would have been my dad's 80th birthday. And although he died in 1992 I miss him still so much. It would have been easy to spend the day mourning his death but I made the choice to inwardly celebrate his life and remember the time we had together. I remember him as a man of integrity; one of his sayings was, "If you can't say anything good about someone, then say nothing at all." I don't think I ever heard him say bad stuff about people and he just accepted life as it was, with no complaints, and made the best of circumstances. My earliest memory of doing stuff together was when I was about 5 or 6 and he took me to my first football (soccer) match; it was at Anfield which is the home of Liverpool FC and although I eventually became an Evertonian he never argued with me about that. I remember when I was 8 and my teacher at the time, Mrs. Roberts, told us that when you died you just became bones and dust and that was all that would be left of you. I had nightmares and when I told dad why, he went up to the school and graciously told Mrs. Roberts what he thought of her! He loved singing along to Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole and played "air trombone" with Glen Miller!!! He loved gardening and I remember him getting a "Highly Commended" in the annual neighbourhood gardening competition. He worked in an electricity generating power station which was 15 miles from home and in the days when we didn't have any family transport he used to get the bus into Liverpool city centre and then the train to work. Sometimes when he was on a late shift - finish at 10pm - the train might run late and he would miss the last bus from Liverpool to home and he would have to walk because a taxi would be too expensive; he wouldn't get home until after midnight. He never learnt to drive but he was a biker! We had a motorbike and sidecar; it was a BSA M21(?) 650cc - what a machine that was - a real thumper, not like the whizzer type bikes of today! Ha! I remember the times he told me that he loved me and after he died I was looking through his papers and diaries etc. I found an entry referring to myself and my brother which said, " I could not have had two better sons".
In the final years of his life he had quite a few heart attacks and after one such event Kriss and I managed to persude him to come upto Scotland by himself - mum needed a lot of looking after and the doc said it would be good for dad to have some rest from taking care of her. It's about an 8 hour journey from Liverpool to here and dad and myself had a wonderful time together on that journey. Thanks dad.
