Insult to Injury

Before choosing weapons, I had to consider several things. Age was one of them. I was young my father was older. Given the age of my father, and that too could be a sore point. I believe I once caused him insult (a duel, a duel you cry?) unintentionally (not to say that any other times I insulted him were intentional). We had been watching a Formula One motor race and my father was sitting in ‘his’ chair. This is important to understand. When watching television, we children were at the end of the room, farthest from the television itself, sitting on the sofa, or the ‘pouf (small ottoman), or one of the other straight chairs. Fathers ‘Chair’ was a recliner type, which was nearest to the television, so we were always behind him, out of his line of sight, as it seems, we fidgeted, and this would put him off watching. ‘Even now, one of you is jiggling your leg, I can feel it” He constantly used to complain (sorry but edginess can do that to a person). However, this particular occasion as we watched the end of the motor race on a wet Sunday afternoon (wet, where we were, not where the race was), the slim driver climbed from the cockpit of the vehicle. The commentator said in a thrilling voice, “And there he is, a winner at 42 years of age’. Immediately after this comment I had looked up as this fit racing car driver, who had valiantly thrown his vehicle calmly around a racing circuit at a couple of hundred miles per hour for a couple of hours turned and gestured to the delighted crowd.

I had of course, looked past my father in his chair. Sitting with a couple of bottles of beer (these were those long tall ones), stacked beside him on the ‘coffee’ table and a glass with the familiar looking froth head around the lip. Perhaps he also a plate of his deep fried‘mock’ whitebait fritters (fried grated potato fritters), which he only cooked for himself on Sunday for lunch, or occasionally when there was a Saturday test match on, sitting next to this. I recall the visual of him in the chair, the slightly large form partially reclined (he possessed a bit of a beer gut, so his stomach swelled forward in the chair, adding to the shape). His legs thrust forward in a comfortable position ready to nod off (and snore) as he often would in his ‘unwinding’ time from the weeks work.

Innocently I opened my mouth after the commentator had raised his congratulations to this incredible athlete and said, ‘ Gee, he’s even older than you, dad, and look at what he’s done.’ It was supposed to be an innocent remark about how well the driver had done, but, even as the words escaped my mouth, I heard the possible meaning ring in my ears as everyone started laughing.

(continued tomorrow)