Dad Dead,(cant fly without umbrella)


 
My normal comic book blog about my efforts to get an indie book published
will have to wait for another week.

My long ill father has died.
I dont quite know how to feel at this point.
The man that raised me along with my mother is dead.
They were funny ,charitable and considered good people by all who knew them.

In my early childhood times were tough.
My Irish parents liked to drink
and were told by the ever helpful Vatican that birth control was evil
so they had several kids and spent most of there money on booze .

 The conservatives made a new sport of squeezing and making things even more difficult for the poor.
So three redundancies in a row brought on by there economic policies had taken our family
from the upper edge of the working class right down to the newly created socio-economic group
 of non workers ,
the under class  .

We moved from a house from an OK area of Birmingham (there are not many)
into a sink hole estate of casual violence ,misplaced aggression and constant vandalism.
Young people with no hope of employment and too much time on there hands are prone to do these things.
 I'm told there were drugs too.I didn't notice as I was too afraid to go out and run the gauntlet of aggressive people on the streets,just looking for an excuse to kick the fuck out of someone smaller than them.
I did notice there were an unhealthy amount of people from the neighbourhood meeting bad ends.

The "new" house was concrete tomb with no central heating.
I invite you to turn off your heating for an entire winter or two to truly appreciate how that feels.
We would come home from primary school and huddle around a small gas fire in a living room with a cold cement floor we could not yet afford to carpet.
Winter traditions include the icing up of the windows in all rooms ,
the annual breaking up of ice from our frozen outdoor toilet
The fun games I learnt included staying deadly silent in the dark when debt collectors knocked on the door.
Sometimes it wasn't debt collectors as such it was a gas or electricity employee with instruction to enter and cut off our supply.

All this of course was normal,Children can accept anything as normal.
Eating cereal two/ three meals a day or no meals at all
Things bought in pubs that you absolutely did not ask where they came from.
"fell off the back of a lorry" was the old euphemism for all the stolen shit circulating in the area.

And my parents
leaving there young freezing cherubs alone in the house
to go off to the pub to spend what I would later refer to in adulthood as
"the fucking food money".

So my relationship with my parents was complicated
(is there any other kind?)

and now there both dead of alcohol related conditions .
I missed my chance to tell them  how much I hated every single fucking thing about my grim childhood.

I suppose I use all this in my writing ,the better writers are the ones who have lived first before sitting down at a keyboard,
They've gotten out in the world and seen some shit.right?

right?


I think in my grief I would sometimes trade my "experience"
for knowing where my next hot meal was coming from




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