We are a grandfather!

Sometimes privately I liken my existence as akin to being a passenger in a second class railway carriage of a runaway express hurtling along a toy Hornby Double-Oh track, with the countryside, hills, animals, hamlets, towns and people whizzing past (relative to the train) and – as they do – not having much time to reflect upon them, individually or as a group, or indeed much else besides.

My person angle rather chimes with how I view my position as a contributor to this organ.

As a senior citizen I am literally and metaphorically on a “journey” [surely 2020’s biggest cliché term of all, alongside – inevitably – Covid-19’s own and special “unprecedented” which seems to punctuate every pronouncement of each Government minister, media pundit, expert or vox pop in the street] as both Time and memories disappear further and further into the distance via the proverbial rear view mirror.

As such my occasional posts to The Rust remain for the most part either reflections upon events in the past that I have had cause to recall, or (alternatively) observations upon my ongoing attempts to ‘keep up’ with current developments happening in the modern human world … or not.

And then stuff happens.

When I was about ten years old – at the beginning of the 1960s – I was as keen as any of my peers to “grow up” and become an adult, by which I probably meant someone aged between 18 and 20, which was clearly the oldest that I was ever going to be.

Inevitably, from that viewpoint, anyone aged 25 or above was “getting on a bit” and anyone of my parents’ generation effectively a different species altogether [possibly aliens from outer space?], being impossibly older than that … as they must have been ever since they arrived upon the planet.

And then there were these people called grandparents – practically zoo exhibits – who, despite all appearances, were actually great fun because they always spoiled you, genuinely appeared to have endless time to spend with you – and also seemed to enjoy it when they did.

If your parents were ever giving you a hard time of it – e.g. on the warpath again because you’d just broken yet another kitchen window with your football –  and your grandparents happened to be on the scene they always had a supporting warm embrace to offer and (I felt) a greater affinity with your stance as a real-life ‘Just William’ [the creation of children’s author Richmal Crompton (1890-1969)] than anyone else.

A little later, when I was 12 or 13, I worked out that in the year 2000 I would turn 49 years of age – a supposed projection that I found totally impossible to take on board.

To be fair, my parents were always a huge positive influence – they had an active social life, loved sport and encouraged my sisters and I to try every pastime known to man, the better to discover those that we might choose to pursue in earnest one day.

They were actually 26 and 27 when I was born, so looking back were relatively close in age to me. But not as close of those of Ben – my first and best pal at my public school – who had produced him when they were 19 and 17.

Thus when Ben and I were 15 and 16, his parents were roughly 34 and 32 – about the age of some of our younger masters. And acted like it. One time, having been invited out to spend the weekend with Ben at their home upon an Army base, I remarked to him that I envied their youth relative to his, assuming it must assist ‘understanding’.

Ben sniffed and said not a bit of it.

He’d much prefer it if his parents were older – like mine –  because then they’d be totally oblivious of, and uninterested in, whatever our generation got up to and simply let us get on with it.

Instead, whenever he was setting off to a disco, his Dad would take great interest – discussing the attractiveness of the local girls and giving him condoms “in case he got lucky”.

Ben found this all terribly intrusive, not least because in those days neither of us ever had the occasion or need for condoms. He used to chuck those his Dad had issued him with away en route to his evenings out … and then have to lie and pretend he’d used them when he got home and was subjected to parental interrogation.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to my subject of the day.

Last night shortly before 10.00pm, my daughter Grace was safely delivered of a 9 pound baby boy – her first child and my first grandchild.

I discovered this wonderful news via the medium of a thing called WhatsApp, which I was persuaded by my kids to “download” and use a few months back now. I’m still getting used to it – they tease me because, in order to get me to go to it in order to read a new message, they first have to give me a prompt by text.

When I last saw them three weeks ago – the new arrival emerged ten days after his given “due date” – Grace had commented to me that she and her husband were still coming to terms with the inevitability that their lives would soon change significantly forever.

Never mind them. Ever since 0130 hours this morning when I received the news I’ve been struggling to come to terms with being a grandparent!