Author: Mark Hannam

We walk steadily uphill together.  The peak is only 2km from the car park, but we have 530m to climb, which takes us 50 minutes.  Although the sun is bright, the breeze is fresh and cool, streaming off the Atlantic, to our west.  Our body heat – generated step-by-step, stride-by-stride, as we slowly rise, higher and higher, along the narrow quartz-strewn path up the mountain – soaks us in sweat.  I can feel the water drips running down my face, back and legs.  I lick the salty residue from my lips.

Errigal is fully exposed to the weather.  There is no shelter, no hiding place.  My ears fill with the steady pulse of the wind.  A small passing cloud coats us, briefly, with snowflakes, cooling and cleansing our faces as they melt on impact.  We reach the summit: we sit, we drink water and the pace of our heartbeats starts to slow.  We admire the views, which are spectacular.  This is a great place for a good conversation, but when we stop talking there are no other human sounds audible, only the gentle hum of nature.

Descending is easier on the lungs but harder on the knee and ankle joints, our leg muscles no longer stretching out to propel us upwards, but tightening and tensing, holding us back from slipping on loose rock, keeping us balanced as we drop back towards the moorland below.  The wind becomes gentler – now a modest breeze that tickles the skin – and quieter too.  We can hear the call of birds, an occasional car in the distance, and the steady trickle of brackish water in a mountain stream, that makes its way down the slope, skipping over the rocks, alongside us.

Two days later, now alone, I walk across the dunes to the beach.  The wind wraps around me, in my ears and eyes and hair, surrounding me with the sound of the sea, exfoliating my skin with minute particles of salt and sand, flavouring my journey.  The grass is spongy and springy: no need for walking boots here, light trainers will suffice.  The dunes rise and fall, like giant molehills, but the walking is fast and easy.  Where the path is sheltered from the wind the sun warms my face – the air temperature today is higher than average for mid-May – confirming that Spring has arrived.  Earlier this morning I heard a cuckoo.

The beach curves around the coastline.  To reach the far end will take me 25 minutes at a brisk pace.  I take off my shoes and feel the fine sand, firm and moist on the soles of my feet, and I hear the cries of gulls above the rushing of the air, and the rhythmic patterns of the waves blown repeatedly against the shore.  If I were to look closely, I would see flecks of white everywhere – sheep in the fields, shells in the sand, birds on the wing, foam on the waves and clouds in the heavens – and I could enjoy the endlessly variegated blues of the sea and sky, but my senses are already overwhelmed by the white noise of the wind and ocean in my ears.  My head is full of their vast sound.

Prompted by powerful sensations, my mind engages, searching its archives, making connections with previously stored experience.  It replays the lyrics of a song:

I am drawn to the western shore
Where the light moves bright upon the tide
To the lullaby and the ceaseless roar
And the songs that never die

My memory links the words, the tune, the image of a shell on the cover of the compact disc, with this moment, this place, this feeling.  For me, this is the western shore that will always be the subject of the song, this is the beach where the light will dance on the surface of the sea, these will be the connections that will never die.

It is time to swim; or, rather, to confront the waves as they surge relentlessly from the north-west, knocking me over, plunging me under, my eyes stung, my mouth, ears and nose cleansed by brine.  My skin is everywhere taut and alert, stimulated by the force and temperature of the water, strong and cold – very cold – wrapping me, rolling me, pushing me down and lifting me up.  When I manage to empty my ears of saline, and lift my head into the sunshine, once again I feel the wind across my face and hear the sea.  The horizon line recedes into the silence of empty space, but the tidal flow advances incessantly in full voice.

The ceaseless roar of the wind and the lullaby of the ocean will stay with me forever, but the song does not remain the same.  Amid the repetitions – wave after wave, gust after gust – are countless minor variations: subtle changes according to the direction of the jet stream and water currents, the gravitational pull of the moon through its cycle and the rotation of the seasons: variations of tone, of pace, of rhythm, of melody, each asserting its unique individuality through minor differences, while also reinforcing their shared characteristics within the soundscape.  The music of the beach – repeated patterns, marginal deviations – is unlike anything else, but it mostly reminds me of Philip Glass: no, not the 1975 opera, but the piano études.

A few weeks previously I had attended a musical event at Tate Modern, during which an orchestra of professional musicians was joined by a choir and a band both comprised of people who are or have recently been homeless, to perform together.  My friend who works at With One Voice – the international arts and homelessness movement, which organised the event – had encouraged me to come and listen.  They played Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ blood never failed me yet continuously, from 8pm in the evening until 8am the next morning.  The sung lyric – recorded by an unknown homeless man, in 1971 – lasts for about 25 seconds, which means that the tape loop plays approximately 1728 times during the performance, with the instrumental and vocal accompaniments providing a series of musical variations around this repetitious central theme.

It was a truly immersive experience.  Initially my attention was centred on the recorded song but was then diverted by the changing combinations of instruments and voices performing live.  After some time, as these became familiar, predictable, anticipated, my attention shifted to the subtle changes – intentional or mistaken – introduced by the performers.  Then, as both theme and variations became routine, the experience became more hypnotic: the music was everywhere in the room, but it was also nowhere special; it enveloped me, filling my head, but it allowed my mind to wander, to search for connected memories, to bring to the surface of my consciousness thoughts and feelings that otherwise might remain submerged beneath the routine busyness of my conscious life.

After three hours, my physical reception of the music had transformed my sense of place and time: I was suspended in a moment in which all regular distractions were absent.  The experience – swimming attentively in sounds – was mesmeric and visceral.   In today’s world, music is ever-present but always in the background, lulling us without really bothering us, providing comfort but never touching us.  Listening to recorded music is a very different experience, a second-order pleasure.  To feel the music on our skin we need to be in the presence of the performers.

Our memories work mysteriously, unpredictably, unreliably, surprisingly, suggestively.  These profoundly physical experiences – climbing the steep mountain path, splashing in the cold, cold sea, and listening to the meditative music performance – reminded me of an essay by Montaigne, On the art of conference, which is in Book III of the collected Essays.  I did not have either of my printed copies to hand, so I re-read it on an electronic device, which feels different and slightly inauthentic.   But the quality of the writing was as I remembered.  Montaigne writes:

The most fruitful and natural exercise of the mind, in my opinion, is conversation; I find the use of it more sweet than of any other action of life; and for that reason it is that, if I were now compelled to choose, I should sooner, I think consent to lose my sight than my hearing or speech.

I was struck by this remark, since I am sure that most of us would, if we were now compelled to choose, consent to lose our hearing or speech than our sight.  Montaigne makes an unexpected choice, but – as always – he has cogent reasons.  He values conversation above the reading of books because it engages us more fully.  “When anyone contradicts me”, he writes, “he raises my attention, not my anger.”  And later, “’tis a dull and hurtful pleasure to have to do with people who admire us and approve of all we say.”

Spending time in the company of others, who question, challenge, counter-suggest, oppose, examine, cajole and tease us, is a great sensory pleasure as well as the cornerstone of friendship.  It is not just their company – their being-with-us – that matters, but their constructive resistance – their being-against-us – that counts.  We need our friends to be present, to hear their voices immediately in our ears, not mediated by some form of information communication technology; we need to feel them on our skin, to be touched in our hearts.  Their engagement with us is both a comfort and a stimulant: they remind us who we are and that we are alive.

These are the moments that feed our memories, creating reserves of happiness and goodwill upon which we can draw when we are alone, or separated, or simply reliant on mediated communication using electronic messages.  Like letter writing in an earlier age, the use of text and email today is a valuable lifeline, keeping us connected to our network of friendships; but it is always only a poor substitute for being with them in the same room.       Nothing can recreate the pleasure of the immediate, real, physical presence of a friend.  Montaigne is right to say that conversation is sweet; a glass or two of wine shared during conversation makes it sweeter still.

I chose not to stay at Tate Modern for the full twelve-hour performance.  After three hours I made my way home, tired from the effort of paying close attention, but rewarded and renewed by the physical and psychological demands of the task.   It is not a great piece of music; not as good as Philip Glass for sure.  Even so, the value of the experience – the lesson in listening – was evident.  The next morning, I woke early, walked back to the gallery and heard the final hour.  When the orchestra and choir finally stopped, their marathon performance over, the silence was immense.   I will remember this event for a long time, not because of the brilliance of the playing, nor the aesthetic qualities of what was played, but because of the message – creating one musical voice from the elite and the excluded – and because the telling of this story was itself an exercise in effort and endurance.  I was there and I was fully absorbed by my experience of others making music.

Listening, done well, is hard work, like walking up a mountain, like plunging into the ocean.  It makes demands on our reserves of energy as well as on the acuity of our senses.  We do not learn much from chatter, but we can learn to listen better and to sense the depths that lie beneath the surface of language.  We can train ourselves to hear more.  In the immediacy of the company of friends we develop the ability to hear the subtle variations of unpredictability as well as the regular repetitions of consistency; it becomes possible for us to be robust as well as to be gentle; we are able to ascend to greater heights of shared understanding and respect.  Friendship is a labour of the senses and of the memory.

 

The tasting notes told me to expect a “sparkling body with stone-fruit acidity, kumquat, honeydew melon and jasmine notes and a floral finish”, all of which sounds delicious.  What, I wondered, could provoke such a diverse and abundant medley of flavours?

I am no expert on wine, merely an enthusiast for the phenomenological enjoyment of wine-drinking, particularly in good company with well-prepared, flavoursome food.  A bottle shared is a pleasure doubled.  Or, in the words of the Chinese poet Li Bai, whose lyrics Mahler used in his song-cycle, Das Lied von der Erde: “A full glass of wine at the proper moment / Is worth more than all the riches of the world”.

I know that Californian chardonnay is sometimes said to taste of melon, and a little research informed me that rosé from Provence also has that reputation.  Jasmine, by contrast, is more often associated with dry white wine from cooler regions, German grown riesling being a good exemplar.  Yet it is another grape varietal altogether –viognier – from which connoisseurs most reliably find a hint of stone-fruit.  A combination of three different grapes, potentially from three different regions, might therefore be required to produce this complex balance of flavours; and, less we forget, we also have been promised kumquat.

The trick, however, is to gather not grapes from the vine but beans from the bush.  More particularly, to secure some Ethiopian coffee from Werka Wuri, a washing station located in the Gedeb Woreda, a small district in the region near the town of Yirgacheffe, internationally famous for coffees abounding with floral and citric flavours.  In the Gedio language, werka translates as “gold” and wuri as “high altitude”, so I am reliably informed by Caravan Coffee Roasters, from whom I obtained my beans, with their enticing description.

I repeat, I am no expert on wine:  I am not confident that I could distinguish a Californian chardonnay from an Australian, nor that I could pick a Rhone viognier from a marsanne, but I am sure – very sure – that I can distinguish a glass of wine from a cup of coffee, despite the fact that the tasting notes might be almost identical.

My point here is not to mock the writers of tasting notes: I am sure that some drinkers – better trained, more alert than me – regularly distinguish these flavours in both wine and coffee.  What interests me is that our sensory faculties function in such a way that two radically different experiences of taste can be appropriately – that is to say, competently and credibly – described using a shared vocabulary, without anyone thinking that drinking hot black coffee and chilled white wine are otherwise similar.

Our experience of wine and coffee – and of food and drink more generally – is almost always the product of two rather different forms of sensory experience: taste and smell.  Although we refer to tasting notes, wine tastings, and the cultivation of good taste, much of the richness and precision of our experience of wine comes from not from our mouths but from our noses.  We sense more variety, discriminate more finely, remember more clearly that which we smell compared to that which we taste.  The knowledgeable drinker always uses their nose first, when the wine is poured.   That said, to leave the wine in the glass, smelled but not tasted, would be an unconscionable waste.  The gourmet engages both nose and mouth, takes times to notice the range, intensity and balance of the sensations they produce, and finds pleasure in the apprehension of the world’s rich bounty through the combination of their messages.

The receptor cells on our tongues – and in the sides and roof of our mouths – can detect five main types of taste: bitter, salty, savoury (umami), sour and sweet.  While these provide important high-level information about what we are about to consume, they offer us a very limited vocabulary with which to discuss the finer points of wine consumption.  Our mouths can also provide us with information about a drink’s viscosity – important for our appreciation of port – its effervescence – important for champagne – and its tannic qualities – important for my fellow drinkers of barolo – all of which is valuable, but hardly sufficient to sustain a meaningful conversation about the relative merits of one vintage compared to another, or of an unusual but pleasantly striking paring of wine and food.

If we think that “terroir” matters, we must educate our noses.  Our olfactory neurones are stimulated by molecules from our drink entering the front of our noses, directly, and from the back, via our mouths.  These molecules provide detailed information about their source material, which is transmitted to the brain through our limbic system, which connects our sense of smell closely with our emotions and our memories.  Smelling is, by comparison with tasting, more detailed, more intimate and more memorable.  It is also more amenable to training and refinement: almost everyone can easily identify sweet tastes on the tongue, but it takes practice and concentration to distinguish stone-fruits on the nose.

We start with a basic ability to discriminate tastes and smells.  From an evolutionary point of view, these senses functions to protect us from forms of ingestion that would be harmful, but like other evolved capabilities, they provide us in addition the opportunity to enhance our enjoyment of being in the world.  What is needed to prevent harm can also be put into service to create pleasure.   Just as our ability to see colours or hear pitch varies from person to person, so too, owing to the individual physical qualities of our sense receptors and neurone system, we all start with our own distinctive appreciation of taste and smell.  But we are all able to develop these faculties, to improve our detection of the sensory qualities in the glass – and on the plate – and to store memories of smells and flavours, which we can draw upon to make comparisons with new experiences.

Learning requires us to attend closely to what our noses are telling us, and this is not always easy.  Several years ago, I attended a wine tasting event in California.  After four whites, we tasted four reds, one of which puzzled many of us.  It was hard to put into words what was wrong, but what we saw in the glass and what we felt in our mouths and noses were incongruent.  Characteristically, we gave priority to our vision, and tried to think of a red grape from the region that might have that lightness, that hint of butter, that suggestion of oak, which the wine presented.  Finally, the host confessed that we were drinking a fifth white – a local chardonnay – that had been dyed to look like a red wine.   He assured us that if we had been blind-folded we would have picked the grape, but we had all allowed our sight-perception to over-rule our tasting memories: a trick of the eye causing a failure to remember.

All this proves – some might say – is that we should read the label on the bottle, which will tell us where the wine came from, which grapes were used, the year that it was made, the approximate alcohol content and, perhaps, some tasting notes that will prepare us to discern flavours that some other, more knowledgeable person, thinks are there.  What is the reward for all the investment of time and energy – because paying attention to our senses of taste and smell in a sustained way over many years, must consume a considerable amount of intellectual energy – that it takes to educate our palate?  Why not simply rely on others to tell us what to expect, what to enjoy, what to look out for?

The quick answer is that relying on others to tell us what to experience is almost always a bad idea, particularly once we get beyond early childhood.  I am happy to defer to the expertise of horticulturalists and oenologists about the cultivation of vines and the technical production of wine, and to neurologists and philosophers about the way in which the brain interprets the sensory information sent from the tongue and nostrils.  I am not happy – not at all – to defer to anyone else when it comes to what I feel when I smell and taste the wine from my glass.  My experience of the world is my experience: I am its owner, I am its authority.  I want to understand it better, more thoughtfully, more deeply, but this is work that only I can do.

There are two reasons to think that relying wholly on the taste judgments of others is a mistake.  (I say “wholly”, because the process of improving our taste involves listening to and learning from the judgments of others: connoisseurship cannot be learned from books but requires practice and – at least to a certain extent – apprenticeship.)  One reason concerns the role of the memory in the cultivation of our sense of personal identity, which in turn plays a central role in the development of our sense of happiness in life.  I will return to this point in a later text.  A second reason concerns the intrinsic pleasure of drinking wine (or drinking coffee, or eating flavoursome food), preferably in the company of others.  If we are to participate fully in our own lives, and to share the lives of others, we need to be able to develop our own ability to capture the full flavour of the world.

There are some who drink to forget, for whom the principal pleasure of alcohol consumption is the alcohol itself:  it numbs the senses, dulls the memory, takes away the pains of living, at least for a while.  This is a way life to be avoided, to be pitied.   But it would be a mistake – albeit one made seductive by the dogmas of religion and the prohibition movement – to assume that modest consumption is always the prelude to over-indulgence, to argue that the only responsible attitude to pleasure is to avoid it entirely from fear of excess.  Too little can be as bad as too much.  As Aristotle taught, the virtuous life is lived at the mean, with just the right amount, taken in just the right way, and for just the right reasons.

Much of the pleasure of drinking is social, reminding us of another of Aristotle’s great themes: friendship.  When we share wine and food in the company of others, we jointly connect our senses – of smell and taste – with our shared world.  Drinking and dining together provides us a means of opening our minds and our hearts, alerting us to the great range of taste combinations in the world, and to the pleasure of discovering how these combinations are perceived by others, whose tastes overlap, but also differ in interesting ways from our own.  Wine reveals to us to the variety that is in the world and, at the same time reminds us of our common humanity, that everywhere others also take great pleasure from exploring variety.  By becoming more alert to the richness of our own experience we are better placed to understand, and respect, the wealth of experience of others.

There is an old Latin saying, in vino veritas: in wine there is truth.  Conventionally this is taken to mean that because the consumption of wine lowers our sense of restraint, reduces our control of impulse, that under its influence we are more likely to say what we really think, or to disclose information that we might otherwise have kept to ourselves.   I suggest that there is another meaning to this saying, perhaps more profound, which is that in our experience of educating our taste we come closer to the truth of the world.  Not only do we learn to embrace more attentively the precious fruits of the earth, but we become better able to share more deeply with our drinking companions the qualities of these sensations: we come closer to the truth about our habitats and our friendships.

Now, it’s time for me to see if I can find that hint of kumquat …

It is August and we are driving to Heathrow.  In less than an hour, you will depart through the security gate – with three other young people – heading for Manzini in Swaziland, via Addis Ababa and Johannesburg. You will be gone for year, although we will come and visit you in eight months.  In the last eighteen years we have never been apart for more than two weeks.  I am going to miss you greatly, but I do not want to tell you this.

For, this is your day: the culmination of a year of dreaming, planning, fund-raising, waiting and waiting and more waiting, with a growing sense of anticipation.  It is a big adventure, a rite of passage, a declaration of independence, a crossing of the threshold from adolescence into adulthood.   It is your day, not mine.  At the airport I buy £50 worth of Rand, so you have some brass in pocket when you land.  In your bag you have a letter that I have written to you, which you read – I later discover – while the plane taxis out to the runway to take-off.  It tells you how proud I am of you, and that I think about you every day.

The day after you depart is one of mixed emotion for me.  I know that without my support and encouragement it would have been difficult for you to spend a year away in Africa.  I worry about the increased risks you face in an environment very different to Hackney.  You are street-wise, but where you are going the streets are different.  And, don’t forget, because I told you several times, the number and severity of traffic accidents is one of the biggest differences.   Yet, for all that, I know that this is what you want to do, and I admire your courage and your commitment.  You will have a great time and you will do some good in this world.  For that I cannot but be happy.

Those difficult early-teenage years are now behind us.  At sixteen, after under-performing in you GCSE exams, you changed schools and started again.  You made some new friends, worked harder, applied successfully to the University of Manchester, deferring your place for a year to allow you to volunteer at a project in Southern Africa that looks after children who are orphaned, abandoned, or simply in need of care.  You had (mostly) stopped picking pointless fights with me and I had (mostly) stopped imposing pointless rules on you.

Our relationship was not without its frustrations: there were still irritations and misunderstandings on both sides.   You wanted to grab more freedom and I wanted you to show greater responsibility.  But we kept talking to each other, kept cooking and eating together, kept faith in each other.  Most importantly of all, we were able to joke together.  We maintained a common bond in the humour of the absurd, of the bizarre, of the eccentric.  We had progressed from Harpo Marx in A Night at the Opera, via Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, to Leonardo di Caprio in The Wolf on Wall Street.  We laughed at them all, and we laughed together.

I have a vivid memory of when you were very young, maybe only a year old.  I had taken you out of the bath and you were wrapped in a big towel, slowly being dried and rubbed with oil and cream, before being dressed in a sleep-suit and put to bed.  I wished that I could sing in tune, even just a little.  I would have sung you a lullaby: Summertime, and the livin’ is easy / Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high / Your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good-looking / So hush, little baby, don’t you cry.  But I knew well the strict limitations of my vocal skills: I’d better stick to pulling funny faces at you instead.

We play a game.  I make a series of actions, touching my ears, my eyes, my nose, my lips, my chin and the top of my head.  I try to get you to copy me.  I repeat the series in the same order several times.  Then I make a deliberate mistake and touch my chin when I should have touched my nose.  I pull a face, roll my eyes, shrug my shoulders and look forlorn.  Then I try again. I repeat the series correctly three times and then make the same deliberate mistake again.   You giggle.  You smile at me.  You seem to find my clowning funny.  You have been waiting and watching for the error.  I can’t sing but I can make you laugh, and that’s good enough for me.

Then you try to copy me.  You touch your ear, your nose, your lips, the top of your head.  You repeat the series.  Then the third time, you go wrong and touch your chin.  You look puzzled.  For a split second I’m not quite sure what has happened: have you lost the thread of your actions, and forgotten the pattern?  Were you not able to remember the sequence for a third time?   Before I could organize this thought in my mind, you shrugged your shoulders and burst out laughing.  And how you laughed: peals of uninhibited, uncontrolled hilarity.  Pure physical delight.

The human animal: a thinker, a talker, a maker of tools, but most importantly, a laugher.  And I want to laugh with you, but I am in shock because I realize that you have not only copied my action series, you have also copied my deliberate mistake.  Crazy girl!  You are already asserting your equal standing in our relationship: anything you can do I can do too.   I laugh – we laugh together – but I also want to cry with joy that we have shared this moment of mimicry and intimacy, that I made you laugh, and you repaid me by making me laugh too.

Last month you came to visit me on my birthday.  I cooked for you.  This is more challenging than it once was, because of your commitment to veganism.  You know that I am sceptical of your rationale, but respectful of your decision.  And I am glad that it has made you more interested, both in cooking and in the politics of food.  I make us a selection of dishes, all with a Middle-Eastern theme, and they mostly work out.  We eat well, and I drink well too.  Later we drop into a pub in Holborn to watch England play rugby.  You queue to buy me beer and we enjoy the game together.   Then we head to Covent Garden: you have bought two tickets for us to see an evening of contemporary dance as part of my birthday present (along with a small succulent, an essential addition to my new flat in E2).  The performance is good, with striking music, simple but effective set design and exciting modern choreography.  We had a great day together and I will remember it for a long time.

You are now in your early twenties and we are starting to make friends.  It is not always easy.  Converting a relationship between parent and child into a relationship between two adults requires us both to reconsider our roles, our power to hurt, our knowledge of each other’s weaknesses, our propensity to slip into standard or stereotypical roles.  You will always be my daughter, but I do not want you to be only my daughter: I also want you to be my friend.

I remember someone asking me, when you were around ten or eleven, did I mind that my only child was a girl?  I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this question.  I didn’t think that I would have treated a son any differently from the way I treated you.  I have sometimes wished that you were more tidy, more timely, more Tottenham; but I have never wished that you were a boy.  My only regret, less for me than for you, which I have become aware of in writing these texts about you, is that you will never know first-hand what it feels like to be a father to a daughter.  For me it has been the best experience.

 

It was a warm night in June, or perhaps July.  I was very conscious of the time, because you were late.  We had asked you to come home by a certain time, but your curfew-hour had passed, and you were still out.  I left the house and walked around aimlessly, for fifteen to twenty minutes, up and down the local streets.   I knew that the chances of meeting you were low; negligible; greater than zero, but not by much.  What else could I do?  Sitting at home waiting for you was a torment.  By walking, at least I could slowly impose upon myself a diminution of my anger.   I would almost certainly not find you, but I would be kinder to you when you eventually came home from wherever you had been hiding.

You had a phone; a very nice phone; a BlackBerry to be precise.  In those days, when Nokia and Erikson had fallen behind, and before Apple and Samsung were ubiquitous, BlackBerry was the phone of choice for teenage girls in Hackney.  Forget the efficiency with which they delivered email, which made them beloved of employees of the financial services industry, for you it was only about the free-to-use messaging service:  BlackBerry Messenger allowed you and your friends to communicate endlessly and pointlessly – securely too, although you cared less about that – without incurring any cost.

Tonight, my smart daughter had her smart phone turned-off.  Or you were just ignoring my messages, pretending that, despite being a member of the most “connected” generation in history, somehow you were unavailable to take my call, enquiring why you were not home at the agreed time.  You were on the grid but pretending not to be.

You were late, very late, and I was furious.  This was not the first time: it felt as if it was every time.  You asked if you could go out and we agreed a time by which you must be home.  You invariably came home an hour or more later than we had agreed and then played hurt and aggrieved when we chided you for tardiness.  You were at fault, but your body language quickly made us feel ourselves to be the problem: frowning mouth, eyes rolling upwards, tension in your shoulders and fists.

One of my worst experiences of fatherhood was catching myself while offering you some form of admonition or cautionary advice, realising half way through that I was starting to sound exactly like my parents addressing me when I was your age.  And I remembered – immediately and urgently – how little regard I had for what they said to me when I was in your shoes.  I didn’t want to repeat that mistake but, mid-sentence it was hard to re-phrase my nugget of parental guidance in a way that might be of some beneficial use to you.

The repetition of fool’s wisdom, from one generation to the next – and the next and the next, onwards unto perpetuity – was not my idea of responsible parenting.  Just stop talking, I told myself, before you say something even more stupid.

When I was a teenager, I thought school uniform was an authoritarian imposition, and wholly pointless; I thought it not unreasonable that I should go out with my friends without being obliged to return home at some arbitrarily agreed hour; and I thought that the formal rituals of family life – eating together, taking an interest in the day-to-day worries of kith and kin, showing respect to each other’s values and property – were insubstantial and should be subordinated to the genuine demands of peer friendship.   Mostly, I still think these things.

How I struggled to make the case for the other side of those arguments, when you told me, with exasperation, exactly what I had tried to explain to my parents a generation previously.  I could have said, “yes, of course, you are right”, but I doubted that it would be helpful for you, as you matured into adulthood, and was certain that it would not be helpful for me, as I clung on, reluctantly, to my paternal role as enforcer of household law.

Looking back, I realise that there is a modicum of truth in the wisdom of parents.  There is virtue in shared daily routines, of demonstrating solidarity with the joys and tears of other family members, in learning to be diplomatic, in respecting agreements and trying to meet expectations that have been collective agreed.  An important part of growing up is learning how to modulate the desire for sincerity – for authenticity, as we existentialists like to say – with the social value of compromise and peace.  Some things, albeit true, do not need to be said; some hypocrisies do not need to be called out; some family traditions, rules, mores, do not need to be transgressed, just for the sake of demonstrating the ego’s autonomy.

That said, an equally important part of growing up is knowing when civility is demeaning, when home-truths demand to be told, when double-standards exposed, when tradition should be abandoned and when innovation embraced.  I am even now learning how best to judge the appropriateness of these actions; back then I found myself trying to teach you what I had yet to master.  Parenting is error-strewn; learning by doing badly; being unable to find the right balance; laying paving in the wrong direction but with good intentions.

What did you need from me during those difficult teenage years – from fourteen to seventeen – when you felt the need to rebel against me and my values, to challenge my authority, to overturn the order of the home, just as I had felt that need when I was your age?  But – I wanted to say to you – but don’t you see that the order I have imposed is reasonable?  I have not established my authority upon unjustified and unaccountable power.  I am not an unthinking dictator.  Each request I make, each limit I set, each boundary I draw for you is based on a thoughtful and sincere assessment of your right to independence, blended with our right for the integrity of our family life to be respected.

Of course, you needed to rebel.  When you are a teenager, the specific character of authority is not the point.  It is not the details but the essence of authority that needs to be challenged.  Thereby, you forced me to realise that my own rebellion, a generation earlier, was less to do with the righteousness of my case than my need to have a case – any case – to sustain my emergent sense of independence.  The James Dean film is right: being a rebel is what matters, the precise nature of the cause a minor detail.

If the essence of adolescence is rebellion, then the burden of parenthood is the erosion of fraudulent authority.  I longed for my part in this drama to be over quickly, but that making it too easy – for me as well as you – would have been a great disservice to us both.  You needed to learn that you have to fight to be free; which meant that I, your father, had to resist, to try to keep you imprisoned in your childhood cocoon, despite my not wanting to.

And then – mirabile dictu –some evenings you would come home from school and talk about a lesson you had found interesting, a piece of work that you had enjoyed doing, a problem with a friend to which you had discovered a solution, a challenging incident in the playground or the street that you had responded to with maturity, an item on the news that had awoken your curiosity, an inappropriate remark or insult to one of your classmates that you had challenged.   From time to time, hope springs.

I’m guessing that a frictionless path from childhood to maturity makes for a weak person in later life.  The battles of my teenage years have surely held me in good stead during adulthood.  I hope that I made your adolescence hard enough for you to nurture your strength.  But I am so very happy that time is now in our shared past. Truly: the sign of failed parenting is not that your children break the house rules; it’s when they don’t.

 

It was a warm night in June, late in the evening but I had lost sense of time.  A bundle in a blanket was handed to me, lighter than I had anticipated, but heavy with expectation.   “You’ll need to put the baby-grow on her now”, I was told.  I was about to say, “How can I?  It’s in my bag.  How can I open my bag to find it if I’m holding the baby?”  Instead, I said to myself: “You have two hands.  Use them”.    It’s not an especially difficult task.  Quickly parents learn to open bags, doors and tins of baby milk-powder with one hand, while the other gently cradles and supports the new-born.  But the first time is experimental.  There is no preparation, no rehearsal, no training course that can capture the feeling: that moment when everything changes forever.  They say that the Rubicon was a small stream, but it carried a vast flow of meaning for those who waded across it.  One moment fatherhood is merely an idea, a theoretical proposition, the next it is a real, physical, urgent demand.  The baby is in my hands, wrapped in a hospital blanket and needing to be dressed for the night: I am on the cusp of becoming responsible.

I wrap my right hand around your small fingers and ease your arm into the sleeve.  Balancing your body on my leg, I use my free hand to open out the cuff, allowing me to draw your baby hand safely through.  I repeat three times for each of your other limbs.  I button up the baby-grow, which is now far too big but within weeks will be far too small.  For the next year you will change every day, but I know this moment will stay with me forever.  The first time that I dressed you, that I kept you warm, that I prepared you for sleep; the first time that I took responsibility for you because – for now – you cannot be responsible for yourself.

We have names and identities of our own, but our relationship to each other endows each of us with another name, another identity.  I am Mark and you are Ysabel, but I am your father and you are my daughter.  We are bound together, for better or worse.  Let’s hope for the better.  We will both need to work at that.  For now, there is a profound asymmetry in our relationship, which places an obligation on me that I want to understand in full, and discharge as best I can.  I know that you are a part of me, but also separate from me.  I want to protect you but not to suffocate you.  Sometimes at night when you cry, I take you downstairs and I sleep on the sofa, I lay you on top of me, with a blanket covering us both.  I worry that if I move in my sleep you will fall.  Instead I lay you by my side, but now I worry that if I roll-over I might crush you.  There is no good solution.  I lie awake and listen to you breathe.  I make sure you are warm.  I will be tired tomorrow at work.  Never mind.

Part of my responsibility is to be away from you: most days I go to work, to earn money, to pay the bills, to provide for you, to ensure stability and security as best I can.  Sometimes this is a relief: reading the FT on the bus, staring at my Reuters and Bloomberg screens, adult company and wine at lunch, hours spent puzzling over my Excel worksheets, looking for something that others have missed, trying to understood what these numbers and the shape of these graph-lines mean, more clearly, more fully than what is implied by the asset-weighted-market-average.  Sometimes a very early morning taxi takes me to the airport to catch an early morning flight to somewhere: where there are prospective clients with money to invest, or existing clients to whom reports must be made, or conferences at which to listen or to speak.  There are sights to be seen, people to meet, food and drink to enjoy.   Wherever I go, for however long I am away, there is always the moment of return: I will open our front door and you will be there.  Will you smile when you see me again?  Or will you scowl and turn the other way?  How little you know your power to break my heart.

I put you in the car seat and drive down to Whitechapel, to the large supermarket.  It’s not the nearest, but it is a trip out, just the two of us.  I have a long shopping list, but we have plenty of time and we have more than enough money to pay for the food.  Unlike the indoor adventure playground, to which I sometimes take you on a Saturday morning, at the car park we don’t have to pay an entry fee.  I put you in the shopping trolley with a child seat.  I check you are secure, holding the hand rail with me.  Then, I brace my arms, press down on my heels and I spin, around and around and around, with you shouting, “faster, faster, faster!”  You shriek with joy.  Dizzy Yzzie.  I stop the trolley and then we spin the other way.  You might be sick now, but it’s a risk worth taking, just to hear your laughter: no inhibition, no self-censorship, no socialized constraint, no decorum, no embarrassment, you just laugh, laugh and laugh, loud and free.  I love this sound, this intimacy, this shared moment.

You are very unimpressed when I take the stabilizer-wheels off your bike.  Now you can’t ride ever again, unless you learn to balance on two wheels.   We go to the park and practice.  It’s hard and you don’t manage it.  You complain.  You frown.  I am lost for words.  It’s hard to explain what to do.  Just keep trying.  It will come.  Maybe next weekend.  The following Saturday, another park, another glum face.  I persevere, but I prepare myself for failure rather than for success.  We try and you fall.  We try again and we make more progress.   I run along behind you holding the seat to help you balance.  This week is so much better than last week.  In your face there is a glimmer of hope.   We try one more time.  I stop running and you don’t notice that I am no longer holding you.  You are riding solo.  You have done it.  I stop and watch you pedal away from me.  Happy day!    Wait a moment, where are you going? Why don’t you stop?  Why don’t you turn around? Where are you going?

I feel sick.  I feel lost.  I feel helpless and foolish.  I was responsible for you and I have lost you, lost sight of you. You have learned to ride a bike and for your first expedition you have cycled off into the far distance and I have no idea where you are.  I have failed you.   I let go before we had agreed a plan on what to do, when you were able to ride on your own.   I start to run after you but what’s the point?  You can already ride faster than I can run, and you have a head-start.  I don’t know which way you will turn.  I don’t know whether you will be able to start again once you stop.  I don’t know whether you will find someone who can help you, or whether you will find someone who might harm you.  You are lost, and I am lost.

Penelope waited twenty years for Odysseus to return.  I waited barely twenty minutes but was equally joyful when you rode back into sight.  You were a little breathless but otherwise nonchalant, apparently unaware of the emotional trauma your little adventure across the park had inflicted upon me.  All smiles.  “Dad, I can ride” you tell me as if I hadn’t worked that out.  But you are back, you are safe, and my irresponsibility has gone unpunished.  I smile at your delight and my relief.  Lucky man.

Looking back, there were plenty of times when things might have turned out worse than they did.  All those random events that might have but didn’t happen – accidents or illnesses – the “left tail” as the statisticians would say, the heart-breaking moments that some parents suffer – unlikely but always possible – which we managed to avoid.  Happily, we found ourselves located within the better part of the normal distribution.  Sometimes behaving responsibly just wouldn’t be, just couldn’t be enough: but in my case, it was.  And I felt that burden, like a heavy winter coat draped upon my shoulders.  As you grew, day by day, from baby to toddler to child towards teenager, I felt the weight slowly lift.  My relief was genuine, but also tinged with concern: not that I desired to cling to my paternal role, to maintain you in a state of dependency, but a growing worry about my ability to help you gradually to assume responsibility for yourself.  There is no preparation for becoming a father, whether caring for a new-born baby girl, or preparing your daughter as she stumbles into the age or autonomy.  We had come a long way from that first June evening, but we still had plenty far to go.