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I have decided against revealing the petty acts of revenge I engaged in against my father, partly because a number of them carry potential criminal liability. Instead I propose to tell you about some of the unaccountable bad luck that my father suffered after he left us to shack up with the barmaid from the golf club. These misfortunes will seem minor and, to anyone but my father, they are. However, what you need to know about him is that he is a huge volcano of rage that is never more than a minor inconvenience away from a spectacular eruption. Missing a traffic light could have him thumping the steering wheel and baying like a doberman; spilt food could have him angry enough to throw his own plate at the wall; and filial defiance or perceived disobedience would result in a blow to my ear that would leave my head ringing like a bell for days. For more formal discipline he preferred the belt or cane.

In the month or so after he left, he was in a near permanent rage. Some little bastard went round to his house in the dead of night and removed the licence plates from his car. Then another little toerag let down his front offside and rear nearside tires while he was in a restaurant having a romantic meal out. And then he discovered someone had spray-painted an enormous penis on the side of his house. I could go on but it seems unfair. Indeed, I almost feel sorry for him and, of course, ashamed that the area I grew up in could harbour such delinquence.

Over the next few years he and I had our little run ins; the time I stole his accounts so that my mother’s lawyer would know the truth about his earnings only to have him threaten me with arrest; the time he tried to cut off my university funding and I had to threaten to sue him; the time he tried to persuade my Chambers not to take me on as a pupil – such jolly japes. Anyway rather than let it get me down, if I ever feel low about it I spend some time looking at the licence plate I have affixed to the wall of my study.

 

The brilliant and wenchy Christina has posed a great question: Is there a day in your life you would redo? At first I could think of nothing. Then it occurred to me that I would travel back 15 or so years and not kill my Grandmother.

I should make it clear immediately I did not murder Nanna. I loved her very much. Though not enough, as she latterly became inclined to point out, to make the effort to travel down to Bexhill-on-Sea to play crazy golf with her. In that self-centered way that teenagers have, it never occurred to me that I had any obligation to go visit her. She was supposed to come visit me, clutching a gift (usually, even when I reached my twenties, a colouring book). I wish I had seen more of her. She had a twinkle about her I sometimes catch in the eyes of my sisters and a sense of fun stapled to a fearsomely solid sense of responsibility and decorum.

When my family split up it did so with a truly theatrical venomousness that horrified her. My father was her only son and the proverbial apple of her eye. What he had done by walking out of the family and taking up with his mistress plainly upset her but how can you help but forgive your son? Round in our house we were having no truck with forgiveness. My own speciality was petty acts of revenge which, should there be demand for it, I will list in another blog post.

The place I grew up is a popular retirement spot. Once grand seaside hotels, cracked, faded and then fell into the hands of developers who converted them into sheltered housing for the elderly. Entrpreneurs devised ever more complex schemes which were designed to remove the life savings of members of my grandmother’s generation whilst allowing ungrateful and inattentive familes to feel less guilty about doing nothing themselves. Nanna became involved in one of these schemes. A developer had built a private housing estate close to where we lived with small flats and houses built around a day centre. Residents had a place of their own but access to shared facilities. Nanna bought a house in the development. It was outrageously expensive. The deal was, should she die, the company got to buy it back from Nanna’s estate at a knockdown price and re-sell it.

The day before she was due to move in she came round to our house. Being saintly, if naive, she decided to broach the subject of our relationship with Dad in the hope of improving it a little. This was like making a black power salute in a KKK meeting hall. Vitriol sloshed across the wallpaper. Words never spoken in genteel company caused the cucumber sandwich she was holding to brown and crackle. She began to look genuinely terrified. Seeing her distress I changed the subject and asked her how she was. She told me her legs were hurting and I offered to rub her calves for her. I knelt on the floor and worked away at her papery leg muscles. She looked down at me sorrowfully and then told me in a dry quiet voice how sad it all made her. I can’t remember what I said but it was almost certainly another elaborate condemnation of my father. She looked at the ceiling, lost in grief. In my viciousness I thought it better she get a clear idea how things stood given that she was going to be in the neighbourhood.

The next day, as she moved into her new home and as the removal men shifted boxes around her, she collapsed and died. The doctors told us that she had had a stroke. She had, he explained, probably had a blood clot form in her legs which had somehow been worked free and travelled its way up into her brain. If I had my time again I would not let my arrogance and ill-will spoil the last few hours of her life.

What a week. I have not been posting because my Chambers has been in the middle of a knockdown dragout, potentially enterprise-destroying battle of such monumental bitterness that grown up (and usually fearsome) QCs have actually been caught weeping. I’ll give over 8 or 9 hours of the weekend to writing about it.

In the meantime this message has two purposes:

(1) To prove I still have a pulse and I remain a blogger; and

(2) To point out that I am flying off to Scotland this afternoon with a view to watching the woman I still love* (and who, conveniently, is also my wife) running in the Edinburgh Marathon (which is like an ordinary marathon except run by scary, skirt-wearing men with no underwear up and down huge hills in skin-blistering temperatures).

If you happen to find that you unaccountably have more disposable income than strictly you should we can help you launder some at P’s Marathon Charity Website.

Moobs Out!

* Despite having organised a two week holiday in the remote reaches of the Scottish Highlands in the middle of the World Cup