Squaring the Circle

I always hated the phrase ‘squaring the circle’ I think it’s because I heard it a lot when my job had me spend a great deal of time with corporately schooled consultants. We had a rake of them around the place, and I found them to be sort of ‘Stepford Wives’ like in their ways of working, only wearing sharp suits and sporting trendy beards. Other favourites of theirs at that time were; ‘we’ll run that puppy up the flag pole and see how it flies’, ‘let’s blue sky that’ and lately they all want to ‘leapfrog’ over stuff to get to the next innovation’.

Squaring the circle came into my mind today when I found myself, for the first time in a long time, thinking about my dad.  I don’t think of him as often now, and I don’t know when exactly he stopped being present at the fore of my consciousness and became more of an abstract of the father I once had. Here’s the thing too! My very sweet father in law took on the role of dad for me when mine passed away 33 years ago. He was my dad for longer than my dad was my dad.

My dad passed away just when I met my husband. He and my mum were just getting to know Phil and his family. Our parents were called Alec and Agnes & Fred and Jane, and they just took to each other from the ‘get go’. They shared a commonality of working class roots and a love of holiday camps, working men’s clubs and a ‘wee night in’ with the wider family.

My mum Agnes said our family was made up of aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters, cousins and cousins of cousins, and all related through drink.  My dad Alec loved any opportunity to get them all together for a party, and they would drink and sing songs way into the night. Some, like my Mum and wee Aunty Agnes, only knew one song and even then would only sing if the others badgered, prodded and begged them to. Others you couldn’t tell enough to, ‘shut up’ and ‘let someone else hold the stage’. The worst offender was my uncle Charlie, who played his bagpipes full blast in a small 20-metre square living room (my Aunt Annie bribed us kids to spirit them away back to her house when he was otherwise distracted).

 

 

 

 

 

Like the karaoke hoggers of today, some tried to work their way through a huge repertoire of songs, like would be lounge singers.  My dad though only sung three songs but they were big belters, two rousing and one sad.  Sinatra My Way, Tom Jones Dalila and The Green Green Grass of Home. Proper window shakers the lot!   I would spend all night asking him to sing my favourite song which he did when they had reached a certain sentimental level of drunkenness.  I was completely entranced by his singing and was always bursting for the chorus to come so that we could all join in.  (It was frowned upon to sing along to the verse of a song with the singer, and if anyone tried they would hear a stage whispers of “shhh,  one singer one song.”

Their parties always had a rhythm:

Stage	Atmosphere	Children
Meet and greet	Warmth and welcome	Kids act shy
Laugh, joke and drink	Camaraderie	Kids break off to bedrooms
Storytelling	Noisy laughter	Kids gather supplies
Reminisce	Silence, laughter bursts & chatter	Sugary drinks kick in, and kids get shouted at for shaking the ceiling below
Sing show stoppers	Cheers and clapping	Kids come back in
Sing heartstring tuggers	Silence, singalong and cheers	Kids; girls stay, boys go
Dying embers	Exits, stragglers and goodnights	Kids crashed everywhere with mum saying “just leave them, get them in the morning.”

He did like a drink my dad, and not always in a way that was useful to his life and his ambitions, although, he always remained a good humoured and kind man who welcomed absolutely anyone into his home. He was a social butterfly, and he lived a full life.

Today he came flooding back into my heart and mind when I was sitting in my web designer’s office, and she was showing me the homepage of the new site.  I had asked her for a photograph of the river Clyde, and she’d put one at the top of the page. In the right-hand corner of the photograph was the big crane, standing on the banks of the river.  My father operated the giant crane in the Govan shipyard, a job that he got after the Chrysler factory in Linwood closed.   When I think back now, the closing of industries across Scotland was hard going on our family, and it did split the wider family up.  One of my uncles went up North to work on the oil rigs, taking my dear cousins far away from me, and the others went to New Zealand when Chrysler Bathgate factory closed.  My dad went to the ship builders initially as an engineer, but he quickly developed a passion for operating the giant crane, and so, as he became less physically able for the heavier work, he swapped to crane operating and did that until the day he retired.

So I thought of him so very clearly today as I looked at the picture.  I wonder what on earth he would make of it all,  Cranes standing idol on the Clyde, being looked upon as monuments and appearing on postcards of Glasgow, etc. He’d never have conceived of anything like that as he climbed up into his cab each day, with his flask, a paper and  ‘pieces’ for his breaks.  I love that she was drawn to this particular image. For me it symbolises not only the pride I wanted to show at being a part of the Glasgow business community but now my very roots are also there, standing solidly beside me.