Spanners and swearing...

It's my dad's birthday in a couple of days so I trundled down to Sainsbury's to buy him a card.

Flicking through the fishermen and gardeners and the beer cans and wine bottles I began to despair. My dad doesn't fish much and whilst he gardens the gardening cards were naff; and as for drinking "Just a glass of tap water please."

As I perused, despairing and wondering if I'd have to run the card shop challenge, out of the corner of my eye I spied just the very thing. There under 'Son' rather than 'Father' was a black and white card with a photo of a young boy holding a spanner. The tagline read something along the lines of "Most of what I learnt from my dad about DIY began with F's and B's!"

I was immediately transported back to the old green garage at the bottom of our garden in King's Close. Picture this - a cold autumnal evening, my dad just back from work and wanting his tea, no electric light in the garage, and a broken clutch to be changed.

"Keep that bloody torch still, will you boy, you’re about as much use as a bloody don’t-know-what?" I try to keep the torch still.

"Blast! (Clatter) I've dropped the bloody spanner. Shine that torch over here won’t you?" I shine the torch towards the unspecified, very dark, here.

"Not there! Here! Bloody Hell!" I move the torch aimlessly about trying to find somewhere approaching where the spanner may have fallen. My dad reaches out stretching his fingers towards the spanner and just as his fingers are about to grasp it... I drop the torch and it goes out.

“For Fu….” He pulls himself back just in the nick of time. Nobody back then used the ‘F’ word in the presence of children or women, well unless you were the vicar preaching that Sunday in his pulpit – but that’s another story.

"Damn and blast! What did you do that for? I'll swing for you my boy. Now get down here and find that bloody torch.” I found it eventually and after replacing the batteries ( “Damn and blast!”) and then the bulb (“Buggeration!”) and finally going inside to get another torch (“If I could only find the right bloody tools I could get the blasted job down in half the time!”)

Eventually we had light again, dim and dismal- a five-bob pocket torch isn’t the greatest form of illumination – but light nonetheless.

My Dad clanked and cursed, cursed and clanked, clanked and clanked and cursed and cursed and cursed and after three hours of achieving pretty much nothing… gave up.

I think he changed that clutch eventually, not that night though, and I don’t know what he had for tea - egg, chips and beans?

It all came back this evening in a flash. I could almost smell the oil of the engine and see the glow from my Dad’s lighted fag in the darkness of that old tin garage and as I remembered I began to laugh. Standing in front of the cards in Sainsbury’s, laughing out loud as they say, the other shoppers looking or averting their eyes as if I were a loon.

Well, bugger’em I say. Damn and blast’em. It was my memory and not theirs.

I bought the card, son or no son, I’ll post it off in the morming.