I was sad to read recently about the death of soul legend Solomon Burke. I only really became familiar with his work when he was mentioned in one of my favourite books High Fidelity by Nick Hornby and one of his songs "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love" was famously used in The Blues Brothers.
He was 70 years old and apparently he left behind 90 grandchildren. I thought to myself, and now I'm telling you, now that's just being greedy. If he saw each one in turn, one day at a time, he would only have seen each one four times a year and if he very capably sang each one a three minute lullaby every evening it would have taken him four and a half hours.
Both of my grandfathers died in the 1960s when I was fairly young, so my recollections of them are very sketchy at best. My grandmothers, however, both lived until the 1980s and my gran on my mum's side was the second finest woman I ever had the pleasure to meet. She was an absolute gem who continually showed a mental dexterity and a wicked sense of humour which belied her years. I often took friends up to meet her and she would welcome and entertain them as if they were her own grandchildren. Fortunately she passed all her good points on to my mum, who, sadly, also died in the 1980s when my own sons were very young
I believe when you have a child, your relationship with your parents almost immediately changes. The penny drops and there is a realisation that perhaps everything they said and did over the years was not always wrong after all. There is an understanding about responsibility and priorities in life.
My dad revelled in his role as a grandfather. I can remember games of "three-and-in" involving three generations with my dad, his sons and his grandchildren (I nearly said grandsons there, but Janine, the only granddaughter in a dynasty of boys at that time, would always be involved as well). My dad would "sclaff"one in from about a yard out with the words "pick that one out goalie" as he backed further and further away from goal until his effort became a thirty yard thunderbolt which we all heard about many times afterwards.
When my sons were young our family often spent summers down in Rothesay and my two eldest boys became obsessed with the ferry and the vehicles coming on and off. When they saw a ferry approaching they would run down to the pier and count each car off and judge if all the cars waiting would make it on to the ferry.
My dad made both of them a wooden ferry (to scale, not actual size) but with a ramp which could be lowered and raised and they would line their toy cars up all round the skirting board, drive them on to the ferry and transport them across the living room to a place where the sun always shone (that certainly wasn't Rothesay).
At my dad's funeral 3 years ago I related my favourite recollection of him at Rothesay, when, well into his 70s, he hid up a tree in the Skipper Woods, and ambushed my wife and I and the boys as we wandered unsuspectingly through the woods. He had been up there for some time and had already ambushed two old ladies walking their dogs. Now that's what I call a grandpa. I really need to start brushing up on my tree climbing skills.
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