In Actual Fact…

I like my father. No, I really, really do. Mostly. We might disagree slightly about the existence of a higher being, an exact interpretation of Marxist theory and whether he really needs to leave any inheritance to both of his children, rather than just me, but we don’t have any major issues; I’m not one of those psychologically scarred children whose mother warned, “wait ‘til your father gets home!” when I did something wrong – she beat me herself.

So it was natural enough that yesterday evening we entered a pub and I asked him “What’ll you have?” Except it wasn’t natural at all. I have never, ever in my entire life, gone into a pub with my father and bought him a drink. Oh, I’ve bought him drinks in restaurants and paid the bill at the end of an evening but I’ve never done the whole male-ritual, go to the pub, get-a-round-in thing. And that’s not because (Oh, I hear you, Devon Boy), “he never buys rounds, the tight-fisted git.” It’s because, well, I don’t know what the reason is. Maybe Freud could explain why it’s never happened before, or maybe it’s because I knew that it could only end with one action:

Standing at a bar – a bar in a pub which has a de facto “men only” room (no, it’s not that kind of bar, and the room isn’t the toilets) – it’s just not the snug, and ordering a half of bitter shandy (heavy on the lemonade, please), I realised why this was a bad idea. And yes, I might only have drunk half of my pint, but at least I ordered a pint!

We walked home in silence (except for the bit when I told him he ‘might as well have driven anyway’).

Song playing as this was published: Guesch Patti - “Etienne“