Monday, December 11, 2006

Remarkable Things

A slightly bizarre thing happened at the weekend. When I was at my parents’ house on Saturday and my dad made a “joke” about his drinking when I was growing up. I just told him that what he said wasn’t very funny because what he was like when we were growing up wasn’t a joke.

We just returned to watching the TV but then a few minutes later dad suddenly said “I’m sorry, I know I treated you really badly when I was drinking a lot. There’s nothing I can do about it now though.” I didn’t really know what to say to that and just said that given what he was like, I didn’t think it was something he should joke about and we just left the conversation there.

Perhaps that sounds a bit heartless, but the thing is that I’m not really sure he does actually know what he was like. If you have conversations with him now (about anything) there are all sorts of things he will say that are just things he has imagined. For example, a while ago I was talking to a friend of my parents and said to him “I hear you’re thinking of moving to the flats they’re building by Waitrose”. The chap just looked at me blankly and said he had no idea what I was talking about and had no plans to move there at all. Who was the source of that disinformation? My father, of course… It’s not that he had lied, it’s that he spends too much time with his own thoughts - you could mention the most innocuous thing to him but when it’s been mulled over in his mind for a few days it can have morphed into the most headline grabbing story you can think of. My father could have made his fortune working for The Sun.

So I’m not really sure that he knows what he was apologising for because he will have edited and reinvented the past anyway. Anyway, he doesn’t drink much any more and instead his weird and unexpected mood swings are more down to the strokes he has had rather than anything else. Still, it was an interesting turn of events that he apologised.

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