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A road trip with my father

Another LiveJournal discovery from the past that popped up on exactly the right, Father's Day:

It was only when writing his funeral oration that I realized how alike I was. This may have been the reason why we were so wary of each other, never wholly, happily connecting, except twice that I recall vividly.

The first was a road trip to the West Country. I was fourteen or fifteen. It was October and half-term from school. My mother was away on a meditation course and we went off with no plan - wandering through Glastonbury and Wells, a beautiful castle (whose location I cannot remember), across Exmoor to Clovelly and Tintagel. We stayed in guesthouses either casually met or remembered from my father's many past work-based wanderings as an engineer. We ate in restaurants - an unfamiliar affair. We talked, bonded, no more so than when deciding to return home across Dartmoor in the fog. We could have taken a safer detour but I had an insistent romantic longing to see the moor in fog, and my father happily complied. We made our way cautiously over the grey, mist drenched, ever-shifting landscape, and I loved it and him for his gracious willingness and his understanding (that ran so counter to his eminent surface practicality but there was another soul within - the one, say, that had loved ballet as a young man).

Tintagel I remember for being one of those strange encounters with an imagined past: standing in the ruined cell of the Celtic monastery, I felt strongly as if it were deeply familiar, having been here before, a monastic past life.

The second was buying my first car. I asked for my father's help. He came to Oxford and we spent a happy morning testing vehicles, peering under bonnets, haggling with dealers. Neither of us, it must be admitted know very much about the practicalities of engines (he was not that kind of engineer) but that did not matter. What mattered was that we did this together and that it was a signal of gathering success (on what was, had been a non-traditional career path). I was arriving and though he could not say anything (he was not that kind of man, a kind I have had to unlearn in myself) he was fiercely proud.


Rest in peace...

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