Father’s Day in Ironbridge
or any excuse for a bag of chips with my son on the riverbank
Sharing a bench and a bag of chips with my son, I turned to the beautiful young man in the Ghostbusters t-shirt and asked him what he thought of the man earlier who’d asked me, with the faintest hint and lilt of a South African accent, when the cooling towers were demolished, before talking all things nuclear, physics, power generation, and how there was big money to be made rather than felling those monuments to history? My son looked at me with eyes drawn in terror of the boring conversation sure to follow as I whispered conspiratorially in his ear: “I wanted to say to him, listen mate, I’m in the middle of an existential crisis at the minute. Well, forever really, but I don’t want to bog us all down with detail here. But it’s Father’s Day, I walk around constantly wondering if we’re all in a simulation and if so, why am I playing this game so terribly, terribly badly, and so I simply don’t have time to stand around here talking with you about nuclear fusion or the travesty to everything that is demolishing the sheer heritage of the foundations, the actual industrial revolution foundations, of this great island nation of ours. I just don’t have the time to talk about cooling towers and nuclear power generation. Not today my new found friend. Is that a South African accent? Are you over here for the cricket in London? Fantastic match, wasn’t it? Giving those Aussies a spanking on behalf of the rest of the world. Bravo. Humbled the piss out of them. Bravo. You’re not a South African? Oh I do apologise! Russian perhaps? That’s it, you’re a Russian! We’re at war my friend, a long and never ending war. Orwell’s forever war. Is that why you were asking about the cooling towers? Were you planning a nuclear attack? Christ, are you a spy? Who am I talking to? Who are you? Come back here you Putin Puppet! Stop walking away from me! I thought you wanted to have a conversation about the cooling towers? Stop walking away! I haven’t told you how they should have turned the cooling towers into a national treasure and run a river taxi service to and from the iron bridge…”
The beautiful young man in the Ghostbusters t-shirt smiled, a Father’s Day obligation perhaps but I’ll take it, today, and any day I can. The old man in the Beatles t-shirt then asked the young man sitting beside him in the best seat in this mightily beautiful house if we ever found out what the Batphone number was in Batman before singing “Yellow Submarine” and then “Slow Emotion Replay” by The The. Snippets of songs world’s apart, the first meeting the approval of the mother’s son, the second the choice of another mother’s son greeted with far less enthusiasm by the young man in the Ghostbusters t-shirt! But he still smiled.
It was Father’s Day (for two Mother’s Sons) after all.
“Everybody knows what’s going wrong, with the world
I don’t even know what’s going on, in myself”
Thanks for reading.
Always appreciated.
"My Ironbridge Summer" - link to Amazon