, to reflect a criticism which I’ve seen more than once on the show when something’s gone badly wrong, the baker seems to have forgotten at least two of the main ingredients. They’ve taken a tried and trusted recipe for a reliably moist, delicious sponge, and they’re going to deliver a half-baked sourdough instead. You need only have a look at Channel 4’s Twitter feed to see that the British public are not amused. The online petition which I mentioned typifies the British response to such things has already started, but I fear that when they see what's actually served up the viewing public may, in this case, behave out of character and go straight to the 'sticking the heads of those responsible on spikes and parading them around London' stage. If they didn't know beforehand what the likely reaction would be, it must already be pretty clear to them what they've done.

Revelations

If you read my eulogy to my father, posted in an earlier entry, you'll have seen mention of secrets that had come tumbling out of the family during my father's illness. Given the week I've just passed at our place in Spain, also the subject of previous entries, and with the permission of the people involved, I thought it timely to write about it here. Most of the people closest to us already know all this stuff anyway.

You think you know how the everyday stuff works, don't you? You think that the mundane things you've always taken for granted just are, and they ground the certainties around which your lifestyle, and to some extent your character, are built. I'd always thought that my family was the absolutely archetypal so-called 'nuclear' version of that paradigm - long-married parents, two kids, standard domestic set-up. My brother found out, though, having by necessity taken over the running of the folks' banking affairs while Dad was too ill to do so, that this was not the case.

"Come and have breakfast with me before the game this Saturday," he said to me. "I've got something to tell you and it'd be better face to face."

You hear that, and you run all sorts of worst-case scenarios through your mind. Well I do, anyway. You can imagine the sort of shit that had added to our woes in my brain before that breakfast actually took place. I did not, though, guess anywhere near the truth. It turns out that my brother and I - those of us of the 2-kid, nuclear family archetype I just mentioned - are in fact two of three, and we have a half-brother whose existence had been kept from us. For seventeen years.

This took a while to sink in, of course. My brother is the bloke I grew up with. The blond kid with the good heart who's been around since quite literally before I can remember. The baby who threw mum's rings into the fire, who's grown into such a dependable and kind adult, the new pillar of strength on which our now reduced family leans - that's my brother.

But there was now, in fact has been for a long time, a third. Mum and Dad had decided between them that we'd not be told about him so as not to damage our relationship with our father - thereby protecting the same man she'd found out years earlier was father to another child by somebody else. Now my brother G and I have different characters, but we've always got on, and we largely see the world the same way. On the important stuff at least. So it was with this. We both decided, without really having to talk about it, that this brother we didn't know existed was entirely blameless in the whole thing, so was certainly not worthy of any scorn on our part. We also both felt that by far the greatest burden of forgiveness landed on Mum, who'd chosen, as she has with so many other burdens through her life, to bear it. If she had been able to forgive Dad and move on, it was hardly up to us to decide differently.

I first met M, my 'new' brother, while Dad was still alive. That was, of course, a bit odd. This kid I'd never set eyes on before calling my dad 'Dad' - rightly, of course. That was his father he was speaking to. But I got a little jolt every time he said it - for 44 years until that point I'd obviously only ever heard me or my brother say that to him. It was the most immediate sign that something had changed forever.

This first meeting was at the folks' old place in Portslade, in the period when Dad was home from the hospital between his first enforced visit to the ICU and his later surgery. Dad had said to me that he was going to 'be a better man', in what at the time was an inexplicable conversation, just before my brother told me what he'd discovered. He asked me what I thought of M when he'd gone that first evening. His concern about our response, my response in particular as it's seemed since, was still there. What could I say? I'd only just met M and was frankly a bit bewildered, but he seemed like a decent kid.

A decent kid who later had to attend his father's funeral in March, surrounded by people he hardly knew or didn't know at all. I can't imagine how difficult that must have been for him. The teenager, one of those carrying his own father's coffin, who was unknown to most of the mourners. It's things like that which back up our original instincts that we should be trying to build a relationship with him, not rejecting him, Just as my dad remained my dad regardless of his own weaknesses and typically male failings, so this young man is a brother to me despite how little time we'd then had to get to know each other.

Rejecting M would have meant scorning our dad, which would in turn have affected Mum, an entirely innocent victim already, so I don't think it's what would have happened regardless of when we'd found out. It is, though, the version of us, particularly of me, which was painted for M by Dad in the absence of actually meeting us. M has told me that he was nervous about meeting me because of how he'd been led to believe I am, what my likely reaction to him would be.

It's not a version of me I entirely recognise. While I may lack a powerful, instinctive, visceral empathy, and certainly am not slow to express my feelings freely and quickly, I hope my response to M is an indication of at least an intellectual capacity for tolerance, for acceptance of changing circumstance. For generally responding the right way to a given situation because my head tells me that's the right way to respond even when my heart and guts have abstained in the matter and are being fuck-all help. That's essentially what happened over that breakfast, when G told me what he'd learned. My guts just went 'Holy shit!' but pretty quickly, thinking about it, I realised that the only sensible way forward was to try to build a relationship with him, to make up for the time that had thus far been denied us.

So I recently invited M to come to our place in Spain with me and my partner, to spend a week in the peace and warmth of the Galician summer and people. He'd never flown before, and never left the country, so all of this was new to him. I'd warned him that the little village to which we intend to retire is not Ibiza; there's little to do bar sit and enjoy the pool, the sun, the cold beer and top-notch steaks. This did give us time to do a fair bit of talking, and we must both have felt a little bit like we were conversing with some time-displaced alternate of ourselves. I know I did. He looks much more like me than he does my brother G - we both felt that the other looks most like Dad. We both, of course, share some of Dad's mannerisms.*

We share a past with Dad, though those pasts are only now being very slightly stitched together through recollection - they'll never be part of the same whole. As he said to me quite early on, all three of us have a store of memories and experiences of the same man, but ours and his are and always will be separate.

That's where we are, then. Our closest friends, as I knew they would be, have been entirely accepting of him and have simply got on with the new reality in the same way we're all trying to. Can G and I build as close a relationship with him as we have with each other? I don't know. How do you bridge the space between meeting somebody at 17 and having grown up with them, having had them a part of your life for all but 14 months of its entire 45 years so far, as is the case with my brother G? Not to mention the generational gap. Difficult. But it does feel like we're all committed to doing the best job of it possible.



*This must have been a bit disconcerting for Mum in particular, who was also with us last week. (Poor kid - he's got two mums on his back, one of whom isn't even his, no doubt nagging him about his smoking for example!) 

Implosions

Even a quick look at the political landscape in Britain right now reveals the seismic changes that have already been brought about by last Thursday’s result. I'm a very, very long way from a political expert, so can only say it as I see it, but it all rather suggests that the front each party presents to the electorate has been tissue-paper thin all along. I suspect that would surprise nobody (and could fill an entry all of its own), but it’s nonetheless a bit worrying.

On the one hand, the Tories are going through a leadership election that was always going to happen if the vote went against Cameron. The declared runners at time of writing are few, with likely candidates like Boris Johnson* and Jeremy Hunt announcing they’re not running. but even so - you know it’s grim when you’re looking at the selection and thinking to yourself ‘I hope Theresa May wins’. And she’s been backed by ‘Corrible’ Hunt – I’m sure she’s delighted.

Obviously though, being instinctively a lefty, it’s Labour’s leadership issue which most concerns me. I confess to having felt mixed feelings about Corbyn specifically – it’s not easy to support a man the majority of whose parliamentary party is against him, simply because it makes things easier for the Tories at a time when their own divisions should be being exploited.

That said, ultimately those MPs are (supposedly) elected to represent their constituents, and many of the rank and file Labour Party members who voted for him in large numbers come from those constituencies. So overall, I think the PLP should shut up and get behind a man who has a clear mandate from the membership and would likely win again in the event of any formal leadership challenge. Indeed the Labour Party membership jumped specifically before his election, with many joining so they could vote for him. Those members haven't gone away, as the rising membership of Momentum demonstrates. The Parliamentary Labour Party should not be distancing itself from the very people who put them there, even if they disagree with many of them on the specific issue of the EU. Corbyn’s support of Remain may not have been convincing but he did support it, at least publicly. He did what was right when it mattered – the PLP should do the same.

The biggest concern for me in all of this is who’s likely to exploit any political vacuum caused by the splits on both sides. Usually the centre ground would benefit from such problems, but the Lib Dems are still reaping the whirlwind of their own voters’ ire after they coalesced with the Tories, so that’s not necessarily the case now. That leaves the worrying possibility that more extreme parties, of whatever persuasion, stand to gain from the chaos. Imagine a general election where the Tory vote is split or lowered because they’ve lost the support of Remain voters in London and elsewhere, the Labour party has split in two, dividing their votes with them, and nobody wants to vote Lib Dem. What you’ve possibly got then is a very low turnout and UKIP and others improving their share of the vote dramatically.

That doesn’t bear thinking about, but the referendum result has generated such turmoil in politics in Britain right now that it’s the kind of hypothetical scenario that we have to.

*Has it all got a bit real for Boris, such that he suddenly doesn’t want anything to do with it? He and Gove looked like rabbits in headlights in the direct aftermath of the Leave victory, and it’s since become clear that they’d done not an iota of planning between them for such a result.

Consequences

I've always been a proud Englishman, but that pride is not bound up with the usual motivations for it, or expressions of it, that typify such an animal. I've always, for example, absolutely detested the flag-waving, tub-thumping spectacle of the last night of the Proms. Instead it's come from the fact that I've always thought us an island of open minded, tolerant, modern-thinking, creative, culturally significant people.

That belief has, obviously, taken something of a dent these past few days. Immediately on hearing the referendum result, my reaction was pretty sanguine. Just accept it and get on with it, I thought. But what's been happening since then has served only to make me think that, frankly, we're a nation of idiots. Look at this piece in the Indy, for example. The morning after the vote, and only once the result had been announced, there was a surge in Google searches for what happens if we vote to leave. I'd thought, rather naively as it turns out, that this is the sort of thing you looked for before you cast your vote. Accepting that some of these may have been worried Remain voters fearing the worst, if you don't even know what it is you're voting for, should you really be in the damn polling station in the first place? I guess it's possibly because many Leave voters were busy fretting about being robbed by a conspiracy to alter the results by erasing the pencil marks beforehand. Perhaps they didn't have time to actually consider the other stuff.

Then there's the quantity of spoiled ballot papers - over 26,000. Of course the bulk of those are people making some form of personal protest, but over 9,000 of these were rejected for both boxes having been marked. What the fuck? How much more simple does it have to be to enable people to vote correctly?

The post-vote response of some people has been startling, too. A workmate told me that more than one of his friends had said they 'didn't think their vote would count'. Apart from wondering why they bothered to vote in the first place if they genuinely believed that, you again have to ask how they thought this process was going to work if some votes counted and some didn't.

There's no room for voter remorse, and no point arguing the result. No matter how huge the petition grows for another vote, it's pointless and doomed to failure because it's asking for retrospective legislation. There was one vote, and it's done.That's how democracy works - the people have spoken and now have to deal with the consequences. Consequences that we're seeing all too quickly. An apparently broken PM resigning, the only thing he could do in the circumstances. The Parliamentary Labour Party rebelling against its leader and, in the process, showing that it doesn't think the same way as the bulk of its voters - in the north at least - because Corbyn, who better reflects what those northern voters think, was too lukewarm in his support of Remain. The prospect of Boris Johnson or Michael Gove taking over at Number 10, in the process giving us an unelected leader that I rather thought was the type of thing the Leave campaign were against. The two of them may at least have managed to sound gracious in victory, but it's hard to ignore that they were doing so when a nice spot in Downing Street had just opened up.

We're also seeing the first noises being made in what could ultimately lead to the break-up of the supposedly United Kingdom (what a joke that name looks like now, given the enormous division in voting). The Scots were already pissed off about the failure to deliver on promises made after their own devolution referendum. They're positively livid now. And what's going to happen on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic? Surely they're not going to want to return to the days of patrolled borders, checks to get across etc, which would be horribly reminiscent of the Troubles they've worked so hard to leave behind.

Meanwhile, Leave are busily distancing themselves from much of the stuff they'd campaigned on. The £350million claim, for example, which I described as already discredited in my previous entry, has now been called a 'mistake' by none other than Farage himself. The version of Britain for which Leave voters thought they were voting never existed, and never could. I wonder if they're beginning to realise that for themselves now.

I confess that, living in Lambeth, with its second highest pro-Remain vote in the country behind Gibraltar, I'd been optimistic that it would go the way I wanted. I hadn't seen a single Leave sticker, window poster etc, in my area. It was difficult, as that's all I was seeing, to see it going against Remain. I thought people would vote with a 'better the devil you know' nervousness about what would happen if we left. I was very badly wrong.

So - and I realise this is sour grapes, since that bitter taste in my mouth must be coming from somewhere - over 17 million people, plus the 28% who couldn't be titted to vote on the most important matter in our lifetimes - have forfeited their right to complain about what happens in future as a result of this vote. They've made the bed, it's just a pity that the young, the Scots, the Northern Irish, Gibraltarians and Londoners, the majority of whom all voted to Remain, will all have to lie in it with them.

And that pride in being English I was talking about? Well, during the General Election people turned out in their droves in Farage's constituency, some of them openly saying they were voting tactically specifically to keep him out. That's the sort of thing I was talking about making me proud. It's a pretty good thing they did, because his lack of class in victory was quite incredible. Then there's this sort of thing. I don't feel a great deal of pride at the moment. I feel ashamed, to be honest.

I can even get biscuits into an entry about the referendum...

It's been, again, a long time since I made an entry here, but the third-ever national referendum in Britain, and one held on such a fundamental matter, seems suitably weighty a subject on which to return.

At time of writing, we're perhaps eight hours, and certainly less then 12, from knowing the final result of the vote that seems, thanks to the ludicrously negative and bitter campaigning, to have taken forever to arrive. I had to queue to cast my vote this morning, which suggests a high turnout, so at least all the effort both sides have put in may have been worth it from the point of view of voter engagement.

It does seem to have been something that people genuinely care about. Mooching around a farmers' market in Oval recently - very good chorizo Scotch eggs to be had there - there was a civilised debate going on between two fairly eloquent reps, one from each side. This was being amplified though speakers so the whole market could hear, and indeed there was a decent smattering of people sitting listening. This debate, though perhaps atypical of the campaign as a whole in that the speakers were at least civil and didn't interrupt each other, instead alternating at the mic, still threw up some ridiculous claims from each side that were all too typical of what we've been hearing over the past few months.

The Leave campaigner, for example, trotted out the standard bollocks about the £350m fee we pay every week to the EU, a number long since discredited since it makes no account of either the rebates we receive or the mitigating benefits we're paying for - see this rather marvellous piece from John Oliver for a much better response that this layman can come up with. In turn, the Remain campaigner retorted that for every £1 we spend on the EU, we get £10 back. She offered absolutely nothing by way of evidence for this number, merely giving her opponent the rope with which to hang her. This was somebody on the same side of the debate, broadly speaking, as me, but who'd still managed to make me snort with derision at what she'd said.

Overall, the two rather nicely summed up the biggest problem with what amount to the sticks with which each side has beaten the electorate lately - there's been nothing genuinely convincing from either side. As far as I can tell, the Remain campaign has largely been about all the crap that could fall on our heads if we pull out. While I can, of course, see that, couldn't they have focused the main thrust of their argument a bit more on the positive, rather than treating them as some kind of side show? The Leavers' argument, however, can pretty much be summed up as 'Hurrumph. Bloody foreigners.' Not even close to good enough, lads.

It's only fair to point out that, as somebody whose partner is an EU citizen who came here a long time ago, and who hopes to move permanently to Spain with that partner, my own position would be rather simple even without all the 'facts' that have been spat at us during the course of the campaign. My partner has worked without a break ever since she got here, and has certainly paid more tax than I have during that period, offering considerably more to our society with her career in teaching and the charity sector than I ever have with mine in advertising. We'd like to live in Spain but come and go to Britain and elsewhere as we please. We'd also like to do this without having to get married, or either of us taking the other's nationality. So to me this is a no-brainer before either side even put their case to me. 

I like to think, though, that I'd want something a bit more substantive than 'if the immigrants would only sod off everything would be OK' to make up my mind, even if I weren't living with one. But in the event that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to go on, I still think there'd be a way to decide. Let's imagine you had, for whatever reason, not the slightest knowledge of what each side was campaigning for. Not an inkling. You've been living as a hermit for ten years so for all you know, it could be about whether chocolate digestives should be banned from having a layer of caramel added between the choccy and the biscuit base - you just have no idea what's going on.

But you've come back from your little hole in the desert ground, have realised from the hubbub that this is important, and need something to key on before you cast your vote. All you'd need to do is take a look at some of the standard bearers for the respective campaigns. They've given us nothing more useful to go on, so that's as good a criterion as any. So, let's see...

On the Remain side you've got the leaders of the main political parties, a lot of high-profile business leaders and quite a few celebrities. Not exactly the champions you'd send in to joust for your honour, but hold on - have a look at this lot on the other side. Yes, there are business leaders on this side too. But... Gove. Boris Johnson. Nigel fucking Farage. 

Quickly! Give me that pencil. Decision made.

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).

The devil is in the detail

A truly magnificent piece of 'news' reported on the CBS website recently, which I urge you to have a look at here. It seems our Fappy the anti-masturbation dolphin hasn't been practising what he preaches. Quite the opposite, in fact.

These stories are laughable enough as they are, but there's often some small detail that enriches them even further, and this one's ripe with them. You may think it's the name of the dolphin that's the most amusing sobriquet in this tale, but it must take a poor second to the name of the bloke who's been nicked. His fourth arrest for such an act, it seems, though he's never actually been convicted on any occasion, of which more later. Our Mr Horner either been lucky to get off so frequently (see what I did there?) or extremely unfortunate to be singled out by quite so many vindictive law enforcement agencies. 

Never mind, though. His organisation, federally funded as it turns out, is right behind him. His part in their crusade to warn people of the 'dangers and consequences' of masturbation will merely go on in prison if he's convicted. I can see why he'd be well-placed, should such a conviction occur, to offer that advice - he'd certainly be experiencing consequences above and beyond what most people might expect from any of their own such onanistic urges.

But back to those little details. The term 'self rape' to describe what he'd be trying to stop during any incarceration is a staggering misuse of a word that represents the genuinely heinous. And on a lighter note I'm struggling to imagine any circumstances in which masturbating isn't consensual, frankly. Maybe if your hand had been possessed by the devil and was doing his work against your own bidding - but Fappy could hardly consider that your fault, could he?

And back to those previous arrests. An illuminating little snippet from his lawyer informs us that Stop Masturbation Now 'Luckily... has lots of connections in Washington. Plus, of course, he is innocent.' You'd certainly put that second in that list, wouldn't you? Describing your client as a 'hero, a prophet, and a saviour', you'd definitely put that he's innocent after those important connections which he may need.

In the event these allegations prove to be false for a fourth time (masturbatory fantasies, you might say?), the number to call to bring 'the tickle monster' as he's also known to your school is helpfully provided by CBS. I bet schools are absolutely queuing up.

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.

Don't give in to hate

It has been, by any standards, a horrible period for news. The indiscriminate killing of people enjoying their holiday in Tunisia, the awful slaughter in Syria, which British people are leaving our shores to go and join, and just this morning more people killed in Nigeria. These are just the ones I can think of - no doubt other atrocities, those which don't happen to catch the newsmen's eyes, have happened away from the gaze of the western media and are therefore hidden from us.

With so much suffering going on, so much inhumanity, it's tempting to simply close your eyes to it, to disregard the news completely. I've never done that, but I increasingly understand those who do. To do so, though, is to miss other stuff that can cast some light on what good people are capable of. I thought it may be an opportune time to add my own celebration to the life of a man who thoroughly refused to let hatred win. His achievements took a long time to come to light as a result of his reticence and modesty, and even as he died recently at the deservedly ripe old age of 106, the events I've mentioned above rather subsumed his story.

Sir Nicholas Winton didn't come to any kind of national attention until around 1988, oddly enough on That's Life (there's a reference for the teenagers...). He'd kept quiet about his efforts to get children, hundreds of them, out of what was then Czechoslovakia and into Britain, taking them from under the noses of a Nazi occupier intent on murdering them. This is not a phrase you'll ever see or hear again on these pages, I suspect, but have a look at part of the episode of That's Life which brought him to national attention.

He dismissed his own efforts for the rest of his life, instead claiming others took the real risks. His modesty no doubt included a grain of truth in that the other people involved in his operations deserve to be recognised as he was, but to return to my original point, this was a man who refused to let hatred win, who did something amazing and inspirational rather than think he faced an overwhelming, impossible task. It's a shame there aren't more stories about this type of good deed around, but regrettably, they don't sell as many newspapers, they don't make people tune in to watch the news specially – generally it's guns, killing and misery that'll do that.

Tomorrow, Tuesday 7th, is the anniversary of just such an event of the type that sends the media into a frenzy – the bombings in London which killed 52 people ten years ago. This was, of course, a perfect illustration of what can happen when people become so blinded by hate that they lose their humanity. But even in the aftermath of that kind of atrocity, there are still stories of incredible courage, of bonds formed out of the adversity, of people helping each other without regard for religion, colour, etc.

I think, so far at least, that typifies your average Brit's response to this kind of thing – 7/7 or Tunisia, 9/11, Lee Rigby, Charlie Hebdo, whatever. Usually, in discussions about this, what I hear is pretty measured, understanding and accepting that you can't judge a whole creed on the actions of a very few. So far, the usual response is a determination to carry on as normally as possible, a refusal to let these actions achieve their aims, and an unwillingness to tar everybody with the same broad brush.

How many stories, though, will it take before open and inflammatory anti-Islamic sentiment becomes an accepted response to another atrocity? The recent support for UKIP and, before that, an increase in the BNP vote, suggest the bar is moving downward, toward the point where it'll be acceptable to express anti-Islamic, rather than anti-terrorist, sentiment in print. There are clearly individuals who will regard any Muslim as culpable, just as Islamic extremist terrorists regards any Westerner as fair game – there have already been attacks on completely innocent people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – and it appears that some of those individuals are getting into politics, trying to legitimise this sort of response, or at least its spoken expression.

It'd be a slippery slope indeed if that started to become the norm. We would, for sure, be handing those few nutters exactly what they want. Sir Nicholas Winton's life stands as an example to all of us that hatred can be denied its ends, if we stand up to it. RIP, sir.