On the people in our lives
I have a small family. Well, that's not totally true: I have a small immediate family - mum, dad, one brother, one uncle (dad's brother), two cousins that I never see. I have a MASSIVE extended family, as my dad's parents had myriad siblings, nine to Grandpa Tom and five to Grandma Evelyn. They are all gone now, the Dixon sisters, having fought their way out of poverty in Oldham during the Depression and terrified their children ever since - not for nothing did their various offspring refer to them as the coven. Dad therefore has, at a conservative guess, hundreds of cousins scattered around the UK and further abroad. We're close to Sheelagh, the cousin my dad essentially grew up with as they bounced between his parents and hers in between foreign postings, and her family, who emigrated to the States in the 80s but who remain close. The other cousins pop up periodically here and there, unmistakably Brunskills or Dixons; as I take after my Dad's side of the family, at Grandma's funeral I was somewhat disconcerted to find myself in a room of strangers who looked like me. Anyway. Aside from all the extended family who I don't know but who bear a striking resemblance to me, my immediate family is small. But my parents have a knack for friends who stick and it is these people who have been the constant in my life and who pop up periodically, in mum and dad's holiday photos, or featured in postcards on the doormat (prolific postcard writers, my parents' generation), or, if I'm really lucky, our paths cross when I'm back in the UK. One of these is a moustachioed giant called John, who happens also to be my godfather.
John and his wife Helen (known to us the little Australian, a good foot and a half shorter than John) met my parents when they were living in Greece in the late 1970s. Both Dad and John were working in shipping finance and they became pals. Mum and Helen had young children - just one for Mum, as I was but a twinkle in Dad's eye at that stage, two for Helen - and would, as far as I can tell, brave the butchers and bakers of Piraeus together, waving their small blond children around like talismans against bad meat and exorbitant prices. Dad and John would do that mid-70s thing of long lunches, and car share - or to be precise, John shared Dad's car as he didn't and still doesn't drive. One of Dad's favourite stories relates to their regular morning game of winding up other Athenian drivers, who were in the habit of buying a paper from roadside vendors and reading it at the traffic lights, thus missing the red light. After the lights had changed from red to green, Dad and John would wait patiently until the lights were just about to go red again before honking the horn. The unsuspecting driver would shoot forward without checking for oncoming traffic, then, in a Greek fury, pull over, get out of the car gesticulating wildly and march over to Dad's car. Dad would get out - middling height, ginger, mildly bespectacled, unthreatening - to a torrent of verbal abuse. Two seconds later, John would unfold all 6 foot 4 of himself out of the passenger seat of their little Eurocar and the torrent would, abruptly and perhaps understandably, stop.
My parents moved back to the UK in 1979, and from there, all around the world, but that friendship stuck and when I graced the world with my presence, John became one of my three godparents. Memories of John and Helen punctuate my childhood. We'd go to their rambling house, rammed full of John's extensive collection of jazz memorabilia, for long lunches and afternoons of children running around the garden. Or the families would meet in some country pub that John had painstakingly chosen from the AA Good Pub Guide - he does not tolerate a bad pint of ale. When I went up to Oxford, John came to visit with (I think) his second son Tim, the same size as his father and a rugby player, to watch the university team play an Australian second XV and then to head off into the Oxfordshire countryside to find yet another pub with a decent pint of locally-brewed ale and a kick-ass Sunday roast. When Mum turned 60, we had a rollicking good party at a country house in darkest Shropshire with their oldest and dearest friends and I vividly remember John's arrival in the house, with a bottle of port (label: 'Of the Sixties, For the Sixties') that he was cradling in his arms like a newborn child, snipping at people who might impede his path and therefore disturb the sediment.
Godparents are a notion that is in some ways a little antiquated. These days, it seems only to be the choice of practising Christians and the Royal Family to have godparents for your children. When I was growing up, however, it was the norm, and godparents were people with an important role - providers of presents on birthdays and at Christmas, suppliers of moral support, sources of amusing stories about your parents. Joking aside, my godmother Sheelagh (Dad's cousin and childhood playmate) has had a huge impact on my life; and in a different way, so has John. Having been a literally larger-than-life figure in my childhood, as an adult he became my distant, yet constant champion; his support for me has been unwavering and his advice unerring. When I wrote a paper for my masters on the role of jazz in the development of African-American culture, John supplied me with apocryphal stories and obscure detail that only a true jazz lover would know. His advice on quitting smoking remains the best I've ever been given: only smoke the ones you really want, the rest are just window-dressing, and that way you'll cut down to nothing.
Why do I write this now? John has been fighting cancer on and off for the better part of two decades now and has been truly round the houses with it. To his great disgust, he missed my 21st birthday party as he was undergoing treatment; and to his greater disgust, he was recently unable to make it to my 40th, for the same reason, though I did make it to Essex a few weeks later to see him. And as my dad's cancer has recently returned, it's been noticeable to me how he and John are quietly supporting each other through it. All of this has made me reflect on the impact my godparents have had on my life, and this is the result, I think, of the way that my parents treasure their friends. John is one of a small group of my parents' friends who may not be actual family but who have been, in many ways, our real family. My parents will drop anything, do anything and go anywhere for these people. They may not see them a lot, they may not talk to them a lot, but they know that these relationship are worth holding onto.
I have three godchildren: my American cousin Marianne's eldest daughter Madeline; Daisy Bea, the daughter of my friends Dave and Rach; and Benj, the son of Alice and Chris, friends from university (and beyond for Alice, but that's another story). I feel blessed that these people want me to play the role in their child's life that John has played in mine, I feel grateful for the ties that bind us, and I love that there are three humans out there whose lives I am part of, however distantly or intermittently. (Mind you, now that Daisy has an iPad she can use for messaging, I get regular updates at 3 am about the progress of the contestants on Strictly Come Dancing and I'm wondering why she hasn't yet learned the concept of time zones or, if she has learned it, why she's choosing not to apply it to me.) I'm currently in the States spending time with Marianne's family and am hoping to make it back for Madeline's church confirmation early next year; perhaps this is why my relationship with my godfather has come to mind so strongly. There are people in our lives for many reasons, for different periods of time and with different impacts. And there are a few, a very few, who stick and whose presence leaves a profound impact. John is one of those for me. I hope I can do as good a job for them.
To cut through the emotion, here's a picture of my cat in a box:
And if the mustachioed legend himself is reading this, thanks for everything.
John and his wife Helen (known to us the little Australian, a good foot and a half shorter than John) met my parents when they were living in Greece in the late 1970s. Both Dad and John were working in shipping finance and they became pals. Mum and Helen had young children - just one for Mum, as I was but a twinkle in Dad's eye at that stage, two for Helen - and would, as far as I can tell, brave the butchers and bakers of Piraeus together, waving their small blond children around like talismans against bad meat and exorbitant prices. Dad and John would do that mid-70s thing of long lunches, and car share - or to be precise, John shared Dad's car as he didn't and still doesn't drive. One of Dad's favourite stories relates to their regular morning game of winding up other Athenian drivers, who were in the habit of buying a paper from roadside vendors and reading it at the traffic lights, thus missing the red light. After the lights had changed from red to green, Dad and John would wait patiently until the lights were just about to go red again before honking the horn. The unsuspecting driver would shoot forward without checking for oncoming traffic, then, in a Greek fury, pull over, get out of the car gesticulating wildly and march over to Dad's car. Dad would get out - middling height, ginger, mildly bespectacled, unthreatening - to a torrent of verbal abuse. Two seconds later, John would unfold all 6 foot 4 of himself out of the passenger seat of their little Eurocar and the torrent would, abruptly and perhaps understandably, stop.
My parents moved back to the UK in 1979, and from there, all around the world, but that friendship stuck and when I graced the world with my presence, John became one of my three godparents. Memories of John and Helen punctuate my childhood. We'd go to their rambling house, rammed full of John's extensive collection of jazz memorabilia, for long lunches and afternoons of children running around the garden. Or the families would meet in some country pub that John had painstakingly chosen from the AA Good Pub Guide - he does not tolerate a bad pint of ale. When I went up to Oxford, John came to visit with (I think) his second son Tim, the same size as his father and a rugby player, to watch the university team play an Australian second XV and then to head off into the Oxfordshire countryside to find yet another pub with a decent pint of locally-brewed ale and a kick-ass Sunday roast. When Mum turned 60, we had a rollicking good party at a country house in darkest Shropshire with their oldest and dearest friends and I vividly remember John's arrival in the house, with a bottle of port (label: 'Of the Sixties, For the Sixties') that he was cradling in his arms like a newborn child, snipping at people who might impede his path and therefore disturb the sediment.
Godparents are a notion that is in some ways a little antiquated. These days, it seems only to be the choice of practising Christians and the Royal Family to have godparents for your children. When I was growing up, however, it was the norm, and godparents were people with an important role - providers of presents on birthdays and at Christmas, suppliers of moral support, sources of amusing stories about your parents. Joking aside, my godmother Sheelagh (Dad's cousin and childhood playmate) has had a huge impact on my life; and in a different way, so has John. Having been a literally larger-than-life figure in my childhood, as an adult he became my distant, yet constant champion; his support for me has been unwavering and his advice unerring. When I wrote a paper for my masters on the role of jazz in the development of African-American culture, John supplied me with apocryphal stories and obscure detail that only a true jazz lover would know. His advice on quitting smoking remains the best I've ever been given: only smoke the ones you really want, the rest are just window-dressing, and that way you'll cut down to nothing.
Why do I write this now? John has been fighting cancer on and off for the better part of two decades now and has been truly round the houses with it. To his great disgust, he missed my 21st birthday party as he was undergoing treatment; and to his greater disgust, he was recently unable to make it to my 40th, for the same reason, though I did make it to Essex a few weeks later to see him. And as my dad's cancer has recently returned, it's been noticeable to me how he and John are quietly supporting each other through it. All of this has made me reflect on the impact my godparents have had on my life, and this is the result, I think, of the way that my parents treasure their friends. John is one of a small group of my parents' friends who may not be actual family but who have been, in many ways, our real family. My parents will drop anything, do anything and go anywhere for these people. They may not see them a lot, they may not talk to them a lot, but they know that these relationship are worth holding onto.
I have three godchildren: my American cousin Marianne's eldest daughter Madeline; Daisy Bea, the daughter of my friends Dave and Rach; and Benj, the son of Alice and Chris, friends from university (and beyond for Alice, but that's another story). I feel blessed that these people want me to play the role in their child's life that John has played in mine, I feel grateful for the ties that bind us, and I love that there are three humans out there whose lives I am part of, however distantly or intermittently. (Mind you, now that Daisy has an iPad she can use for messaging, I get regular updates at 3 am about the progress of the contestants on Strictly Come Dancing and I'm wondering why she hasn't yet learned the concept of time zones or, if she has learned it, why she's choosing not to apply it to me.) I'm currently in the States spending time with Marianne's family and am hoping to make it back for Madeline's church confirmation early next year; perhaps this is why my relationship with my godfather has come to mind so strongly. There are people in our lives for many reasons, for different periods of time and with different impacts. And there are a few, a very few, who stick and whose presence leaves a profound impact. John is one of those for me. I hope I can do as good a job for them.
To cut through the emotion, here's a picture of my cat in a box:
And if the mustachioed legend himself is reading this, thanks for everything.
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