One recent evening I walked out of the cinema alone. It was just after 8pm, and while it was not yet dark, a soft haziness had settled over London. I took the ten-minute walk to the station slowly, savouring that delicious state of suspended reality where the fictional has faded out and the real has not dialled back in. The ordinary becomes cinematic. I go to the pictures as much for these moments as for any film.
First I walked past Islington Town Hall, and it took my breath away. It was there that I met my brother, hiding in the building’s hulk from the unseasonal rain, to register our father’s death. What a strange place to work, I reflected, watching the receptionist as we waited for our appointment: a place of births, marriages and deaths; a place to see strangers only at the very best and very worst moments of their lives. The woman behind the computer spoke softly as she asked me to confirm my father’s details. Yes, I was with him when he died. Yes, I’m his eldest child. Yes, I’ll sign.
A little further north along the street was the ice cream shop I wandered into on the day the consultant told me Dad was dying. We can’t be sure, he said, but this is often how it starts. Two scoops in a cup, I said. And there is the little hill where I sat on patchy grass and scraped out the last melted spoon of ice cream I hadn’t consciously wanted. I didn’t want to go home, for reasons I could not articulate. I wanted to be outside.
When Dad was in hospital for weeks at a time, it was convenient that it was a mere five minutes from the office. Close enough for visits before and after work, to take him home-cooked meals on my lunch break. Being at a practical distance from his bed made me feel less useless, less helpless.
Now he is nowhere – and everywhere. I visit the park across from the hospital and sit on a bench and talk to him; the veil feels thinner here. I go back to the takeaway pasta joint I often resorted to when I didn’t have time to cook his lunch (I always suspected he liked it better when I had not…), and the paper bag containing my order feels conspicuously light. I meet my stepmother and my little brother for a pizza, and we three sit at a table for four, his seat conspicuously empty. I come out of the office, turn left, and there he is walking towards me, his leather jacket heavy on his shoulders, a book (always a hardback, its dust jacket at home for safe-keeping) under his arm. He smiles at me faintly, and is gone. Life is like this now. If you dusted my days for fingerprints, his would be all over them.
If there is a common theme among all the thoughtful correspondence I have received since Dad’s death, it is poetry. Readers have written to me to share the poems that touched them, and they thought might touch me. “Praying” by Mary Oliver is a brief but evocative poem about the way small observations can lead us to quiet, private conversations in silence “in which another voice may speak”. There is something familiar in WH Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and its observations about the everyday nature of pain. “Gone From My Sight” by Henry Van Dyke uses as a metaphor for death a ship that is not gone, only sailed out of sight. Each soothed me in a different way.
In return, I proffer the two poems we read at Dad’s funeral, which should, together, give you an idea of the sort of man he was. The first, “My Funeral” by Wendy Cope, ends: “Yes, I was intolerant, and not always polite/And if there aren’t many people at my funeral, it will serve me right.” The second was “Time Gentlemen Time” by John Cooper Clarke. Dad had marked it in his copy of What, and we could see why it appealed: “Time gentlemen time will tell you/Nature ain’t your friend/Nature made a mess/Nature tries to kill you from day one/With increasing degrees of success.” It’s a poem about the relentlessness of age and death. But that phrase, “time, gentlemen”, also recalls the pub, where Dad was in happier times often to be found. So if you find yourself at a bar near closing this week, raise a pint of Young’s Original to him, won’t you?
[See also: David Gentleman’s pensées for the novice artist]
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This article appears in the 30 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer of Discontent