I have mentioned over the past couple of days about my time spent with my granddaughter, time I absolutely cherish.
I couldn't imagine life without children and grandchildren. Both were always part of the life plan but of course grandchildren weren't down to us.
In many ways, and I hope this doesn't sound arrogant, I have dedicated what I call my real life to children and grandchildren. I have done this deliberately. I refer to family life as real life as opposed to the false life of work. I know many will disagree with that. I was asked when I first retired whether I missed work. Not for a nano second was my reply. Work was mostly a means to an end for me. That doesn't mean I didn't often get involved in internal politics of which there were just too much at times. It doesn't mean I didn't enjoy what I did but it does mean that for me work came a distant second to family.
I had a strange relationship with my own father. I say strange because looking back it's difficult to describe exactly what that relationship was. In many ways it was a non relationship.
I had a happy childhood but as I grew I realised that my father was very selfish and mainly thought about himself. This is something I try not to do although at times this is difficult.
I am convinced by a couple of conversations I heard between him and my mother that he didn't really want children and having had one he certainly didn't want another. I think my mother would have liked at least two but as usual he got his way.
When I grew up and got married it was just accepted that we would have children. There was no real need to discuss this. In fact if I have any disappointment it might well be that we didn't have a third.
My relationship or lack of it with my father is one of my great regrets in life. I probably could have done more about it but somehow always felt something blocking me from making any moves in that direction.
My father spent virtually no time with his grandsons. When my mother died he had another long term partner. They came to tea every other Sunday. They arrived at exactly 5 pm and left at exactly 7 pm with the usual words. "Well I think it's time we were thinking about it."
In other words the whole thing was very much clinical. There was only one occasion he took them out and that was to the local playground when we had a funeral to go to and it's the memory of that which prompts me to spend as much time with our grandchildren as possible.
I do love father/son songs, however. One of my favourite has always been "Father and Son," the original one by Cat Stevens rather than the Boyzone cover. It took me a long time to realise that this wasn't a cozy song about a father son relationship but a song about a fractious relationship between a son who sees his father as an overpowering presence and a father who is trying to stop his angst. What I didn't know until recently is that Cat Stevens wrote it for a musical based on the Russian Revolution. Then Stevens became seriously ill and the musical was shelved and soon the song took on a much wider meaning than a son trying to go off to fight and finding opposition from the father.
The other father/son songs I love are The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics, My Father's Eyes by Eric Clapton and my particular favourite which is rather an obscure song by Level 42 entitled "My Father's Shoes" which only got to number 55 in the UK charts. Seek it out if you've never heard it. Hopefully you will find it as special as I have.
A friend asked me if the reason I loved these father/son songs is they spoke of a different relationship than that which I had with my father and I think there is a lot of truth in that.
An interesting postscript to what I have written is that I read it out at the February meeting of Hethersett Writers' Group and one of our members - Jill - knew both Cat Stevens and Eric Clapton well and so what I had to say really resonated with her.