I’m grateful for my very normal and grown-up Father’s Day

I’ve just been to a local train station to pick up my eldest daughter. She’s been with friends near Clapham Junction. Earlier, my youngest daughter arrived home for university for the summer. Or, to be precise, for the next week before she flies out to Sri Lanka where she is spending six weeks working on a psychology placement. And on Thursday last, I brought my son home from university in Manchester.

So, for this Father’s Day, I am surrounded by my children. And my wife, of course. They bought me some bird feeders and feed to fill the feeders. They laugh at my passion for the BBC’s Springwatch shows and yet manage to turn that good-natured mockery into something that is quite touching.

And I have a father, too. I saw him very briefly this morning. Father’s Day — and Mother’s Day, too — was never a thing in our house. When I wished him happy Father’s Day this morning it was almost as a joke, a way of highlighting the fact that my visit was unplanned: I don’t see my father on Sundays usually. But I had picked up some pain medication from the pharmacy on Saturday evening and I knew he needed first thing Monday. So I wished him happy Father’s Day and handed him his prescription of morphine patches. Then we arranged our trip to the crematorium on Tuesday to visit the small memorial in the remembrance garden there for my mother, who dies one year ago on June 21st.

I spent an hour in the garden weeding this afternoon. Then I cooked dinner — chicken fajitas — and watched France and Switzerland play out a fairly dull nil-nil draw in the Euros.

To me, this all feels like a very grown-up sort of day. There was a time when it would have felt like death to me and I would have chased something to make it feel very different. Now I’m simply grateful to be surrounded by family and to live a life that allows me to put my head on the pillow at night with few regrets and to wake up in the morning with little or no shame.