My father has decided to make a trip home
It may not be a good sign
My father to called to wish me a Happy New Year. We are both of an age now that this is a morning ritual rather than the after midnight call it used to be previously.
I was downstairs making breakfast and my phone was charging upstairs, so I missed the call. After breakfast, I called him back. He was making his own cooked breakfast so couldn’t talk. He wanted to call me back again. I wondered what that could be about: usually the wish for the year ahead is about all that needs to be said.
Anyway, call again he did.
He told me that on waking that morning he had thought of Edinburgh. Not just thought of it but had the desire to see it again. Edinburgh is his original home and where I spent my childhood until I became a teenager. It is, in fact, the town I still consider home, even though I left it behind for good over thirty years ago. My father left it for good over half his lifetime ago.
There is obviously a sense that this will be a last visit. My dad spoke of seeing the changes to the city that have happened since his last trip home. He has been reading through the Ian Rankin Rebus novels and this has awoken a certain nostalgia for the streets he knew so well but so very long ago.
Then he asked me to go with him. I’m happy to accept any chance to get to Edinburgh, so agreed.
We’ll go when the weather gets a little better, so we don’t have to struggle against the wind from the Forth and sleet and rain as we walk along Princes’ Street or up Morningside. Quite what sort of walking we’ll end up doing, I’m unsure, given my dad’s poor stamina and his stick. We may just stay in a central hotel and look out the windows.
One thing I would like to do would be to go to Tynecastle and see Hearts play. My dad took me to my first game there in 1965 — the season Hearts lost the title on goal average when if it had been done on goal difference as they do now they would have been well ahead. But a trip together to see Hearts might be a fitting valediction to the city and our sense of home. Neither of us is likely to live there again, after all.
I have made a similar trip. Twenty years ago my father-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He invited me to accompany him on a farewell visit to his family home in Ireland. We flew to Knock and drove for a week through Sligo, Mayo, and Galway. He died six months later — far too young.
So, the year has started with a plan that contains within it a backwards look. Maybe that’s what all new years are like after you reach a certain age. At least experience and self-knowledge has meant that I have made no resolutions. I will not disappoint myself in more than the usual ways this year.
Whatever is in store, bring it on. And for my father, I hope the trip brings a different type of resolution. Peace and a sense of completeness.
Happy New Year to one and all. May your resolutions be sustainable.
Some lines from John Donne feel relevant:
Moving of th’ earth brings harm and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
(A Valediction: forbidding Mourning)
