A Fanny Stain On The Duvet ( and other stories)

It's my father's birthday today
He died exactly thirty years ago.
We had, what I can call, a pretty typical 1970s relationship.
As in he left me to get on with things with the absolute minimum of interference, affection and interest.
This distance was reconciled in part during a brief visit to Sheffield in the late 1980s
He came to fix a door in my new house,
Chugged a couple of beers and showed a softer side to the one I had mistrusted and been irritated by for so many years.

Why are so many men crap at self expression and self realisation ?

Even in today's " in touch with yourself" age, where men and encouraged to be more reflective and honest, so many remain cocooned in their mental men caves, safe from the pain of free emotion but so often crippled by the ghosts and insercurities we all have by being human.

I recalled a moment the other night when I sat with my father-in-law on the back step, drinking beer into the wee small hours. The moment reminded me of that time with my own father years before, when the timing and the alcholol levels were pitched just right for honesty and revelation to rear their heads and I asked the right questions and pressed the right buttons for the real man to emerge, just for a while.

That was all a bit serious so I will leave you with this blog entry of a few years ago now,
It is probably the story I best remember my father for, and it still makes me smile


" Monday was the day to do the washing and eat a meal of leftovers.
It was the day to start afresh
Dad went back to work, mum did the washing, the kitchen was scrubbed and the kids went back to school.
So was the order of a 1960s childhood.
Today some of that remains, albeit in my imagination.

Anyhow
Chris " facetimed" me when I was in the bathroom this morning
He was busy marking a PhD study
I was scrubbing the wee stains from around the toilet bowl

" are you having a bath?" He asked ( probably thinking that I was luxuriating in a mass of foam bubbles before skipping off to a coffee morning at the vicarage )
I told him what I was up to and he reminded me of another job I had yet to tackle
" There's a fanny stain on the duvet!" he noted dryly
( not a phrase I would ever consider hearing in a predominantly gay household but hey...)
" it's on my list" I told him whilst thinking that the phrase " fanny stain on the duvet" would never have been a comment that would have ever left my father's mouth.
Apart from the occasional " ruddy and bloody" I don't think I ever heard my father swear
Anyhow.....

I remember when I was around eleven , my father was involved in a bit of a punch up in his shop.
He owned a television sales and repair Business and was in the middle serving two separate customers when one, a young man, got frustrated with the wait and called my father " A TWAT!"

My father who was probably in his late fifties then, didn't hesitate and smartly punched the customer in the mouth and the first we children got to hear of the affair was when the police popped up to the house to have a ' quiet word ".

Now the humour in this situation centred around my mother's lack of understanding of the word " twat" rather than any resolution of the punch up itself, for after the police had " discussed the matter" with my dad who incidentally was the chair of the borough council at the time, my mother embarked into wild fact finding mission to find out just what TWAT meant.

The policemen obviously wouldn't explain, nor would my red faced father......and even after a few phone calls to my brother in law, all my mother was informed that the word " twat meant a " woman's vagina"

I remember stuffing my hands into my mouth to stop myself from screaming in laughter, after my mother hurried around the house like a stereotypical Jewish mother shrieking

"Ron RON! .... you hit someone in the mouth for calling you a WOMAN's VAGINA?!!!!!!!!"

" why why would you do that?"

They were simpler days ........"