My dad's getting old, he's past 60 and he's beginning to look tired. When i was a kid I was always amazed at how strong he was because he had a wirey frame but he seemed to have just focused the strength of a tank into 5 foot 8 inches of sinewy muscle.
That sense of condensed power is starting to drain out him and its being replaced with a frailty that his body was always probably designed to have.
He still works as a mechanic and driver for a locally owned coach company where he's still lifting things that would give a health and safety official a stroke but the walk home used to take 5 minutes and now its closer to 10.
For the first time ever, I've started feeling sorry for him and he knows it.
When I'm in the pub in my hometown all the old guys still call me "Wee Eddie" even though I'm a good 4 inches taller, considerably better built and actually named Steven. That used to drive me fucking nuts. Its only recently that i realised that I could be a gargantuan steroid pumping hulk and I'd still just be "Wee Eddie" because my old mans reputation casts a shadow that I'd need a taxi to get out of.
His mates still love to tell the story about when they went to see Manfred Mann at the Concert Hall in Larbert. They came on the stage, played two songs and said "Right we're not playing to this bunch of hillbillies" and walked off.
They had nearly made it to their tour van when four drunk and angry young chaps fae tha Plean ran through their roadies and kicked the sh#t out of them. They had to cancel their next couple of tour dates and it could have been worse because my dad was hopping towards their equipment van while trying to stuff a sock into his half bottle of vodka to make an impromptu molotov when the police arrived. (He denies this. Others comfirm it.)
He worked on the railways for 20 years and when Prime Minister Thatcher demolished them he volunteered for redundancy so that some of his older workmates could keep their jobs. He knew the meat-hook realities facing a unemployed 40 year old but he knew that they were a hundred times worse for the 50 year olds. As it turned out the Tories free-market uber-alles meant he didn't save anyone, just prolonged their slide onto the scrapheap.
A few years ago, he'd be late fifties at this point, he waded into three younger guys who were having a go at one of his mates and took a few sore ones. He'd broke his hand and had a fracture in his eye socket so he ran. Straight to his car boot and ran straight back swinging his heaviest wrench.
My generation talks big, we love to soliloquise about all the wrongs we see, my generation will tut and shake our heads from a safe distance whereas my old man would march straight up, clench his fists and dare the f#ckers to try it, go on, just you f#cking try it.
The failure of my dads era was the inability to see the things that really needed to be fought and how to fight them, the failure of my era, yours too, is that we don't have the f#cking balls.
My dad was never special, all he did was work hard and never let go no matter how hard bastards stamped on his fingers, well I'm not even 30, not even half his age and I'm struggling.
I hope I still get called "Wee Eddie" for a long time.
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