‘THREE TIMES,’ said my dad as we walked across the ridge heading away from the direction of Derbyshire, not quite in view of the house, with IKEA just visible in the distance.
‘Two,’ said my mum.
‘NO. YOU’RE FORGETTING ABOUT THE SHED.’
‘Oh yes. You’re right.’
In the pub after our walk, not far from my old school, my mum, my dad, Mal, Chris and I ate some chips while two men on the table opposite discussed their favourite motorways. They agreed that the M62 was their least favourite but did not reach a consensus on the number-one spot. ‘What’s Sinbad up to today?’ one asked. ‘He’s gone to Cleethorpes on a fanny hunt,’ replied his friend. My dad removed his mobile phone from his coat pocket: an inexpensive clamshell around a decade old that displayed an alert for 144 unread messages.
‘I’VE NEVER LOOKED AT ANY OF THEM,’ he told me. ‘I DON’T KNOW HOW.’
I had one unread message on my own phone. It was from the lady who, with a slight sense of class betrayal, I paid to clean my house for two hours every week. She wanted to know if she could adjust her hours for next week and also wondered if I realised I’d locked her in the house when I set off yesterday. I didn’t, just as I hadn’t the other time I’d absent-mindedly done it three weeks earlier. She said it was OK, since she’d managed to find the key to the French windows and let herself out that way.
Nobody can remember the exact moment my granddad’s scatterbrain gene kicked in, but a poll of those who knew him puts it at around the age of thirty-six, four years before he set fire to a stranger’s coat by putting his still-lit pipe in his pocket during a coach trip from Ilkeston to Mablethorpe. I was always closer to my nan than I was to Ted and Joyce, and have often been told that my looks, as well as my character, are closer to hers and those of her husband Tom. But in recent years, as my hair on my head has become slightly less thick and the hair on my face slightly thicker, I’ve started to see a hint of Ted in the mirror. This effect will no doubt become more extreme if I finally start wearing my glasses as often as I should. It has also got me thinking about my genetic destiny, especially on days when I put the coffee beans straight into the mug, lock my cleaner in the house or place a bottle of unused shampoo directly into my brown recycling bin.
I kidded myself for a few years that my increased doziness might be down to a mind overstuffed with nonsense or the pace of modern life, but I’m now facing up to the fact that my Ted gene is fully operational. I suppose a big signpost was the moment in 2013 when I got a bit too involved in a folk album I’d just bought, forgot to check on my bonfire and accidentally set a fairly large portion of my next-door neighbour’s garden alight. Increasingly, friends and strangers chase after me as I exit pubs and shops, waving my clothes and valuables in the air. But that’s OK. Ageing is often about facing up to your flaws. Admitting your mistakes is something everyone has to do at some point. One day last year I put my wallet in the fridge, for example, and I now realise that was a mistake.
I mentioned some of these incidents to my dad a few years ago, seeking reassurance, following a couple of occasions when I’d come perilously close to recycling my car keys in bottle banks. I felt confident that he at least hadn’t inherited the doofus gene: he was always double-checking that he’d switched appliances off and, for all his excitability and turbulence, was a rigorously organised person. He sat me down and said in what was for him an unusually hushed voice, ‘Why do you think I’m so neurotic? It’s not just because I got it from your grandma. I have to be like that or I’d walk around doing stupid things all the time.’ He too had first experienced the phenomenon during his mid-thirties, he said, during a holiday when he broke an up-and-over garage door off its hinges by pulling it the wrong way. ‘IT’S A LATENT COX TRAIT. I WAS GOING TO WARN YOU ABOUT IT THE OTHER SUMMER WHEN YOU DROVE INTO THAT PARKING BARRIER AND SNAPPED IT, BUT I THOUGHT I’D GIVE IT A WHILE JUST TO MAKE SURE.’
I felt a little hard done by. My dad had had great fun playing practical jokes on his dad – I am thinking here particularly of the time he convinced Ted that he’d received a call from my grandma on an unattached analogue telephone many yards from any building – but because of his pesky compensating for his own condition I’d been robbed of the chance to do the same thing with him. Instead I had been doomed to a life of being told ‘REMEMBER TO PUT YOUR HEADLIGHTS ON’ and ‘DON’T SAW INTO YOUR ARM WHILE YOU’RE CUTTING THAT WOOD.’ Now my illness had been confirmed, I could no longer even claim he was fussing unduly.
