Is there a room in which sits a committee somewhere, where it is decided which day
to dedicate to bulbs or the celebration of Andy Burnham’s mother (yes of course I am being snide ) While we don’t know, supposition is endless and endlessly unsatisfactory. Why do we find it so difficult not to know ? Or to wait and see ?
21st June is the birthday of the Prince of Wales,
the 250 years’ anniversary of the independence of the United States of America, and Father’s Day.
You can’t argue with a birthday: it is the date on which you were born. Somebody will kindly supply it if there isn’t a record. I remember discovering Name Day in a Russian novel, which is the day you are christened. Nations choose days of celebration to unite the populace (lots of disagreeing citizens in the US at the moment, but all patriotic) and Father’s Day is one of the dates I query. How did we get there ?
I am not very good at an excuse for expenditure. I have had wonderful times and wonderful clothes but not because somebody else
thought I should – wedding, reception, block party. My son asked me when he was 10 or 12 how I felt about a Mother’s Day Card and we had a serious discussion.
I said I thought it was a commercial spinoff of Mothering Sunday in the calendar (as far as I knew)of the Anglican Church and I didn’t care for what had become a kind of nakedly opportunistic commercialism. It became a standing joke between us that he might ring me on Mother’s Day but he didn’t send a card.
But because he is facing all kinds of stuff this year and I wanted him to know I was thinking of him, I bought a Fathers Day card this year. As a matter of really trivial downturn one is in the range of cards available to us.
Most of them are twee or rude, few “mean” anything so I went back to the oriental imagery he and I both admire and bought him a print of plum blossom to wish him all the positives.
To people with unsatisfactory relationships with their fathers, from difficult interaction to physical abuse or absence , Father’s Day may be anything from uncomfortable to irrelevant. It is irrelevant to me to because I don’t need an occasion to remember either of my parents and my father was key to my growing up. Not that my mother wasn’t – but even she acknowledged that that Pa and I had a bond. I have previously described my parents as my friendly ghosts
– they are very present in my life. Looking for a day to think of them specially, I’d chose their birthdays or their wedding anniversary on Christmas Eve
I don’t need a day to remember
all the men and women who worked and gave their health and physical soundness and lives for me to live through two world wars, and every other social upheaval you can think of. I don’t want to be reminded of the Titanic going down – it was a vanity (unsinkable indeed) and it is a mausoleum. I wish people would leave it alone.
I love personal birthdays – mine, my friends – but I keep a note of those in the desk diary without which life would be shapeless. Neither party animals or big present givers – we just remember and write appreciatively. And there are personal reasons to remember, like me and Friday 13th of anything which I had always been taught was unlucky – but was the day I passed the 11 plus. Still gives me a wry smile.
This “day” of one thing or another may be a way of structuring time but it remains a mystery to me, devoted as I am to a day a t a time – one of the biggest gifts of my later life. And I still want to know who decides these dates and why, why some are well know (like the US celebration) and why some are revealed in a “500 hundred words on National Darning Day” as a filler in the paper. Every day is special to somebody.
by Anthony Heywood
- and elephants are lucky!
Annalog 