The Lighthouse at Flamborough Head. Still going strong after 200 years.
I like lighthouses, they are simple to understand. You see one and know exactly what you are going to get….
We sat down to watch a movie last night, Fight Club. As I sat with my coffee I was ready for a couple of hours about boxing, maybe unlicensed, probably featuring an underground boxing club. Think Rocky mixed with Dead Poets Society.
I won’t give the plot away but how wrong was I with that assumption. It was like sitting down to watch a harmless romantic comedy like Notting Hill and then finding out it’s actually a slasher horror film set on a Space Ship.
After the movie Hawklad said that this time, the real movie entertainment was watching my increasingly confused and bewildered expression.
It’s just me, I don’t get out much these days 😂😂😂😂😂
As a child I lived in a seaside town that was bizarrely lacking in water. We were definitely a bit short of streams, lakes, ponds and rivers. One really big river but that was many many miles away. No streams….. If you wanted water then it was about walking for 40 minutes to get to the beach. Yes the local park had a boating lake, but that lake had more shopping trolleys than water. Maybe that’s why I now have a real soft spot for villages built around water.
That’s definitely why I always love walking around Thornton-le-Dale.
My Partner’s Mum used to live here. One evening we were walking around the village when we came across a well dressed chap pulling himself out of a stream. He was an absolute state, dripping wet. As we asked if he was alright, he muttered something about ‘daydreaming and suddenly finding himself falling into water’. I’m not sure he was so enamoured with village streams.
Summer poses its own set of challenges. This season’s weather hasn’t been great with few warm weather days. Yes there has been sun but it’s often felt more like late October than high Summer. But the weather hasn’t deterred the crowds. Try to go anywhere around midday and the car parks are mobbed. Hawklad doesn’t do mobbed car parks….
But leave it until the evening and suddenly the car parks are empty. Ok that usually means the venue is shut but not everywhere. Just like Dalby Forest. A few hours earlier this walk would have been rammed with hikers, dog walkers and mountain bikers but now at 6-30pm it’s all change. It’s quiet, we are the only car in the car park. A 2 hour walk and we didn’t see another soul.
Or just like 6-30pm on the North East Coast. A couple of intrepid surfers enjoying warming drinks on the beach. A couple of ball chasing dogs with well wrapped up owners. That’s it. Solitude.
Yes 6-30PM cuts down the places open but it opens up so much space and peace. It works for us. Just don’t forget the Woolly Hats, it is Summer here.
Chatting with a work colleague who was literally busting about his upcoming trip to Cornwall next week. He had just booked in to a luxury hotel with its own golf course, a few days of golf and pampering. He apparently hadn’t played golf in years. Seemed odd as I had thought that he had mentioned golf in Scotland a few months back.
Silly me mentioned that to him and the normally ultra talkative colleague was unusually silent. Silence eventually broken by a sharp intake of breath and the timeless herald of one of those monumental life mess-ups, summed up perfectly in one simple but effective word …. “BO##@@@S”………
Turns out that the poor chap had a few months back already booked a similar golfing package in Scotland for the week ahead AND HAD COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN about it….
At least he saw the humour ….
“Like pigging buses, you wait for ages and then two come at the same time…..”
I wondered which one he would cancel….. turns out kinda neither …..
Three days golfing in Cornwall (rather than 6), an overnight drive (9 hours), then two final days golfing in Scotland. Well that was PLAN C. Today he went down with COVID, so I guess it’s PLAN D for next week now.
I wonder what simple and effective word he will be using right now to describe golf, next week.
I ended up with way too many missing pieces from the jigsaw which painted the life of my parents before they had our family, before me. I never took the time to ask for those missing pieces when I had the chance…..DEEP SIGH.
But I can sketch some details with the pieces I do have.
Dad loved playing cricket, loved to go and see Yorkshire play. He would go for long bike rides, go fishing, loved to ride on steam trains. He was also a bit of a party animal, putting on his suit and heading to the dance halls. He liked to look after himself, liked to be fit. Apparently he was also a bit of a comedian, very gregarious.
Mum loved to dress up and go dancing with her friends. Way too much dancing for her parents liking. She loved music, especially the likes of Crosby, Martin and her always favourite Sinatra. She also loved the cinema but only to see musicals or romance. She also really wanted to travel, wanted to see Paris and New York. In a word, apparently she was FUN.
Then they had three daughters and two sons.
Dad never talked about it, but looking back I’m convinced he fought depression for years. Boughts of heavy smoking and drinking. Hours sat in his chair, pretending to read the same newspaper page yet eyes fixed on a blank wall. Volcanic eruptions of anger, followed by days of silence. Those eyes, eyes filled with suppressed tears, frustration and anguish, was that why he frequently avoided eye contact. Some days he seemed unable to function, rooted to his bed, did sleep bring some temporary relief. Maybe he opened up at Work or at the Pub, not to his family. At home, one word summed the mood, UNAPPROACHABLE. Maybe DISTANCED is better. One word definitely didn’t fit Dad, HAPPY. I can’t remember him smiling or laughing. He worked, he gardened, he went to the pub.
Mum was more open. She said she struggled. She would apologise sometimes simply saying something like she wasn’t feeling like herself. Yes I can remember Mum laughing and smiling, but I can also remember way too many tears. She often seemed so sad. I remember a doctor visit, mum rooted to a sofa, talk of a nervous breakdown. She soldiered on. She had never touched alcohol but started to drink some sherry to calm her stomach. She went shopping, went to see her parents, went to her part time job, went to school evenings when school needed to see a parent, she looked after the house and US. She never went out socially, never met friends, never seemed to listen to music. She never put on a dress, she never made it to Paris or New York.
Just a few clouds make such a huge difference to the mood here.
Did I ever really grieve, TWICE
Back in 2016, almost to the day. I was sorting out mum’s funeral, broken yet my mind was on my seriously ill partner. It felt like grief had been put on hold. Then a few weeks later I’m sorting out my partners funeral and again …..
Was I really grieving, how much was I allowing myself to grieve.
My focus was on our son, trying to keep my head above the single parenting waves. Looking back I was living through Hawklad. If he was happy, I was happy. If he struggled, I struggled. Did I ever really think and meditate about what grief and death truly meant, how it was changing me.
Probably NOT.
Probably figured out way more about me as a PARENT.
Maybe the Mood will change one day and I can start to seek a little more clarity on grief and how it’s changed me, still changing me.
I’m trying to learn German, been trying for years. It’s a few years now but we used to stay in a largely Germanspeaking area of Switzerland. Great chance to practice, way better than getting strange looks in Yorkshire trying out my second language. As a result, these days I have to practice by ordering the occasional German magazine or newspaper.
I’m not going to kid myself, my second language capabilities are still pretty rudimentary. There are reclusive Himalayan mountain sheep with a better grasp of German grammar than this Yorkshire Pudding. Which basically means that quite often it’s picking out the occasional word I can translate amongst a sea of letter confusion. It’s a good job you get pictures in the magazines to at least give me a few clues on what on earth is being written about.
A couple of years back I was trying to read a German magazine article about Interlaken, a beautiful Swiss town which was often our Sunday morning adventure. Best hot chocolate of the holiday. Best shop combo ever for the three of us. One shop, three happy punters. Hawklad looking at a huge Schleich toy section, his mum looking at a huge wall calendar section and me fascinated looking at the amazing cuckoo clocks on the wall.
Interlaken given its name is unsurprisingly a town between TWO huge lakes. But this article mentioned a third lake. A mysterious lake, as hard as I searched on the maps, I couldn’t find it. In the end I decided it was either a massive underground lake or a famous fictional lake from some mega Swiss story, maybe a continental Europe version of Brigadoon.
Yet this week. In an English magazine, an article about last Ice Age, that mystery lake was there again. And this time I could read the words all about the now not so mysterious third lake. Apparently the two Interlaken lakes, Thun and Brienz, were once a mega lake called Wendelsee, Lake Wendel. No wonder it’s not on the maps now, and what a good job it’s not. Our favourite shop would have been underwater, right smack in the middle of that lake. In this case two lakes is definitely better than one.
There comes a stage when our kids start to develop superpowers as a direct result of trying to live with their strange and ancient parents. It’s the power of second guessing, otherwise known as the power to interpret muppet parents. Maybe it’s the result of too many sleepless nights, too many family crises, too many additions to the ‘to do list’. Maybe it’s not enough caffeine, too much mind numbing tv but often parents function with only 90% of the words they know, the other 10% is either randomly lost or corrupted. The end result is we often don’t make sense and yet our kids can somehow make sense of the rubbish that sometimes comes out of our mouths.
Example one of those superpower from our house…
Asking Hawklad what he wanted for tea… “do you want thingy and chips”. Seamlessly he replies “yes I’ll have an omelette but maybe with vegetables…”
Example two of the superpower….
Asking Hawklad “have you seen the erm, you know”. Without taking his eyes of his book, he points to the sofa, “the remote control is there”…
Example three….
In the car, we were talking history and Hawklad mentioned Theodore Roosevelt. His muppet dad immediately butted in with his Einstein like intellect….
“Theodore, wasn’t he one of the hamsters in that tv thing…”
Almost without blinking Hawklad replied
“You mean Chipmunk…. Theodore from Alvin and the Chipmunks..”
I was surprisingly close, Theodore was a rodent. As we don’t get chipmunks here, maybe we need a British version of that show. Harry and the Hamsters. Rather than singing pop songs badly, The Hamsters could recite Shakespeare really badly with annoying high pitch voices.
Example four….
“Erm, you had a {…. mumbling as I fight with the vacuum cleaner, …}, erm Whatsaface {…. more mumbling as I’m distracted by the vacuum cleaner bag emptying its contents onto the floor…}, don’t forget”
Hawklad somehow understood what I was trying to say and he went to phone a friend who had called him earlier….
BUT here is the thing, it’s a selective superpower that our children wield. The power seems to fail if the parent starts talking homework, housework or personal grooming…….
The iPhone tries to hide the terrain. It’s a bit steep. it’s a bit bumpy. It’s also hardly ever used these days. But yesterday I was around about here when I came across a dismounted mountain biker, someone who initially looked like he was taking in the view. As I passed him, he asked if I knew anything about fixing knackered bike gears. After I said ‘a little’ and started aimlessly tapping the bikes chainring, he painfully explained ….
“If you heard any screaming noises a few minutes back, it was from my lungs, my knees and my backside. My wife said I should take up this as a hobby, she said it would be fun, good for me. Strangely she didn’t buy herself a bike…. The first time I went out I fell off and dislocated a finger. Since then I’ve been lost, bruised, angry, tired, broken but never ever has it felt like fun“
His bike was beyond my expertise…
The poor chap groaned …. “this hobby just keeps on giving”.
LIFE IS FUNNY SOMETIMES
Just then, in the distance, a bit of a dust cloud coming up the usually quiet hill lane. One bike, two bikes, three bikes, four bikes, five bikes. All flying up the steep climb, heading towards us. It was like a scene from a modern day remake of a Spaghetti Western.
Unbelievably a professional mountain bike team, all in matching team kit, out on a training run. Not just one bike expert, FIVE EXPERTS. Within seconds the fallen bike was as good as new.
In the words of Monty Python, the Lucky, Lucky, Lucky B………
Yes Lucky but I also suspect, he is now a FORMER Mountain Biker…….
Sat in a surprisingly quiet cinema, watching Despicable Me 4. I could hear Hawklad laughing, along with his fellow Minion Movie Goers…. I smiled then slowly an emotion swept over me. One I’ve had before in these nearly 8 years of single parenting but never this strong, this striking. Would she recognise his laugh, it’s been 8 long years, so much has changed.
His mum never got to see or experience this moment, all the moments. In 2016, when he was just 8, she left this stage. She has missed out on so much, the highs, the lows, the laughs, the tears, the struggles, the adventures, the family time, seeing all the great strides he has taken. Would she even recognise him now.
She missed so much.
Missed so much precious time.
I know the value of that now, I didn’t a few years back. Maybe that’s the thing about LOSS and BEREAVEMENT. You get to see the fragility of life and what is lost. You start to develop a better focus on the value of time and the pricelessness of the precious moments.
A Dad trying to cope with the loss of his Partner and becoming a single parent. 