“HOW’S the surfing going?” My brother nodded at my coat which bore a small emblem of a surfer.
I looked at his camouflage jacket and asked: “How’s it been out in the Gulf?”
It was a bitterly cold late December morning and we were walking across the hospital car park, in which a sign wished us a “Happy Christmas” and told us there would be no fee for leaving our car.
We both laughed at our coat-related banter and the car park offer which, for us, amounted to little more than the opportunity to leave a vehicle for free while we visited our dying dad.
I know all this because I can remember some of it and it is also among the detail of an 11-day period in 2003 that I wrote in a notebook.
I was living in Exeter at the time and travelled up to Yorkshire on notification that my father was in hospital. He would be okay though, wouldn’t he?
The words I wrote, often while consuming copious amounts of whisky and listening to Johnny Cash’s dark versions of Hurt and Bridge Over Troubled Water, tell me and anyone else – however unlikely that is – who may read them that no, he wouldn’t be okay.
They inform me that I listened to that album a good few times that week and drank a hell of a lot. There were no hangovers though as any pain from the alcohol was masked by the mental suffering we were going through.
The notes also tell me that when a nurse asked him the name of the person who had been treating him he answered “Doctor” and when asked if he could walk he did a dance by his bed.
They also say that the lovely elderly chap in the next bed had received a Bryn Terfel CD for Christmas and was festively blasting out The Old Rugged Cross. My mum asked him to play something different as my dad, her husband, was dying. He cried at the news.
I remember that my dad was worried about what work was going to say if he didn’t get back quickly as he had only been off once in 45 years and that was when he suffered a bout of jaundice.
There’s reference in the notes to an annoying doctor who asked if my dad was normally so inactive. My brother wanted to punch him. Far from permanently lying in a hospital bed, just four months previous he had kept wicket in a cup final.
He asked me how my training for the London Marathon was going, told me not to “try to bloody win it” and pointed out that at least he had got me a charity to run for. I couldn’t let him down after that.
As I look at my scrawled notes, the writing made worse due to the alcohol, I can remember writing them even though it’s 21 years ago this Christmas.
One note says that in the last proper conversation I had with him, the day before he died, he asked how Leeds United had done. I informed him they had been beaten 3-1 by Wolves.
He had been beaten too. And so had we.