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My dad used to have this saying, “Taking back on giving is worse than the old man living. “ I don’t know where he got it from, and for a long time I didn’t really know what it meant, but one day he explained it to me, and because I was a freaky little kid with an ear for the macabre, the explanation – and the saying itself – wedged itself into my brain.

“What it is, see, if you give somebody a present that you’d really rather have yourself – then maybe you get jealous at ‘em for having it, especially if they don’t appreciate it quite the way you would – you get so green about it all, that you end up taking it back off of ‘em… you don’t necessarily have to steal it, maybe you just ask ‘em for it back – but, it doesn’t matter either way, it’s still a terrible thing to do, Guy, a terrible way to behave. They say it’s worse than the old man – that’s the devil himself - living. And every time you do it, you give the old man just that little bit more power. Then one day… one day…”

He was always like that, my dad, coming up with these scary little stories to stop me doing things. Don’t eat wild blackberries because witches might have peed on them; don’t steal the cat’s eyes out of the middle of the road because for every one you cut out with your pocket knife, a real cat loses its eyes too; don’t go walking through Harry Siswick’s fields because once Harry Siswick caught a little boy trespassing and painted him from head to toe in creosote – and that stuff stings. So there was nothing unusual about the ‘old man living’ advice, except maybe something in my three-gaping-hole face gave Dad cause to think again. Maybe he realised at that moment just how wild my unstoppable six-year-old imagination could run – like a dish with a spoon, like a cow over the moon; or maybe he just heard the words out loud – not just in his head – and felt some quiet call for restraint. Whatever the reason, I do remember he started to backtrack, almost immediately.

“Well, in truth, it isn’t really as bad as all that, Guy, it’s not really going to… but if you put it in your mind that it is… if you tell yourself it is, make a little story out of it - if you make the consequences of your actions as serious as ever they could be - then you won’t ever do ‘em, will you? That’s the way I think, anyway. That’s what I tell myself. Now do you want some Angel Delight or what?”

So that was my dad, always trying to scare me into being a good kid, only scaring himself worse in the process. But whether you agree with his parenting methods or not, they had the desired effect. I grew up a relatively honest, unselfish, and reasonably well-behaved child, teenager, and young adult. And then I met you, Keri.

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