Month: October 2013

It was twenty years ago today…

~ kevinrevell ~ 4 Comments

…and I’m sitting on the bottom stair in our old house, and I’m biting onto my knuckles, because, upstairs, our two week old baby boy is crying, and my wife has been taken into hospital with mastitis, septicaemia and God knows what else, and I’m scared witless, and I haven’t got a clue what to do.

Quite a levelling experience, altogether. Fortunately, we muddle through and after a couple of weeks, we’re back to a fragile three again, and we start enjoying the first of a number of small people that are to enter our lives over the next eight years.

So, he starts to respond differently after a couple of weeks, and we get past that point where you’re not sure if he’s smiling or not, and he’s got a face that melts your heart, and everything starts feeling pretty right with the world.

And he starts crawling and talking and walking and it all goes really fast and before you know it he’s holding his baby brother in his arms and tickling him, and they’re both giggling away, and that’s pretty good.
And he toddles off to nursery school and learns songs about crocodiles and parachutes and makes friends that last him right up to now, and all the time he’s getting this really great sense of humour, and he’s naughty without being horrible, and that’s all pretty good too.

And, before we know it, he’s at school, and cutting quite a dash in his grey shorts as he goes off for his first day, and he loves it to bits, and he really likes learning, and all that seems to fall into place. And he starts getting those crazes, and the one that really sticks it the guitar and he starts practising for hours, and he gets really good at it, and I couldn’t be more proud. And we go for hours with me running and him on his bike and he tells me all about the absolute ideal colour for a stratocaster, and I couldn’t be less interested in that as a specific subject, but it’s just great to hear him so excited, and eventually we go to a guitar shop with his birthday and Christmas money and buy an Epiphone Casino that’s almost as tall as he is, and he sits down to play it and, you know, he’s really quite good. So he plays in a few bands and loves it, then he starts playing drums and he’s pretty good at that as well, and we start sharing all those stories about Things That Happen At Gigs, and that’s all good too.

And he does pretty well at school, and takes a few chances, and makes a few mistakes, and goes through those rites of passage as he learns to drive, and (separately) learns to drink, and meets a girl, then stops meeting the girl, and all the time he’s handling it pretty well, and it’s great to have him around, and before you know it he’s the third adult in the relationship, and telling his parents to grow up when they argue, and you can’t help but laugh. And he runs his first half marathon, then runs his first marathon, and we get to see him cross the line, and because we’ve both run marathons we know what that’s like, and there are moments like that where you just want to freeze time because its really not going to get much better than this.

And he gets his place at University, and it’s his absolute first choice, so he’s chuffed to bits, and after a fabulous summer he packs everything he needs into the car and gets deposited into a little room that reminds me of a Cat B prison I once visited, but which he absolutely loves, and we go away from there thinking that actually, these things can sometimes work out quite well.

And then a couple of weeks later, we’ve just come off the phone to him, and we’re talking about him in the kitchen, and his younger brother puts ‘Wish You Were Here’ on the stereo, and there’s that line about ‘two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year’, and I just start crying.

And it’s not because I didn’t want him to grow up and it’s not because I selfishly want to have him around all the time. It’s because we won’t get to see the world through his eyes any more, because over the next few years, we’re going to feel like this a few more times, and because, well, you’re allowed to miss people when they’re not around, aren’t you?

Well, it was about twenty years ago that Mrs E’s mother gave her the fairly mature advice that she should enjoy every minute of being a parent, because you only ever borrow your kids. It’s only taken twenty fairly wonderful years to understand what she meant.

The T Word

~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment

I was listening to Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago, and heard the sort of comment that you’ll only ever get from a listener to the Today programme, who had written in:

‘I feel it’s a crying shame that the term BBC Trust has turned into an oxymoron’

Please bear with me on this, because your first reaction may be the same as mine, ie  slight irritation at the self-serving sort of twit who thinks they’ve turned into the next Oscar Wilde because they know what oxymoron means, and has to prove it on national radio.

But, that aside, OW#2 does have a valid point, and one that I’d like to get some thoughts written down on, because Trust is a word that feels like it needs a bit of attention.

When I grew up, which, in the scheme of things, really wasn’t that long ago, you couldn’t move for parts of the world that you just naturally trusted. If you believed in an order in society, you’d have a natural trust for government and the police force. If you had a faith, or even if you didn’t, you’d probably trust the natural morality of religion. You trusted the media to tell you the truth, and you pretty much trusted the banks or the building societies to do something honourable with your money, like lend it to other people, who, by definition, you trusted. You trusted that your musical heroes were talented musicians, and it didn’t really strike you that sports stars would by default be pumping themselves full of EPO.

You even trusted the stars of light entertainment, in a way that is really quite hard to explain to today’s Generation Y. Being on the TV was so much of a big deal that you’d naturally be in awe of anyone who’d been anywhere near the lens end of a camera. So Operation Yewtree is actually far more of a big deal to those of us who saw ‘personalities’ on the TV week in week out, than it would ever be if it happened (or continues to happen) in the here and now. It’s interesting when you look at where the fingers have pointed on the whole sorry post-Savile mess here, as most of the people being called out are the ones with what you’d call ‘eccentric’ personalities – that’s what got them onto our screens in the first place. And, lo and behold, in a ‘always thought there was something odd about him’ style, we find that their sexual peccadilloes were, well, a little eccentric as well. And, as a result, we’ll head towards a society where you’ll just never trust anyone who displays any eccentricities, which in some ways is kind of a shame.

Anyway, given the list above, I’m scratching around to think of any body or anybody I can trust. I asked a group of friends about this a couple of months back, and we spent a fairly depressing time ticking people off the list. Politicians, policeman, judges, commentators, doctors, teachers, union and religious leaders, all got the chop, and at the end of the evening all we had left were Nelson Mandela and Mother Theresa. And depending on your point of view, you could claim that one of them is a retired terrorist and the other misappropriated funds from, amongst others, Haiti’s hated Duvalier clan.

So far, so depressing, and if its bad from my perspective, then just take a moment to think about it for someone born this side of 1999. Our kids have turned a healthy skepticism into a deep, deep mistrust of anything in power or authority, which you’d do well to understand next time you challenge their choice of role model.* When I ask my own children about this, they’ll fairly politely call out their family as role models that they trust, and then, well, they’re pretty well stuck.

The winners in our future society will be the ones that regain that trust and can use the word in a precious fashion, in the knowledge that trust takes a long time to build, and can take not very much effort (or lack of effort) to lose. The fact that this can happen without us really lifting an eyebrow (last year I’d probably say I had an element of trust in Google and the Co-Op, and I have a different view now), gives the lie to a world where people are completely vindicated by taking a suspicious and negative approach of everything around them.

I’d hope that all is not lost, although in the case of the bigger institutions above, it might take generations to regain credibility. In the meantime, I’m really hoping that one or two companies will be transparent enough to set out a trustworthy stall. If they stay true to their roots, they’ll clear up.

Sorry if this is all a bit downbeat and serious.  Flippant comment on all that is irrelevant will return shortly.

 

 

 

 

* I’m talking to you, Daily Mail reader