Carry On Camping, Please

Camping out in the bush is seen as a birthright of every Australian, but this innocent pastime is under threat from commercial pressures and our own indifference.

 

The two sounds I associate most with the Australian bush are the tremulous singing of a magpie and comforting rasp of a chainsaw. The first is an early morning melody, while the second usually kicks in just after lunch when Aussie blokes migrate to their sheds.

In the country, simple pleasures take on another, deeper resonance – like the sight of young Eastern Grey kangaroo standing ghost-like in the dusk or a vapour trail stenciled across a glorious dome of blue sky.

Just after Easter I took my young son for a few days camping in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales – an oasis of sanity just three-or-so hours from Sydney.

I hoped Myles would learn how to put up a tent, gather firewood, cook on an open fire and, perhaps, along the way, acquire some appreciation of the natural world.

But the transformation was instantaneous – by the time we’d crossed the Blue Mountains he declared: “Dad, I think I’m more of a country boy, than a city boy.”

On a previous trip we’d spied this campsite (I’m not going to say where) which was compact, leafy and surrounded by native bushland teeming with rainbow lorikeets, sulphur-crested cockatoos, kangaroos and magpies.

The camping ground, run by NSW National Parks, had everything we needed: well-maintained sites (each with its own fire pit), a free communal BBQ and a ‘70s ablution block, which was basic but regularly cleaned.

Online booking was fast and efficient and the cost for three nights absurdly cheap (A$52.28). The campsite rules were sensible; dogs on a leash were permitted, but drones and amplified music were not. A notice board next to the toilet block advised about fire dangers and feral pigs.

Like most Australians who love the bush, I’d always seen this type of no-frills family camping experience as a right rather than a privilege – a national urge to explore this continent and connect with a simpler way of life.

“Australia is an outdoor country,” said the late Barry Humphries. “People only go inside to use the toilet. And that’s only a recent development.”

The quote is still funny, but no longer true. Most Australians like only those parts of the great outdoors that have been specially curated for them – like Noosa or Uluru; a ready-travel meal designed for the microwave.

Our tolerance for discomfort and bland food, the two cornerstones of camping, has largely evaporated. We may admire the heroic Australian landscapes of Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Arthur Streeton in the art gallery, but few of us want to experience the real thing.

A couple of years ago we booked into a commercial camping site on the Central Coast and were astonished to see the huge amount of equipment that the modern Sydneysider now requires for a camping holiday – everything from portable fridges to gas barbecues and fairly lights. The tents were huge, multi-room structures.

Small, family-owned sites are rapidly disappearing from the landscape as large corporates such as BIG4, G’Day and the NRMA build huge property portfolios; the biggest is the G’Day Group (majority owned by SunSuper) with 280-plus parks around the country.

Australian hotels are generally not family-friendly and overcharge for things like roll-out beds and kids’ meals, so I understand the appeal of these new camp sites which come with swimming pools, water slides and jumping pillows. And forget about crawling into a two-man tent, today’s sites boast upscale cabins and safari-style tents.

But I’m not sure this is really camping. Rather than shaking off the comforts of home, today’s well-equipped camper is merely creating a facsimile suburb under canvas, complete with a spotless SUV parked next to his or her marquee-sized encampment.

With so little government funding for our national parks, I wonder how long they will be able to compete for business against these glitzy pleasure domes by the sea?

More importantly, a simple bush camp site is the ultimate expression of a robust, classless society, where people from all backgrounds and income levels mix easily.

One evening I sat by our huge fire while Myles played tag with a couple of country lads who’d come over to see if he wanted to hang out – I heard their laughter as they chased one another through the gloom.

Every morning Myles jumped out of bed to visit a mob of kangaroos who gathered in a paddock across the road. “I have to go and check on Bill,” he said. “He’s my friend.”

I have fond memories of my first camping trip on the English moors where our tent leaked and Dad fed us on tinned Irish stew, but I am not confident that Myles will be able to take his own children on such a carefree adventure where they might light a fire, gaze up at the Milky Way and meet a roo called Bill.

 

Support your national parks:

https://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au

https://www.parks.vic.gov.au

How To Raise A Model Child

During last year’s tedious Covid-19 lockdown I fell into the clutches of a shadowy global movement. No, I’m not talking about QAnon, the Proud Boys or those loony anti-vaxxers, but the worldwide fraternity of modellers – people who dedicate their free time to building meticulous scale models of fighter planes, historic ships and military hardware. 

As a child I’d built plastic kits of Spitfires and Hurricanes and thought it might be fun to introduce my six-year-old son to the archaic world of the sprues, poly cement and decals.

Since Myles consumes the usual diet of cartoons, computer games and learning apps, I was worried the arrival of our first kit, a scale model of James Cook’s famous ship HMS Endeavour, would be greeted with indifference, even hostility. Instead, it was infatuation at first sight and Myles is now an avid, even obsessive, modeller.

Together we labour for hours decoding complex instructions, gluing tiny plastic components together, sanding hulls and wings, making ships’ rigging and discussing paint schemes.

In the mornings Peppa Pig and SpongeBob SquarePants have been replaced by a small band of YouTube modellers who provide expert commentary on this hobby – from detailed product reviews to technical support and historical background.

Operating from sheds and spare rooms across Europe, North America and Australasia, this cohort of male modellers (mostly bearded Englishmen) has become Myles’s second family and a constant source of delight; although pitched at a young audience these shows are adult in tone and never patronizing.

The models themselves are not expensive (a basic 1:72 aircraft from Airfix costs around $25), but the novice kit builder must also buy a wide range of accessories, such as cutting boards, snips and specialist glues and varnishes. Before long the home modeller has monopolized the dining table.

“Look, there’s glue on the table again,” shouts my wife in exasperation. “I’m sick of these models – get them out of the house or I’ll throw them in the bin.”

Over the past few months, I’ve started to understand the strange alchemy that occurs as the modeller transforms a bagful of plastic components into a finished product. To an outsider our WW2 fighter planes and 19^th Century sailing ships may look like poorly made plastic toys, but to Myles they are an endless source of wonder.

“Daddy, did you know that a squadron of Curtiss P-40 aircraft fought with the Chinese in the war?” he said the other day. “They were known as the Flying Tigers and quite famous.”

Apart from exciting his interest in history, modelling is a brilliant way for boys to learn about engineering and design; sometimes I find Myles just gazing down the deck of a ship or doing aerial manoeuvres with his Zero or Curtiss planes.

From his YouTube mentors my son has acquired an impressive knowledge of the development of both ship and aircraft design. He is now familiar with great events such as Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Britain and the D-Day Landings – subjects that are unlikely to crop up in his Australian school curriculum.

Modelling kept us sane during the darkest days of Covid-19 but is now an important part of our weekly routine, alongside swimming classes and cricket practice. Myles has learned to snip, sand and glue with the best of them. And tantrums? These days, we prefer to call them creative differences.

Spooked by The Serpent

Over the past few weeks veterans of the Hippie Trail, a rite of passage for thousands of Western dropouts in the 1960s and 70s, have been forced to re-live, and perhaps re-evaluate, their youthful exploits. 

The Serpent, an eight-part BBC drama attracting huge audiences on Netflix, makes disturbing viewing for those, like me, who wandered across Asia in search of spiritual enlightenment – a journey that bristled with exoticism and danger. 

Charles Sobhraj, a con man, fantasist and serial killer later nicknamed The Serpent, plied his grim trade in Afghanistan, India, Nepal and Thailand – all favoured destinations for young, naïve, truth-seeking travellers of the Woodstock generation.

 

The son of an Indian father and Vietnamese mother, Sobhraj spent his teenage years in France where he developed a taste for burglary, car theft, gambling and various criminal scams.

 

By the time he returned to Asia in 1970, the smooth-talking sociopath had developed a violent hatred of young, privileged, European travellers (or “long hairs”) whom he charmed, exploited, poisoned and, when he felt like it, slaughtered.

 

Flitting between Bangkok, Mumbai, Kabul, Calcutta and Kathmandu on passports stolen from his victims, Sobhraj embarked on killing spree that would claim the lives of at least 20 young people, including 14 during his stint at Thailand.

 

Sobhraj was eventually cornered by Indian police in July 1976 after a botched attempt to drug a group of French academics – an episode brilliantly re-told in The Serpent – and sent to jail.

 

By the time I arrived in New Delhi in late 1977, having travelled overland from London via Greece, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sobhraj was just beginning his long prison sentence at the city’s salubrious Tihar Jail.

 

Exhausted, friendless and with dwindling funds, I was exactly the type of Westerner that Sobhraj and his partner Marie-Andrée Leclerc targeted. Watching The Serpent unearthed memories that had lain undisturbed for over 40 years. That lost chapter of my life returned in vivid detail.

 

What has disturbed my sleep over the past few days is the not the thought that I could have fallen into the murderous clutches of Sobhraj and Leclerc, but the inescapable truth is that my entire Hippie Trail adventure had been shadowed by danger.

 

My trek from Istanbul to New Delhi was punctuated by small acts of violence and intimidation. Held at knifepoint by an irate bus driver in Turkey, harassed by on the streets of Tehran and fleeced of my valuables in Kabul I had no illusions about the dangers I faced on the road to enlightenment.

 

At the age of 21 I was already battle-hardened, having picked fruit in Queensland, lugged bricks in Perth and worked as a day labourer on the Auckland Docks to fund my travels. I reached Europe as a deckhand onboard a German tramp steamer.

 

By the time I boarded the ferry at Dover I had long discarded the garb of a 70s hippie. In the King’s Road I bought cavalry twill trousers, button down shirts and a tweedy jacket (all second-hand, of course). My flowing locks were shorn and my tatty backpack replaced by a compact, pig-skin suitcase.

 

Instead of Kerouac and the Beat Poets, my literary heroes were Evelyn Waugh, Rupert Brooke and Philip Larkin.

 

While there is much to admire in The Serpent, the series does reinforce many of the ridiculous stereotypes about life on the Hippie Trail – images that trivialise what was for many of us a pivotal and liberating experience in our young lives.

 

Drug addled hippies dancing to Jefferson Airplane might make amusing TV fodder, but I failed to spot any such gatherings as I travelled across the dry wastes of Afghanistan, marvelling at the sight of its nomadic Kochi people, the vibrant night markets and the imperious mountain ranges that touched the sky.

 

Clutching copies of the Bhagavad Gita, we were escaping the stuffy conformism of home in search a more cosmopolitan, tolerant and spiritual place. Some were searching for an Indian guru, others were simply addicted to life on the road with its instant camaraderie and hilarious unpredictability.

 

My travelling companions were earnest, peace-loving and almost entirely male – there were no bikini-clad girls in Kabul in 1977 – but not stupid. Before CNN and the Internet, the only way to really learn about the poor, war-ravaged and desperate parts of the globe was to get on a bus or train and go there.

 

The Hippie Trail was an astonishing, fleeting and imperfect social experiment. Its sights and smells, passing friendships, periods of despair and moments of innocent delight remain with me. Even a sordid killer like Charles Sobhraj, still rotting in jail, cannot poison those golden days my vanished youth.

 

A Child of the 60s

Something has changed in our household. Our five-year-old son is a schoolboy. He is now a veteran of two weeks in the classroom. As I wander home from the school drop-off, I reflect  on the massive gulf that separates our boyish lives.

 

Myles goes to a cosmopolitan, inclusive and thoroughly PC Sydney primary school. The parents are mostly young professionals – the mums in leggings and trainers and the dads in rumpled shorts and designer stubble. The teachers are attentive and approachable, the atmosphere laid-back.

 

At Myles’ age I was attending a Victorian-era village school in Devon, south-west England. The austere building stood on the top of a hill overlooking farms and cottages. The nearby church of St John The Baptist dated from 1460. The village had a sweet shop, a pub and a lumpy playing field.

 

The school was divided into two large classrooms. I sat at the back and watched the clouds through a huge gothic window, yearning to be back on the farm with the pigs (my father was a pig farmer), Lassie my border collie and our obese pet donkey. 

 

When I was eight my parents sent me to a posh independent school in town where the teachers were shocked to discover that I was illiterate. By contrast Myles has been reading for two years. Thanks to his iPad and learning apps he has already acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the solar system, dinosaurs and the inner workings of the human body. 

 

Prior to COVID-19 our inquisitive little boy had travelled to New Zealand, the UK and the Gold Coast. At five years old my entire world was a picturesque valley on the edge of Dartmoor, a storm-lashed wilderness famous for its small ponies and fearsome prison. Eamon de Valera, Jack "The Hat" McVitie and the Aussie bushranger Moondyne Joe were all inmates.

My days were spent doing farm chores, building mud dams in our brook, picking wild strawberries or climbing up to the old Martello tower overlooking our farm; the tower was built, it was said, during the Napoleonic wars. In summer we swam on the pebble beaches of south Devon or tramped across Dartmoor in unsuitable clothes. We shivered through winters, nursing chilblains and waiting for the soft benediction of snow on our slate roof. It always snowed on Christmas Eve.

 

In 1962, life in this corner of rural England had not changed much for 500 years. Before the arrival of the motorway London was impossibly far away – our longest journey was to the livestock market in Newton Abbot, about five miles away. 

 

This all sounds very Thomas Hardy and I suppose it was. When I revisited our old farm (now a luxury country retreat) a few years ago the new owners told me that we were the last family to actually farm the property – the end of an unbroken 800-year-old farming tradition. At the pub in Marldon I was greeted like a celebrity or perhaps a ghostly apparition.

 

“Oi, Trevor come over here,” said the barmaid in thick West Country. “There’s a man who went to the old village school up the hill. Yes, of course, I’m serious.” 

I asked if Marldon still hosted its annual Apple Pie Fair (very Doc Martin). It did. As a schoolboy I’d been chosen to be the Apple Pie Queen’s page boy. We sat proudly on a float while a horse walked us around that lumpy field. 

 

By the 1960s small holdings like ours were uneconomic and my father became a property developer, renovating cottages for Londoners seeking a rural idyll in deepest Devon. Eventually we sold the farm and moved into Torbay – which later became infamous thanks to madcap antics of a certain Basil Fawlty.

 

Compared to Myles I had few luxuries. My entertainment was the farm, the woods where we found a WW2 ammo case, the apple orchard, the hay sheds, the water meadows. I have memories of moving a neighbour’s sheep down the narrow Devon laneways and hay-carting in the burning summer sun.

 

I don’t remember ever watching television or listening to a wireless although my mother must have tuned into Women’s Hour to keep her company as she prepared yet another family meal or baked giant slab of chocolate cake. Myles can access the digital universe by swiping a screen, but my window to the world was my brother’s copy of Look And Learn, although I preferred The Hotspur, a much racier comic.

 

Myles is a thoroughly urban kid with access to galleries, interactive museums, great sporting venues and a wonderful diversity of human beings. By comparison, my young childhood was narrow, white and unexciting. And yet I wonder whether he will ever feel the thrill of dancing around a giant bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night, holding a newborn piglet on a winter's morning or gazing lovingly into the eyes of a teenage Apple Pie Queen.

Yes, I was, to quote Dylan Thomas, as happy as the grass was green. 

 

Goon To Woy Woy

At the height of his fame Spike Milligan drew up plans to leave Britain permanently and settle in Australia.

Newly-discovered correspondence reveals that the brilliant but often temperamental comedian and author had decided to move his family to the NSW Central Coast.

In 1961 he wrote to the Gosford Shire Council asking it to help him identify a large block of land, preferably surrounded by native bushland, on which he could build a “contemporary villa”.

In the letter, Milligan, then a household name in Britain thanks to the Goon Show (1951-60), said he planned settle down on the Central Coast and devote the next 20 years to writing books – including one about the plight of Aborigines in New South Wales.

The former Goon’s parents, Leo and Florence, emigrated to Australia after World War 2 and had settled in the quiet seaside suburb of Blackwall, just outside Woy Woy. Milligan, who made numerous trips to Australia in the 1960s and 70s, famously described Woy Woy as “the world’s largest above-ground cemetery”.

Milligan, who was born in British India in 1918, was very close to his parents who were both flamboyant personalities in their own right. Leo was a soldier, weapons expert and vaudeville performer with a passion for the Wild West, while Florence was an accomplished horsewoman and singer. Both appeared on stage during their time in India.

“Spike could sit quietly in the study at the back of his parents’ house on Orange Grove Road and write – or talk to Leo about his gun collection or sing around the piano with Flo,” says local historian Geoff Potter. “Woy Woy was his sanctuary.”

Despite his scathing comments about Woy Woy (“the only town twinned with itself,” he once joked) the comic relished his time on the Central Coast, where he wrote three bestselling books, including Hitler: My Part in His Downfall and Puckoon.

“Spike loved the bush, the beautiful waterways and the relaxed lifestyle,” says Potter. “In Australia he could be himself – he wasn’t expected to ‘on’ as the zany Spike Milligan all the time.”

In his letter to the council, Milligan, who suffered from manic depression throughout his adult life, said that the Central Coast, then sparsely populated, offered the peace and tranquility he needed to write.

Potter, who has spent 10 years sifting through the Milligan family archive, says that despite his hurtful gags about Woy Woy he was serious about leaving the UK and settling permanently in Australia.

“Spike did buy land at Empire Bay (just east of Woy Woy),” he says. “It’s a magnificent piece of bush with beautiful views across to Riley’s Island. He paid rates on the land throughout the 1960s.”

Locals also claim that the famous British comedian owned a second piece of land towards Kincumber, another beauty spot overlooking the local waterways, but Potter has been unable to verify these claims.

Despite his barrage of Woy Woy jokes Milligan, described by Eddie Izzard as “the godfather of alternative comedy,” clearly felt right at home in freewheeling, classless 1960s Australia.

“In letters he wrote to his daughters Spike would never shut up about Woy Woy,” says Potter. “But the pressure of work and family in England meant that he was never able to settle here.”

Opened in July 2018, The Spike Milligan Exhibition at the Woy Woy Library contains a treasure trove of personal items, including his cornet, LPs and several manuscripts, gifted to the council by Spike’s much-loved younger brother, Desmond, a talented artist, who died in 1991, and nephew Michael.

Potter, who curated the exhibition, says the late comedian made a huge contribution to the Central Coast, where he was heavily involved in local causes, such as fighting a canal housing development and establishing a bird sanctuary.

“Spike did an enormous amount of good in the district, but being a private man he kept it to himself,” says the historian. “More broadly Spike was involved in other Australian environmental campaigns of the 1970s and ‘80, including stopping the Franklin Dam in south-west Tasmania.”

During his lifetime many people in Woy Woy naturally resented Milligan’s hurtful comments about their sleepy commuter town, but Potter says that the Goon often mocked places and people, including Prince Charles, who were close to him.

“Spike did call Woy Woy the largest above cemetery in the world but he often used the same line on stage but substituting the names of other towns,” he says. “Spike Milligan was a comedian.”

Six decades after he first set eyes on the Central Coast it seems the people of Woy Woy have forgiven the comic genius who once made them an international laughing stock – apart from funding The Spike Milligan Exhibition the council has named a pedestrian bridge in his honour.

“I think we owe Spike an apology,” says Potter.

Did I Hurt My Son?

A red-faced father is dragging his crying four-year-old son from a Sydney park. He grips the boy by the upper arm tightly while holding the child’s bicycle and helmet in the other. After a 20-minute tantrum this dad has reached breaking point and decides that the bike-riding lesson is now over. 

Crossing the street they are confronted by a middle-aged woman. “You’re hurting that child,” she says. “You must stop doing that.” The man tells the woman to mind her own business. Expletives are used. “I’m going to report you to the police,” she warns him. “I know your face.”

That man, of course, was me. And while I dismissed the incident at the time as simply annoying, such a strong reprimand from a complete stranger has troubled me over the past few days. 

Had I indeed been too rough with my son? Had I given into my own frustration and taken it out on Myles? Was I, in short, a negligent father -- or worse an abusive one?

Using physical force against children, especially in public, has been a sensitive issue since the publication of the bestselling novel The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas in 2008. 

The book pivots around a fictitious incident in which a man slaps a three-year-old child, not his own, at a Melbourne barbecue. The story spawned television spin-offs in both Australia and the United States and sparked passionate debate in the United Kingdom. It also polarized opinion here in Australia.

Some critics argued that Harry, the villain of the story, is a victim of forces beyond his control and that while his actions were reprehensible they pointed to a wider malaise in society.

What I did to my son in Centennial Park hardly constitutes corporal punishment. I was merely restraining him so that we could get back to the car. 

But in the eyes of a concerned onlooker I can understand that seeing an adult literally drag a small, crying preschooler might appear cruel.

My main problem was simply that I did not have enough arms to hold my son (who was struggling) and to carry his bike at the same time. Had the lady in question volunteered to carry the bicycle rather than threaten legal action the situation could have been resolved. 

Little did she know that two minutes later, Myles and I sat down and had a quiet chat and a hug. The tantrum was over – which illustrates the problem of judging someone’s parenting from afar.

The question remains: should parents be allowed to discipline their kids inside and outside the home? The busybody in the park clearly believes that dialogue or perhaps some time out is the only mechanism that parents should use to alter their child’s bad behavior. 

What if that fails? Even the loveliest of children can misbehave. A gentle slap might do the trick. And despite the soul searching that followed The Slap, I suspect that many parents still raise a hand to their children – if only as a threat – when they are severely provoked.

Australian parents find themselves in a tricky situation when it comes to the use of corporal punishment. It is still legal for parents and guardians to physically punish children under their care, but the exact rules vary from state to state. 

In New South Wales, for example, I am entitled to use “reasonable” force to discipline my child, but not strike them on the head of neck. But many experts would like an explicit ban on the use of physical punishment against children.

“All corporal punishment, no matter how mild or infrequently administered, irrespective of whether it is administered by parents or teachers, regardless of whether it is religiously or culturally motivated, what part of the child's body is targeted or whether it is administered with an implement or the flat of the hand, is morally wrong and ought to be legally prohibited,” says Patrick Lenta, Associate Professor in the Law Faculty at UTS.

Many other countries, including Sweden and New Zealand, have already outlawed the use of corporal punishment; although parents and guardians are still permitted to use some force in limited circumstances. As a signatory to the United Convention on the Rights of the Child the Australian federal government might be expected to follow suit.

While I do not condone the excessive or even routine use of violence against small children the idea of prosecuting people for hitting their children seem ludicrous to me. And what happens if a court decides that I had used excessive force to remove my son from Centennial Park? Would I end up with a criminal conviction and even a jail sentence?

Professor Lenta argues that the purpose of such legislation is to change behaviour rather than to prosecute aggressive parents, arguing that children who are subject to even mild physical punishment can suffer serious and long-lasting psychological harm.

“One possibility is to require corporal punishers to attend, as punishment, specialised programs focused on family violence, with a view to bringing home to them the nature and effects of corporal punishment,” he says.

Poor parenting is not like poor driving. Correct parenting methods cannot be taught in a workshop but are fairly instinctive. 

Criminalizing corporal punishment will only make things worse. Only those within a family unit can decide where to draw the line. Getting the police, judges and the courts involved is I believe like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.

Alan, I Still Miss You

Grief is a strange, unpredictable beast. It follows you around like a stray dog, forlorn and loveless but somehow comforting. Once you open the door to grief there is no turning back. When my father passed away in June I expected a defined period of grieving and a speedy return to normality. But his death has left a huge chasm in my life – a keening absence I had never anticipated. I often hear something funny on the radio and want to call him. 

We often chatted about books. “Have you read so-and-so?” he’d ask. “He’s a mustard writer.” It was his favourite compliment.

A few weeks before he fell ill we had a long conversation about Albert Camus, the French existentialist. “What a marvelous writer,” he said. Dad, who had left school at 15, was a voracious reader and a curious one. 

A graduate of the school of hard knocks, my father worked every day of his life. He was still running a furniture restoration business at 88 and had recently taken on an apprentice. Like many men of his generation Dad was more comfortable at work than at home. Babies terrified him. Young people annoyed him. Lots of things annoyed him. 

When I presented him with my youngest son, Myles, four years ago he said bluntly: “Bring him back when he’s ready to go to uni.” But when I look at those photographs today I can see the love and pride in his face. He was a marshmallow in an iron glove.

Sadly, for much of his life my father saw family primarily as an obligation, rather than a source of joy. As a child he’d been a distant presence in our lives, always working, always pre-occupied. When he came home, the fun ended. There were no dinner parties, no BBQs. “Don’t think of me as your father, but as your bank manager,” he once said. I never went to the pub or the football with dad. He once took my brother and I hiking on the English Moors for a couple of days – that is the only act of father-son bonding I can remember. We ate Irish stew from a tin. Luxury.

Too often ours was a combative, fractious and generally awkward relationship; my fault as much as his. As a teenager I hated his politics and he hated my music. “The Beatles are rubbish,” he said with finality. “How can you compare that to bloody Mozart.” Curiously, my parents had met at a local dance in the 1950s jiving to the latest American hits. “I noticed him as soon as he walked into the room,” my mother once told me. “He was so handsome in his RAF uniform, with this mass of blonde hair. I told my girlfriend ‘He’s mine -- you can dance with the other one’.”

I can safely say that Dad was my sternest critic. He didn’t approve of my career, my girlfriends, my jet-setting lifestyle (as if) and my spending habits. But he often complimented me on being a great father to my two boys, Courtney and Myles. While genuine and heartfelt, I also saw this as an admission of his own failure as a father, a role he just felt emotionally unequipped to perform. 

But my dad was a good dad. He was caring, supportive and generous with his time. I’d always seen his awkwardness and lack of physical affection as a type of rejection. They weren’t. That’s just the way he was. 

Towards the end of his life Dad, the most non-tactile person I’ve ever met, became a serial hugger. “Come and give your grandad a kiss,” he’d say to Myles whenever we went to his house. I don’t believe there are bad or second-rate fathers, just absent ones. And my father was always there for me.