I know some would say I have a tendency to overshare, but I’m afraid it’s hardwired, so look away now if that sort of thing makes you feel uncomfortable.
There are some things I haven’t shared though. The last few years have been…complicated at home. You will have seen oblique references to it here
and here
In September 2022 dad had a stroke. He had been caring for mum (to a far greater extent than we had realised because they hid the full extent of it from us, not wanting us to be worried). We took over from him, caring for mum at home for about a year until she moved in with us and the family home, now unoccupied and sad, had to be sold. And then Mum passed away in March last year. The two posts above relate to that period of selling the house and dealing with my mum’s death. In May this year dad passed away too, after a pretty awful last month. We buried him last week.
It’s been a lot (and I haven’t even told you the half of it – some of the events of the last few years still remain private or not stories for me to tell). And in the words of the BFG, I am a norphan. I don’t know if you be a norphan at 50, but it suddenly feels very lonely and exposed. Mum and dad were always there to catch us when we fell, and to patch us up.
But if posts have been a little thin on the ground in the last couple of years its not just been because I’ve been busy (I have), but because I write about what is on my mind (had you noticed?) and mostly what has been on my mind and in my heart is the sadness of losing my parents, something which has been with me continuously since, well, since covid when mum first got ill.
Keeping things together at home and at work has been difficult to say the least, and some of you will have seen me have a moment, or listened to me drone on about the current crisis. Thank you. One of the reasons I wanted to come here and talk about this is because I know there are many others going through something similar, particularly people of ‘my sort of age’. And I know a number of you are dealing with similar but different crises with children, spouses, siblings, marriages. All of them hurt, all of them make our hearts ache. So I’m waving to you. Sometimes drowning, but mostly waving to say ‘Hi, I know what it’s like.’
Obviously, family crises of one sort or another and the fall out from them are the main subject matter of our working days, and in our clients we regularly meet people in the midst of such crises. But every day when I go to work I remember that any one of my ‘opponents’ (or the judge, or witness) may also have their own personal sh*tstorm going on at home, which doesn’t stop when they are at work. The kindness that people have shown me when I have shared has been so important. And I think that politically (small p) its also important to say out loud that these are the sorts of things we are having to juggle alongside our daily diet of abuse, trauma, addiction, conflict and loss – and if wellbeing is to mean anything it has to acknowledge that impossible combination.
But I actually came here to tell you something about my dad – because whilst his death is the source of much of my grief, his memory and the things he taught me and passed on through his genes are the source of my strength (and possibly some of my more irritating characteristics).
My dad was a bank manager. He used to tell a joke about a bank manager with a glass eye, and how you could tell which one was the glass one because it had a glint of human kindness. I never really understood it, partly because it was a terrible joke told badly, but also because my dad was a bank manager who was kind, so what other sort was there? In my memory my dad was a bit like a real life Mr Banks. He was nothing like the other bank manager I remember from the television of my childhood, Mr Mainwaring (though he did often recite the line ‘don’t tell him, Pike!’).
He was benevolent, prudent and careful and played by the rules. He taught us how to count up loose change by making neat little towers of ten, he taught us that if a job was worth doing it was worth doing well, and when baking a cake he would follow a recipe with precision to the second and to the milligram, resulting in exceedingly good cakes. But he also flew kites with us and sung supercalifragilisticexpialadocious with us. He would parade around like John Cleese doing the Ministry of Silly Walks, put on silly voices from the Goons or Hancock’s Half Hour, reliably and intentionally fail at reciting ‘I’m not a pheasant plucker…’ when we taught it to him as teenagers, and told terrible jokes (right up to his last weeks).
Dad was a perfectionist, whose determination to avoid a wrong decision sometimes paralysed him so that he couldn’t break out of the thinking and research stage to make any decision at all (he once took 3 years to choose the ‘right’ kitchen table after the completion of a large kitchen refurb project). He was determined, and most of the time that determination bore fruit. He would tell tall tales of postwar hardship (‘we used to cut a sausage in four for our sunday roast’), of school brutality, and how the teachers made clear that boys ‘like him’ would come to nothing, His father wanted him to ditch school and go out and get a job at 15, but he argued the point and stayed on. And at 16, with less than the minimum required O levels he somehow secured a post at the bank (being taken to one side by a Mr Mainwairing type at the end of the first week and told to replace his school blazer he was wearing with a proper suit using his first paycheck). As a young man in the bank he was sent to elocution lessons to get rid of his Somerset burr (only partially successful) and he studied to pass his banking exams (including a bit of land / mortgage law, which he could still quote back at me when I later went to law school) and was given promotions and a substantial lending discretion. When he described his job it was wisfully, and he sketched a role that was all about relationships and reciprocity, about understanding the needs of the customer and their business, and lending in a way that was right for the customer as much as the bank. He hated the targets and management speak that were taking over by the time I was a teenager, and would not compromise on those principles of integrity in lending. He would come back from meetings with flipcharts and training events fuming, frustrated and dejected. When I think back to dad’s venting about the wrong turn retail banking had taken he was a canary in the mine before the crashes and PPI scandals that would follow. I know also that he felt the responsibility of earning enough to support his family very keenly, and so staying was his duty. He took early retirement in his fifties, probably a blessing in disguise.
Dad was always up for a new challenge – seeking excitement and thrills in moderation – he took up a voluntary post as a ships purser on a schooner, which somehow involved manning the crows nest as lookout, he liked to drive fast (but always in accordance with his advanced motoring training), he took up gliding and bought a suzuki bandit (though he later got the fear of both), and bought an open top ‘sports car’ (well, a sporty car, an MX5). He carried on learning through the Open University, although he never quite had the confidence to finish his degree, which he later regretted. When I was about fourteen we took up bellringing together, spending many happy evenings together trying and failing to ring something more complicated than we could manage, and in due course we had three generations of us ringing together. He was still ringing with us in the weeks before his stroke.
In every aspect of his life dad behaved with kindness and generosity to others – especially his unconditional support of his family, but also his friends, customers, his community. He got involved and gave his time to all sorts of different community groups and organisations – not just the bellringing, but he acted as treasurer for several charities and local clubs, and in his 70s he trained as a Community First Responder. If he could help he would.
But dad’s strengths were also sometimes his weaknesses. He got frustrated when he couldn’t achieve something through logic or persistence, struggled to understand when he saw people ‘give up’, and became quickly incandescent when he lost something (I might have inherited that last one). He struggled sometimes to see other people’s point of view where logic told him his was right, which could lead to clashes. And he never accepted his inability to overcome the effects of his stroke and the resulting brain injury, and so his persistence and optimism became a burden not an adaptation.
His kindness, though, never changed. He continued to worry about his kids and his grandchildren and was delightfully proud of us all, especially when we achieved through hard work. Up until the stroke he would read Pink Tape, and make a point of letting it be known he was following, and the news I was going to be appointed King’s Counsel buoyed him up when he was recovering from the stroke. He knew that, for me, being a lawyer was a lot like being a bank manager was to him, and that although bankers and lawyers are often characterised as venal, both were about helping people when done properly (see also jokes about lawyers and sharks). Although he couldn’t make it to silk day, I tried to involve him in it by taking the crazy costume to him in his nursing home. Making him happy was one of the main reasons I applied (and tried again and again until I bloody did it). I owe my appointment to his determination as much as my own, and so I treasure this picture.
(Thanks Jo Martin KC, this is your wig!)
What a wonderful post ! Struck so many chords .