Out for supper, we raised a glass of a very nice Primitivo to Dad. A moment later, I was lost in thought. First I was thinking how I wished I was more like Dad, and then I thought if I was more like Dad in the way I wanted to be, I wouldn’t have had that thought in the first place. That is, he was very accepting of the status quo and if he ever wished he or his circumstances were different, he didn’t let on.
He often used to quote his old Classics master at Eton (David Simpson?) who apparently was fond of saying: “Things are as they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be. Why therefore should we wish to be deceived?” The first sentence might be a deliberate quotation from Agamemnon (ll. 67 – 68). But maybe that is just the sort of thing that tragedians always say and Classics teachers say because they have read a lot of (Athenian) tragedy. Or all of it, since there isn’t a lot.
Anyway, this saying, which may or may not have been David Simpson who may or may not have been quoting Aeschylus, captures something about who Dad was and how he approached the world. Honest and sanguine, curious and realistic without being cynical. It wasn’t fatalism — a quality he hated; he was just willing to grapple with the world as it was rather than sit around wishing it were otherwise. He almost never complained in the sense of saying he wished for the impossible. He had mastered a profound — and profoundly engaged — kind of acceptance without a minute of meditation or reading a single book about Buddhism.
But what’s funny is that while he had this amazing attitude to the larger vicissitudes of life — for example, being wrongly diagnosed with three different kinds of cancer on three separate occasions — sometimes the little things really irritated him. I mean REALLY.
A few years ago, he had a heart attack and spent a week in hospital, on an NHS ward. The food was disgusting, the other inmates sometimes disruptive and generally NQOCD. But Dad was cheerful and stoical throughout, reading the Guardian I brought him and munching Rich Tea biscuits with diabetic jam. Instead of moaning about the comforts that had been taken away from them, he took enormous pleasure in them as they were gradually restored: when I brought him home and we ate a home-cooked supper in front of a DVD, he was in heaven.
But a couple of days later, I went out for an evening and came home to find him in a right state. “Where is the tin?” “What tin?” “The Fairy tin!” “Oh you mean the one that was finished?” When I’d come back to the house while he was in hospital, I had undertaken a massive cleaning operation which involved doing several loads of laundry. I had found a near-empty Fairy washing power tin in the cupboard, used the contents, thrown it out, and replaced it with a full cardboard box of the same product. What I didn’t know was that Dad would buy the boxes and empty them into that tin, which he’d had for a long time. For some reason, he preferred to scoop his detergent out of a metal container. And now that it was gone, with a cardboard substitute in its place, he was very annoyed with me. Usually mild-mannered and laidback, he was also capable of getting very angry very quickly and he was so confident and authoritative that his anger had an irresistible force.
After the stress of the preceding ten days, I’d had enough. I burst into tears and fled to my room. A few minutes later, Dad came upstairs and knocked on the door. “I’m sorry, darling.” As quickly as it had come, the anger was gone. And I would much rather have him here now, being irritable, than this quiet freedom to throw things out. But if I were more like him, I wouldn’t have that thought, would I?
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