Blog Standard Stuff

Well, the crux of this post is right there in the heading, but that’s not all I wanted to write about.

Yesterday was the day that we said our final goodbyes to dad. If you read my previous post on this blog, you’ll know that my relationship with my dad was, like the rest of my family’s relationship with him, not a typical one. Nonetheless, I wanted to be there for his funeral (or rather cremation); it was the right thing to do even if I hadn’t had much to do with him in recent years.

I allowed almost 3 hours to make the journey from Swindon to South London – plenty of time, or so I thought. I had imagined I’d be there an hour early, having a cup of coffee with my brother somewhere near the venue. But as I reached the first Reading  junction on the M4, the traffic slowed down to a crawl, with all three lands almost at a standstill and remained like that for the next 30 minutes. My ‘buffer’ was disappearing fast. When I reached the next motorway exit, I decided to come off, loop around the roundabout at the top and use that as an opportunity to get a look further ahead up the M4 to see if it cleared ahead. It didn’t (and now I know what the cause of the delay was) so I diverted to Basingstoke, took the M3 up to London, back on the M25 and then on to the M4 again taking me into central and then south London, all the while watching my estimated time of arrival (according to Satnav) slip further and further back. It went to 1:05pm (the service was at 1pm) but with my foot down I managed to squeeze it down to 1:00pm exactly. I never saw It creep back to 12:59 and once I hit central London it only started to slip back again.

I knew, in my heart of hearts, that being a bit late would not change his ‘present condition’, but I really wanted to be there to hear what my brother had to say at the service. We got there at 1:15, and walked in to the venue to the sounds of Andreas Bocelli’s "Time to Say Goodbye". I’d caught the closing credits, you could say.

Afterwards, we made our way a short way across south London to a café (it was a low-key affair), where Manda and I, my brother and partner, Sandy (one of my dad’s previous partners and someone who went through so much of the mad moments with dad) and a handful of dad’s recent friends and neighbours joined us. It wasn’t the traditional wake – there was no heavy boozing (somehow, that didn’t seem appropriate), instead we had baguettes and coffees and just talked about some of the funny moments in dad’s life, his unending wit and the crazy/dark moments he had.

Andy (my brother) has said to me in the past that we should try to write some of this stuff down for prosperity, combining it with some of the other characters he’s known in his life. And I suppose in some way I can do that here – there were some things that I hadn’t heard before that made me laugh and some that really shocked me. I heard the story about a bar he was sat at once, a bar that had underneath it some hooks to hang handbags on. He fell off his bar stool – probably not for the first or last time – but on his way down managed to catch himself on one of the hooks. By his nose! For what probably seemed like a slowed-down comedy moment to others (but a slowed-down moment of sheer agony for him), he hung there for a moment before the nostril gave way to the inevitable. Ouch. Then there was the time that Sandy answered the door to dad who had been sleeping rough for some weeks: "Can I use your toilet?" he asked, to which Sandy said yes. Some time later, Sandy went up to investigate why he was taking so long to discover him taking the side panel off the bath – he must have had a flash of inspiration weeks after last leaving the house, remembering that he’d hidden something in there: a stash of vodka. I imagine the scene as he stood there at the door asking to use the toilet, screwdriver in hand (that wasn’t how it was, I was just thinking of the absurdity of it all)! Sandy probably has so many other stories of his crazy times, due to the alcoholism. One New Year’s Eve he told her that he would be back by midnight (yeah, right) but ended up back at 2am, handcuffed to two policemen who wanted to search the house. They uncovered a gun and Sandy was not entirely sure whether they believed that she wasn’t complicit in some way! Turns out he’d tried to pull (or had pulled) off a bank robbery, for which he’d later do time. Another time after an argument, he’d threatened to shoot them both! Sandy wisely decided to go for a walk and let him cool down. When she returned she discovered holes in the wall and thought to herself "that’s a funny place to make holes for the radiator pipes", as he was in the process of fitting a radiator. Later when moving the sofa about, a couple of bullets fell to the floor. Crazy times indeed.

The weird thing is that despite the tragic aspects of his life, we were all able to sit there ourselves and have a laugh about it, even Sandy who’d witnessed some of his most bizarre behaviour. I was glad that I’d gone up to the service and the aftermath. I was also pleased to discover that regardless of his darker moments, he did have a group of people who he called his friends and who thought John was a real character, a funny guy who would, to use one of their word-for-word quotes, "be sorely missed". The truth is that it’s much easier to forgive friends and drinking acquaintances for their various foibles than it is close family. Friends can make new friends, they can decide who they wish to associate with and they can more easily overlook parts of their friends’ lives that don’t fit with their moral code. With family it’s different, it doesn’t work like that. The irony is that had dad been the funny guy who lived next door to me and who I occasionally chatted to while nipping out for a pint of milk, the old guy with the colourful past and the raft of amusing anecdotes, rather than my dad, I probably would have got on better in recent years.

So, now the deed is done. All that’s left is for us is to work out how we collectively pay for the service (not surprisingly, there is pretty much nothing in the ‘estate’ that he leaves behind, aside from letters, photos and other memorabilia) and for his ashes to be scattered. He’ll finally settle somewhere over a cliff-edge in Cornwall, a place that he loved as a young adult, when he would take us on camping trips as a family, before the various demons took hold. 

There’s the saying "You come into the world with nothing, you leave with nothing -  you can’t take anything with you" (or words to that effect). I get the sentiment, but most people do leave something behind, even if it is a bit of material wealth that is passed on . But in dad’s case, there really is nothing left behind – other than us, his children. He apparently wrote in a letter to one of his sisters in the past something along the lines of "It’s not what you achieve in life, it’s what you leave behind", a bit of a twist on the earlier saying. It’s almost as if he had admitted and accepted his failures in life but acknowledged that he had indirectly left a mark, be that by his children or by the impact he may have made on friends.

And now I’m wondering quite how to finish up this entry and drawing a blank, so I’ll just leave it at that. Oh I know what else I wanted to say: do you know if there’s any way I can find out if I’ve fallen foul of any speed cameras? In my mad journey up to the crematorium, I think I may have been over the speed limit in a couple of spots as I desperately tried to make it to the crematorium. I may have to write a pleading letter or two, but for now I’m keeping my fingers crossed!