My Dad's Enforced Silence

My Dad is an expressive person. He talks a lot, and sings a lot, and when he’s not talking or singing he’s happy just to scat or make noises. On the way home from the football once, I had to ask him to please be quiet - He was bored, and consequently had been blowing raspberries intermittently for about 20 minutes, on a busy train. He is an expressive person.

Adolf Hitler and my Dad both developed a growth on their vocal chords which had to be removed. In around 1940 in the case of Adolf Hitler, about 2 months ago in the case of my Dad.

So last week he went into hospital to have his one taken out (a procedure which happily passed without incident) and before I knew it he was conscious again and sending me texts.

“No cups of tea for 24 hours, and no talking for 48!”

I can only imagine how daunted he must have felt at the prospect, and how delighted my stepmother was.

The following day, he decided to go out for a walk to get some exercise. Realising that this would expose him to other people, who would expect the usual enthusiastic chatter and might not know about this imposed rule of silence, he prepared a note of explanation:

“Sorry, I can’t talk. I’ve had surgery on my vocal chords, and I don’t like you anyway”.

I love my Dad.

No Ball Games

Being a goalkeeper was a lonely existence which suited me down to the ground. On arrival at the Big School, cross-country running soon took its place as the only activity I was any good at. It transpired that I could run quite fast, as long as it was over uneven ground, past foliage, through puddles, and between trees.

Again, as with my career in goalkeepery, this was perfect for a young aesthete such as myself. Firstly, it was a reasonably safe option. There was very little danger of being tackled, and still less danger of being knocked out or impaled by a badly aimed projectile.

It also afforded ample opportunity to let my thoughts rise above the mundanity of everyday school life, and tackle the real issues: Can Mark Mitchelson really arrest me just because his Dad is a policeman? Will I get into trouble if I go the Long Way Home tonight? Is it true there’s a school in America where you don’t have to do any work?

I had done it again. I’d found a sport that allowed me to ponder life’s great mysteries, to extract myself from the unseemly business of being about 13. Not for me the painful bewilderment of being hit in the face by a size 5 mouldmaster football. Not for me the missing teeth and brutalised shins of a hockey team changing room. Never for this thoughtful child the twisted human carnage of an adolescent rugby scrum.

And crucially, as with keeping goal, my newly adopted sport had its place in outsider art – as a film that would for years allow me to pretend I’d read the book of the same name. It completely validated my choice and confirmed my long held belief - that I was a misunderstood antihero. From assembly until lunch. Every Thursday.

Albert Camus, Peter Handke, Erland Tangen.

In some ways I was a late developer. In others I was an old head on young shoulders, setting myself up for a future as a self-regarding gobshite with aspirations of poetic and artistic grandeur. I think this is best summed up in my choice of sports - more specifically school sports. I was a child who, even as the Savlon was applied to the latest grazed knee, always had one eye on his memoirs.

At the age of about 7, there was a decision to be made as to what kind of sport I would subject myself to: I could have chosen hockey, but those sticks didn’t seem to have much give in them. Rugby always looked to me like a game being played by far too many people at once, on the same pitch. So football it was. But not for this child the camaraderie that comes of pulling on the same shirt as all your tiny team-mates, nor the concerted everyone-running-after-the-ball tactics, as drilled into us by our foul-mouthed and foul-tracksuited manager. I wanted to be the goalkeeper. "It was good enough for Albert Camus", I’m sure I thought, "so it’s good enough for me". Naturally too, by that age I had already enjoyed Peter Handke’s excellent novel about murder and the dilemmas of free will "the Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick", so really it was a no-brainer.

Then came four years of standing alone in the pouring rain, ignored as my team-mates celebrated each goal, vilified for each one I conceded. Four years of staring into space while I tried to invent lyrics to go with the Superman theme tune. Four years of standing exactly in the middle of the goal because Princess Leia would be executed if I didn’t. Four years of being caught unawares by lightening-fast attacks while I was figuring out whether I’d prefer to be Batman or Robin at playtime on Monday. Four long years, in which time I think Cults Primary School won about three games.

As an aside, special mention should now go to Erland Tangen, a slightly odd Norwegian boy who scored an absolutely spectacular goal against me in my second season. A right-footed volley from the edge of the box, which fairly thundered into the roof of my net. It was like a proper grown-up goal, and would have been goal of the season had Tangen not been one of our own defenders trying to make a clearance during what became a 7-0 defeat.

But then came the step up to the Big School, where the team’s manager had it all wrong. He made no mention of the importance of a goalkeeper letting his thoughts wander all over the place. Nothing about cultivating an air of aloofness that would stand me in good stead for my adult years. He wanted his ‘keeper to pay attention, bump into people, get in the way of the ball, even catch it. My goalkeeping career was over.

Vampires, Castles and Cocktail Parties.

I recently finished reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Loved the first half, where not a great deal happened but it was creepy and there was a sense of impending doom. Wasn’t too fussed about the 3rd quarter where nothing really happened and the doom seems to stop impending. And then really didn’t think much of the last quarter, when everyone spends the whole time congratulating each other on their bravery, their manners, their fastidiousness, and proclaiming their love for one another. And then they find and kill the Count literally in the final 2 pages. I can’t help but feel that Stoker ran out of story at about page 200 but had promised himself it would be 400 pages long.

One of the places thought to have inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula, and certainly an evocative location in its own right is Slains Castle, a few miles north of my home town of Aberdeen. Stoker spent time here as a guest before starting the novel, and few places have made such an immediate and lasting impression on me – The bleakness of the setting, the precipitous cliffs and the hollow sadness of the building itself. Even though it dates back to the 16th Century the more recent work left it looking like a late 19th early 20th Century stately home, and the ruination always seemed to carry echoes of week-long cocktail parties and late-night music – The chatter of guests dancing into the darkness of the First World War and everything that would mean for their way of life (the owners had to leave and remove the roof to avoid taxes by the mid-1920s). The ruins themselves won’t carry this sense of melancholy for long though, as the site is braced for redevelopment, the nature of which I dread to imagine. I love the place.

Slains castle in its heyday:

...and today: